Google case highlights why traditional competition law is a bad fit for tech

[Commentary] Competition regulators around the world are (slowly) coming to terms with the fact that traditional wisdom in antitrust doesn’t apply to the tech industry. The latest country to contend with this fact was Taiwan.

The details are not yet available, but it appears that the country’s Fair Trade Commission decided late in July that Google benefits customers when it offers its own services to users of the company’s search engine. This is how it is with tech: Discrimination can be good, bigger can be better, undercutting rivals can make markets work better, and things move so fast that markets more often than not punish bad acts on their own. The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission (TFTC) had two investigations of Google. The first, opened in November 2012, considered whether Google was illegally showing Google Maps in the company’s search results. The other investigation, launched earlier in 2015, came after the video playing application FREEdi YT complained that Google inappropriately removed FREEdi YT from the Google Play Store. According to Bloomberg, the TFTC found no wrongdoing on the part of Google. To be certain, Google and other tech firms do not always win these cases. But the controversies surrounding them demonstrate how problematic it is to apply traditional notions of competition analysis to tech.

[Mark Jamison is the director and Gunter Professor of the Public Utility Research center at the University of Florida]