antitrust uses and misuses (in the age of Big Data)

Talk I gave at the conference "Designing antitrust for the digital era" (Brasília, Brazil). TL;DR: antitrust agencies shouldn't go around imposing fines and breaking up companies just because "network effects" or "data as an essential facility". Public policy must be evidence-based. And the evidence suggests that network effects and access to personal data are not preventing competition.

Transcript

1. antitrust uses and misuses
   (in the age of Big Data)
   Thiago Marzagão
   

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4. really?
   

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5. 76%
   54%
   Facebook
   Pinterest
   others
   16%
   33%
   48%
   60%
   35%
   27%
   

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7. • Facebook knows your likes, posts, comments,
   social graph, what you follow, what you mute/
   block, location, device, OS
   
   • plus your data from WhatsApp and Instagram
   
   • Facebook has 2.3 billion users
   
   • people are not porting their FB data elsewhere
   

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9. • Tinder knows what types of people you want to
   date
   
   • not the fluffy stuff you say you want (“kind”,
   “adventurous”), but the stuff you actually want
   
   • and how that varies across markets (US vs
   Europe, Millennials vs Generation Z, etc)
   

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11. • Uber knows where you live and work, your
    favorite restaurants and bars, your daily
    schedule, your hobbies, how impatient you are
    

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12. monetizing data is harder than
    most people realize
    

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17. be humble
    

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18. • CADE: 2 years to approve Microsoft/Skype deal
    
    • Zoom: 4 months to go from 0 to 1M users
    

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22. about
    • data scientist at the Observatory of Public Spending
    
    • Ohio State University Ph.D.
    
    • researcher (thiagomarzagao.com/publications)
    
    • occasional professor of machine learning (thiagomarzagao.com/teaching)
    
    • amateur roboticist (github.com/thiagomarzagao/ev3py)
    
    • @tmarzagao, marzagao.1@osu.edu
    

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