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
4. really?
5. 76% 54% Facebook Pinterest others 16% 33% 48% 60% 35% 27%
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
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)
11. • Uber knows where you live and work, your favorite restaurants and bars, your daily schedule, your hobbies, how impatient you are
12. monetizing data is harder than most people realize
17. be humble
18. • CADE: 2 years to approve Microsoft/Skype deal • Zoom: 4 months to go from 0 to 1M users
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