The excellent Economist article ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data: the data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules‘ raises a superbly framed question.
Railway, phone and oil tycoons of the late 19th century saw their empires dismantled by anti-trust laws to create competition and better prices for consumers. Anti-trust laws are still being applied strictly in the US and in Europe, looking mainly to the global market position.
“What has changed? Smartphones and the internet have made data abundant, ubiquitous and far more valuable. […] Meanwhile, artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning extract more value from data. […] This abundance of data changes the nature of competition. […] By collecting more data, a firm has more scope to improve its products, which attracts more users, generating even more data, and so on. […] Access to data also protects companies from rivals in another way [preventing new upcoming startups to have access to the vast troves of data]”
The fundamentals of the recommendations to follow in the paper is to give value to data and user access. This is valued in the rare transactions to acquire companies, but not really valued as part of a market by authorities.
Availability of data on users should be better valued in the economy as this becomes the driving force of the Collaborative Age. And this should be part of authorities’ decision-making. The question remains: beyond advertisement, how to value troves of data generated by users?
