David Meyer

Why surveillance states and monopolies have a lot in common

[Commentary] There are several trends in today’s tech landscape that I find worrying, and at first glance they seem to be a varied set: mass online surveillance; the erosion of network neutrality; and web giants that are growing in a seemingly unstoppable way.

However, I’ve come to realize they all have something in common. All of them -- including the rise of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- are anti-competitive in one way or another. In their respective fields, all the trends I’m about to discuss create the potential for a monolithic, monopolistic player to block the rise of new entrants and ensure its long-term dominance. Each case involves an over-concentration of power that becomes deeply threatening to plurality and progress.

When I heard of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, my first thought was that in a market where you already have a depressing lack of choice, such as broadband access in many parts of the US, this merging of the two biggest players would be a grossly anticompetitive deal that would harm consumers. Given the lack of network neutrality laws, the creation of such an unassailable monolith could also injure the content and tech startup industries.

And so we return to the NSA, its British counterpart GCHQ, and all the other intelligence agencies that we now know to be more powerful than they appeared a year ago. The competitive issue here is not one of pricing, scaling or advertising prominence; it is one of ideas. True democracy, at least as I understand it, is a system based on and committed to the preservation of a free marketplace of ideas. Mass state surveillance changes all that. Without the option of privacy, we already begin to self-censor; we become less likely to express dissenting ideas online or over the phone. The key issue in antitrust, and also in the case of state surveillance, is one of timing -- how far you let things go before somebody has to step in.