How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back by Ariel Ezrachi

Author:Ariel Ezrachi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Reflections

The ideological platter, even when exposed, remains hard to resist. It fits into a broader free-market narrative that assumes large players won the competition fairly and have the edge over others. The Tech Barons have poured a lot of money into trusts, grant providers, think tanks, and academic institutions to propagate this ideological platter.72

When some academics warn of regulatory capture, they rarely point to their home institutions. And yet, increasingly, universities are being harnessed and used by the Tech Barons to advance their narrative. One example is George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. While the FTC was investigating Google from 2011 to 2013, “Google contributed at least $762,000” to the public university’s Law and Economics Center, “which was used to support numerous GMU studies and academic conferences backing the search giant’s position that the company had not acted anticompetitively.”73 For these purported academic conferences, George Mason’s dean (a state employee) reportedly coordinated with Google as to the speakers, who unsurprisingly endorsed a hands-off approach.74 Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Qualcomm were also substantial funders of George Mason’s Global Antitrust Institute, another university center “that routinely defends the companies on antitrust issues.”75

The criticism is that the Tech Barons fund these centers to churn out policy papers favorable to their position and send professors and graduates to critical jobs at agencies like the FTC. In reporting on the findings by the Tech Transparency Project, Bloomberg’s David McLaughlin noted how George Mason helped shape the FTC’s workforce and “infused it with a laissez-faire philosophy favorable to the school’s tech donors.”76 George Mason also provides training programs for judges and antitrust enforcers from the US and elsewhere that promote a simplified narrative that “the best way to foster competition is to maintain a hands-off approach to antitrust law.”77

A congressional hearing on “Reviving Competition” underscored the distorting effect of this intellectual capture.78 After listening to a presentation by Tad Lipsky, a director at George Mason’s Global Antitrust Institute, New York congressman Mondaire Jones was remarkably frank:

If we wanted to hear the views of Amazon, Google, or Qualcomm we would have invited them. When a CEO comes before this committee, I understand that they are going to advocate for their own interest. . . . But when your institute is funded by secret donations from big tech companies, you today come as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I would submit that the American people deserve to know the truth. The truth is that secret corporate funding, like yours, has distorted our discourse for far too long. For decades institutes like yours have massed corporate money to protect monopoly power. Institutes like yours have worked to “teach” judges and regulators to let their guard down as corporate funders, like yours, came to dominate our economy. The American people, of course, are paying the price. The corporations who wrote your paychecks are now not only the gatekeepers for our economy, they are the gatekeepers for our democracy . . .79

Big tech companies also support other universities, policy groups, and NGOs.

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