Taplin: Government Needs to Reckon With Edge Powerhouses

Media industry guru says treating them as public utilities could be one fallout from 'natural monopolies'

Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, warns that the government will soon have to decide whether to regulate edge-provider giants like common carriers.

The FCC has already done that with Internet service providers, via Title II reclassification, under former chairman Tom Wheeler and with the blessing of President Barack Obama, though the new administration is set on reversing that.

But in an op ed in The New York Times, Taplin said the power of the edge is something the government will need to reckon with, now or later.

He suggested that the government will likely have to step in given that "Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market."

Taplin said that at a minimum those Big Three should not be allowed to do any other buying-up of companies like Snapchat or Spotify, and if the government leaves them to their own devices, it may ultimately have to force them to divest as it ultimately forced the breakup of AT&T's nautral monopoly.

"Force Google to sell DoubleClick," Taplin wrote. "Force Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram."

He said other steps the government could take include regulating them like public utilities; requiring them to license out patents for nominal fees, as the government required Bell Labs to do; or removing the safe harbor from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows Facebook and YouTube to take a "free ride" on content produced by others.

He suggested that might not be a priority for the Trump administration given that Trumpthe president is close with "libertarian" tech moguls like Peter Thiel. The Obama Administration, by contrast, was generally thought to be tight with the folks at Google, and Wheeler consistently held to the position that the FCC could not regulate the edge and did not use the bully pulpit to suggest that its most powerful players were a gatekeeper threat to Internet openness on par with ISPs.

But Taplin sees it differently.


Taplin, a USC professor until last year, is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.