New Ideas in Antitrust and the Tech Platforms

In October, the Justice Department sued Google for violating antitrust laws.These antitrust concerns are motivated by the potential economic harms caused by the tech giants’ monopoly positions, but there might be greater reason to worry about the political harms that the platforms pose to American democracy because of their control over the modern information ecosystem. If the antitrust laws are designed to address economic harms, how should policymakers confront the political harms from dominant digital platforms?

Join us on November 18th at 10 a.m. PST to discuss recommendations from the new White Paper of the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale, where we will assess how today’s digital platforms pose threats to American democracy and a proposal for how creative technological interventions might mitigate the platform’s growing power. Panelists include Francis Fukuyama, Mosbacher Director of Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and a leader at the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, Ashish Goel, Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, Barak D. Richman, Professor of Law and Business Administration at Duke University, Luigi Zingales, Professor of Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and Co-host of the podcast Capitalisn't, and Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, founder and CEO of multiple startups, and now a Managing Partner at 01 Advisors, in conversation with Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center as they discuss new ideas in antitrust.