Some doubt a single regulator could tackle the diversity of issues involved. “The fact that the businesses are so different and that we would try to slam them all together in some sort of tech regulator” seems an impossibly hard legislative challenge, said Neil Chilson, a former Federal Trade Commission official who now serves as a senior research fellow in technology at the libertarian Charles Koch Institute. “It’s just not clear to me how you achieve that.”
Such hurdles aren’t stopping digital agency proponents. Some are calling for urgent action not just to end the tech giants’ dominance but also to prevent them from controlling the next tech revolution -- artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“In every society a lot of the same issues are bubbling up,” said Gene Kimmelman, one of the authors of the University of Chicago report and a former Justice Department antitrust official. “It’s going to take quite a bit more than antitrust to actually drive competitive forces in these markets,” he added.
--With assistance from David McLaughlin.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.