As far as the stock market is concerned, attempts by competition regulators to restrain the power of big tech have invariably been a case of too little, too late.
That was evident again this week as Microsoft and Apple came under fire from a European Commission armed with new and more draconian regulatory powers. Both companies’ shares flirted with record highs as investors displayed their usual, sanguine response.
The tech world moves too fast for regulators burdened with old theories of competition and weighed down by bureaucratic processes, they reckon (though the EU’s new Digital Markets Act is designed to change that). Even cases that have resulted in large fines haven’t forced any changes to the tech giant’s business models that would seriously weaken the power of their online platforms.
Those assumptions will be tested with a round of actions and investigations that target some of the core practices that have helped the biggest tech companies consolidate their power. And though the cases have been triggered by complaints that seem to have little relevance to new markets such as artificial intelligence, they could still establish important principles.
This week’s cases in Brussels included the old charge that Microsoft unfairly targeted rivals such as Slack and Zoom by including its Teams collaboration free of charge in the Office suite of productivity apps. This hardly feels like a pressing issue in today’s tech world. It is seven years since Teams was bundled with Office and four since Slack complained to regulators.
The preliminary complaint that Brussels levelled against Apple also had a historic feel to it. It was brought under the EU’s DMA, which came into force in March, but turns on the same disputed App Store rule that already resulted in a €1.8bn fine against the iPhone maker under earlier EU rules.
All this has left the sense that regulators are fighting the last war. The focus of competition has moved on to new battlegrounds. Yet these cases get at business practices that will also shape new markets, including AI.
Microsoft’s use of bundling, for instance, has long been one of its most powerful business weapons, while Apple’s App Store restrictions on developers have cemented the power of its mobile platform.
Other investigations announced earlier this year under the new DMA targets other core practices, including Google’s ability to direct search engine users to its other in-house services (something that has been on Brussels’ radar since it first opened an investigation into online comparison shopping 14 years ago). It is also probing Meta’s take-it-or-leave-it requirement for users to accept all the company’s data practices if they don’t want to take up a new option to pay for its services in the EU.
This more activist attempt to tackle central parts of the tech giants’ business models has been echoed in the US. A judge is set to deliver his judgment soon on the Department of Justice’s claim that Google unfairly monopolised control of distribution for its search engine, including paying billions of dollars a year to have its service featured prominently on Apple’s devices.
The regulators still have a long way to go to prevail in these cases, including against the inevitable legal appeals, and, if they win, will need to come up with effective sanctions. But the success of actions such as these is likely to play a key role in determining how disruptive the rise of AI turns out to be for today’s tech giants. As things stand, their control of networks spanning billions of people and the troves of personal data they hold present a daunting barrier to upstarts.
That has made it possible for companies like Apple and Meta to treat generative AI as just another tech ingredient, something they can use to add new features to their existing services.
As things stand, AI start-ups have had little choice but to play by the big companies’ rules. OpenAI, for instance, has aligned itself with Microsoft as a big investor and business partner and negotiated a deal to put ChatGPT in front of Apple’s users. But it also has more disruptive ideas: an app store of its own that would create an entirely new platform for developers looking to harness the power of large language models, for instance, and an expansion of ChatGPT for businesses that puts it into direct competition with Microsoft.
Tech’s AI wave is only just beginning. How it develops will depend greatly on regulators’ success at picking apart some of the practices that have shored up today’s giants.