This has been a thread in the economics profession for a long time. Just now getting renewed policy attention. For a perspective, take a look at Adams, Walter, and James W. Brock. Antitrust Economics on Trial: A Dialogue on the New Laissez-Faire. Princeton University Press, 1991. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zvv8c. Accessed 22 July 2021.
Nice writing on an important topic. It seems likely though that the antitrust machinery would be taking on our mega tech firms anyway, regardless of intellectual support from economists. The tech excesses have become large enough that one doesn’t need a research paper to know that it’s time for pushback. But intellectual support does help in making the case. Ultimately what happens will be less to do with economic research and more with politics. Congress will reduce the power of the tech giants but also tread lighter than their rhetoric may imply. These are the remaining crown jewels of the US economy and no one wants to kill the golden goose.
This article is fantastic. It’s also kind of cool because I’m currently finishing up Dietrich Vollrath’s book “Fully Grown”. Towards the end the book there are a few chapters on market concentration where he cites most of these same papers and does a deep dive into the effects of market concentration and whether it impacts growth. The book led me scan some of these papers as well as buy Philippon’s book.
The original economists were progressives who sought to understand economics in order to identify areas through which societal good could be improved. John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Adam Smith etc are all examples of this. In particular, they created the concept of unearned rent (rentier income).
However, it is a mistake to think that the "economists" crusading against anti-trust today are in the same category as these giants.
Among the biggest inconsistencies: Lina Khan and what-not are crusading against Big Tech, but they do nothing against the health care oligopolies. Health Care in the United States is the biggest scandal of all - the US spend nearly twice as much per capita, yet has enjoyed a falling life expectancy long before COVID. This overspend is in the $1T to $2T per year - more than the official Defense Department budget. The overall FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector is another example.
Thus what is happening is primarily political: both parties are afraid that they will lose their monopoly on political power to Tech, rather than these efforts representing any real desire to improve American's lives by reducing unearned rent.
I too am concerned that too much of the ammunition is focused on big tech. We mere mortals suffer the impacts of market concentration in many other sectors, e.g., as you noted re health care. We also pay more for lower quality communications services - cell, internet, cable (if anyone still subscribes), etc. Also as you noted, our financial sector is so concentrated that our government/the Fed expends tremendous resources just trying to keep its frequent teetering from becoming another massive fall.
Another area of dangerous concentration, imho, is the defense industry. Our military-industrial-congressional complex is not only a threat to democracy itself, but also an economic threat in the sense that we expend trillions on "national security" (military/defense/etc.) while other critically needed "threats" (climate change, infrastructure, human welfare) get chump change.
Anyway, enough. My basic point: our economic policies and allocation of resources sucks!
IMO - the problem is that the American oligarchy no longer believes it needs to keep ta least some of the interests of the rest of us Americans in mind.
The rise of Trump isn't because of racism or whatever - it is because the average American's wages, adjusted for inflation, has been flat for over 2 decades.
This even as the wealthy grow wealthier.
My belief is that most Americans don't care if some become wealthy - but they do care if those becoming wealthy do so in a way which is unfair and at their expense.
Yes, defense, FIRE, cable, telecom are all areas where concentration exist and demonstrable harm has been done, and arguably these can all be traced to deregulation during both Democrat and Republican Presidents and Congress.
To put it very frankly (and hopefully not to crassly) this late push by the Biden administration ain’t got nothing to do with improving outcomes for consumers. It has everything to with wanting to fuck up the companies that haven’t done what they wanted em to. Anti trust is simply the particular club which democrats want to bash facebook in for not moderating their enemies out of existence.
Perhaps some some government that does not seek power, that does not reward cronies, and which can’t be bought out can apply anti-trust law in a useful manner. Until such a government is found, I must regard anti-trust law as being a racket, by which the consumer is fleeced in favor of inefficient small businessmen.
( And a further aside, while I regard the author nowadays to be a noxious jackass, and extraordinarily petty jackass at that (just a year I stumbled on one of his articles on that lew rockwell site, and was so appalled by the sexism I sent him a polite, but bristling, email (it was about Sarah Fuller - he had no idea what he talking about) and got a sneering reply back, about me wanting *girls*, to play *mens’*, football. Truly charming)) this paper is still excellent, and from before he lost his mind. (I know this is hardly the way to introduce a paper, by steadily undermining the author via digression. I’ll do better in the future))
I'm not too sure "economic efficiency" is all it's cracked up to be, particularly when it not only doesn't result in lower prices (cf. medical care, mobile telephone service), it eliminates consumer choice (cf. medical care, mobile telephone service).
As other examples, just in the past two years, economic efficiency gave the U.S. a massive PPE shortage at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, spot shortages of meat, produce, and consumer goods throughout the pandemic, and significant reductions in the availability of solid state devices for consumer electronic devices (including automobiles). None of that seems very efficient.
It makes some degree of sense that some socialists disdain anti-trust law. Large firms are easier to nationalize and competition is anathema to central planning. Of course, these socialists are ones who forgot their New Left counterparts who abhorred corporatism and centralized bureaucracies, who also wanted to turn British SOEs into co-ops.
There's maybe no more hilarious, bizarre alliance in all of politics than socialists who are pro corporate monopoly power because "we'll nationalize it during the revolution". It's a notable change in leftist philosophy, which spawned organizations like the Institute for Local Self Reliance in the 70s, which advocates for anti-trust efforts to this day.
In any case, it seems a lot of economists have gone the opposite route - if you are sufficiently globalist, you want our corporations to be big to compete on the global scale. I've heard seriously that Google isn't a monopoly, because someday, someone might edge them out. Someday.
I suspect a lot of this comes down to a bias for what's pleasing us now (Amazon - so convenient!), or a misunderstanding of how big got big (Walmart, an expression of nothing more than the free market)!
Needless to say, I'm cheering on the anti trust effort.
Big vs. small, centralized vs. decentralized is clearly a matter of context. If something is good, we want it everywhere, so it should be big. If we don't know how to do something well, we should have lots of experiments, so it should be decentralized. Neither is really an endpoint in itself, just a means to an end, and yet philosophies of government like Federalism ossify them into fossilized positions like "big government bad" or socialism's "big government good."
For most things in life, we either don't actually know how to do them well, or we don't know how to maintain a culture of doing them well, so decentralization and competition are good. But some things can't be decentralized, so the alternative is to closely guard a culture of virtue that insists that things are done well. For example, we can't have two US Armies, so instead it has a very elaborate culture about being "warriors" but also following civilian leadership.
I'm not a fan of big=bad. However big means we should be watchful. Getting big by organic growth seems like less of a problem then getting big then M&Aing your way to concentration. Traditional anti-trust law is fairly narrow in its application and is something that should be updated.
I do wonder what preventing more M&A activity from large companies would due to the VC funded companies who's entire model seems to be "get bought out"
Usually the economists revolt but today is the economists' revolt.
I feel us health economists could revolt more (not like that!). Massive consolidation in healthcare and pharma in recent decades. I don't get the impression that the implications of have been investigated enough.
Noah’s premise for this article is just plain mistaken. I am in a profession which causes me to meet lots of people, from exceedingly wealthy to homeless, and I can tell you I hear people from all walks of life complaining about monopoly, and a rigged economy. If anything, the complaints are louder and more common at the lower end. The idea that the anti-monopoly movement is arising because of economists simply isn’t true.
I could not believe this statement was presented without citation or justification: "Overall, though, the idea that corporate concentration is choking off American capitalism is overwhelmingly an elite academic idea."
That is flatly false, without any factual basis at all.
One can coherently argue that elite academic ideas are determining the shape of the response to the widespread public disgust and anger. Folks have a notion about the rigged economy and lack of competition, but their response is to want someone to do something, to "get the bastards"; academic elites are playing a crucial role, as they often do, by coming up with and refining the concrete policy proposals and rules under consideration.
But the notion that elites are the only one pushing this ... I just can't imagine what kind of world a person has to live in to think that is the case.
Marxists believe competition is inefficient duplication of production. This is the reason the left went along with slack enforcement of antitrust law decades ago.
Vigorous competition by lots of smaller businesses is kind of the opposite of Marxism.
Curiously, John D. Rockefeller had the same view that competition was wasteful. The point of the day is that increasing economic concentration allows firms to raise markups and suppress employee wages.
Not really that curious. Both Marxists and people like Rockefeller have sought monopolies. The key difference is that Marxists want the monopoly to be run by the government.
It's actually the exact opposite to Marxism. The Marxist conception of "exploitation" is that capital-owners capture as much of LABOR'S productive output as possible. The econ 101 view is that capital-owners capture as much of CONSUMER SURPLUS as possible.
Marx formulated the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF), which builds upon supply & demand, but lands on a different conclusion: as competition between firms increases, and profits fall, capitalists innovate by finding new ways to capture more of labor's value. So according to Marxists it's competition driving down profits that causes the exploitation of workers. So Marxists don't view functioning, competitive markets as a silver lining, where the biggest problem is that it makes capitalism so damn attractive and hard to get rid of - they literally think that falling profits drive exploitation. That's why Socialists scoff at Biden when he says "capitalism without competition = exploitation" - Marxists hold the exact opposite to be the truth.
Needless to say, TRPF is complete nonsense of course, but Marxists don't know this so that's not really the point.
Economic theory says that wages should be based on worker productivity. This was broadly true until about 1980 since growth of wages closely followed tend productivity. Since then, productivity has risen, albeit more slowly than previously, but wages have scarcely increased. This sounds a lot like exploration to me.
Economic theory says wages are a product of supply and demand, so if you see a fall in wages then all things equal the relative productivity of labor is stagnant. But the divergence is more complex than that.
The year you're looking for is around 1973, when the divergence occurred and also it's not a divergence between wages and productivity - it's a divergence between GDP and wages. GDP isn't the same as productivity. In fact when we look at Total Factor Productivity (TFP) it plateaued in 1973, and so did wages along with it. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vphoo8wS5LI/TZqSW-PJv1I/AAAAAAAAA1c/7Wp4nZ_pYBg/s1600/tfp.jpg
The stagnation is basically in the various sectors which have failed to leverage the benefits of Moore's Law since the 1970s. So basically service sectors, which is also where we find most of the stagnating wages. Interestingly, there was a period between 1995 and 1998 where productivity growth was at pre-1973 levels and that was due to information technology benefiting retail; much of it came from Walmart using IT to reorganize inventory control. So in the period when we actually saw widespread wage growth, including in service sectors, it was because the gains from IT actually managed to filter down into the service sector. But the last 50 years have been a story where mostly that hasn't happened.
So then why has GDP still managed to go up if not because of productivity growth, you may ask? Well part of it is the tech sector, which has had very real growth and wages have in fact exploded in tech. But the rest of it is through higher rents in education, healthcare, real estate, and infrastructure. We just spend vastly more on those things, often without much tangible results. Most of the jobs since 1970 have been in law and administration, and it's this bloating outside of tech that is responsible for the GDP growth. In other words, not real productivity growth.
Nobody knows exactly what happened to cause this productivity stagnation, but most hypotheses involve the oil crisis or Bretton Woods at least being the relevant shocks that kicked off the stagnation. However, oil prices have recovered since but productivity still never bounced back. I've seen some optimism about this lately though. Some have pointed to self-driving cars and the deployment of mRNA tech as evidence that the stagnation may be ending; that we're finally seeing technological advancements having real widespread impact outside of just the domain of computers and phones.
Antitrust doesn't mean breaking up natural monopolies like networks. It means identifying which domains are natural monopolies, and which are not, and breaking up the latter. Networks need price-fixing, controlled by extra-market mechanisms, in order to function well for the general public. Antitrust isn't motivated by "big=bad" - it is motivated by a general interest in figuring out when competition rather than scale is the best way to maximize value for the general public.
My sense is that Econ Twitter (like ____ Twitter, fill in the blank with anything you like) has moved left much faster than the actual consensus of the field.
I think it’s likely they can win, because anti-monopoly or anti-concentration is something that is almost cross partisan. I know I support it.
But wow, those socialists come across as sort of idiots. Then again, they just want the government to have a monopoly on everything.
This has been a thread in the economics profession for a long time. Just now getting renewed policy attention. For a perspective, take a look at Adams, Walter, and James W. Brock. Antitrust Economics on Trial: A Dialogue on the New Laissez-Faire. Princeton University Press, 1991. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zvv8c. Accessed 22 July 2021.
Nice writing on an important topic. It seems likely though that the antitrust machinery would be taking on our mega tech firms anyway, regardless of intellectual support from economists. The tech excesses have become large enough that one doesn’t need a research paper to know that it’s time for pushback. But intellectual support does help in making the case. Ultimately what happens will be less to do with economic research and more with politics. Congress will reduce the power of the tech giants but also tread lighter than their rhetoric may imply. These are the remaining crown jewels of the US economy and no one wants to kill the golden goose.
This article is fantastic. It’s also kind of cool because I’m currently finishing up Dietrich Vollrath’s book “Fully Grown”. Towards the end the book there are a few chapters on market concentration where he cites most of these same papers and does a deep dive into the effects of market concentration and whether it impacts growth. The book led me scan some of these papers as well as buy Philippon’s book.
The original economists were progressives who sought to understand economics in order to identify areas through which societal good could be improved. John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Adam Smith etc are all examples of this. In particular, they created the concept of unearned rent (rentier income).
However, it is a mistake to think that the "economists" crusading against anti-trust today are in the same category as these giants.
Among the biggest inconsistencies: Lina Khan and what-not are crusading against Big Tech, but they do nothing against the health care oligopolies. Health Care in the United States is the biggest scandal of all - the US spend nearly twice as much per capita, yet has enjoyed a falling life expectancy long before COVID. This overspend is in the $1T to $2T per year - more than the official Defense Department budget. The overall FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector is another example.
Thus what is happening is primarily political: both parties are afraid that they will lose their monopoly on political power to Tech, rather than these efforts representing any real desire to improve American's lives by reducing unearned rent.
I too am concerned that too much of the ammunition is focused on big tech. We mere mortals suffer the impacts of market concentration in many other sectors, e.g., as you noted re health care. We also pay more for lower quality communications services - cell, internet, cable (if anyone still subscribes), etc. Also as you noted, our financial sector is so concentrated that our government/the Fed expends tremendous resources just trying to keep its frequent teetering from becoming another massive fall.
Another area of dangerous concentration, imho, is the defense industry. Our military-industrial-congressional complex is not only a threat to democracy itself, but also an economic threat in the sense that we expend trillions on "national security" (military/defense/etc.) while other critically needed "threats" (climate change, infrastructure, human welfare) get chump change.
Anyway, enough. My basic point: our economic policies and allocation of resources sucks!
IMO - the problem is that the American oligarchy no longer believes it needs to keep ta least some of the interests of the rest of us Americans in mind.
The rise of Trump isn't because of racism or whatever - it is because the average American's wages, adjusted for inflation, has been flat for over 2 decades.
This even as the wealthy grow wealthier.
My belief is that most Americans don't care if some become wealthy - but they do care if those becoming wealthy do so in a way which is unfair and at their expense.
Yes, defense, FIRE, cable, telecom are all areas where concentration exist and demonstrable harm has been done, and arguably these can all be traced to deregulation during both Democrat and Republican Presidents and Congress.
Totally agree that both of our warring tribes are responsible.
Former English Comp teacher corrects herself .... "our economic policies and allocation of resources SUCK." lol
Lina Khan just got started. Big healthcare is next.
I hope so!
To put it very frankly (and hopefully not to crassly) this late push by the Biden administration ain’t got nothing to do with improving outcomes for consumers. It has everything to with wanting to fuck up the companies that haven’t done what they wanted em to. Anti trust is simply the particular club which democrats want to bash facebook in for not moderating their enemies out of existence.
Perhaps some some government that does not seek power, that does not reward cronies, and which can’t be bought out can apply anti-trust law in a useful manner. Until such a government is found, I must regard anti-trust law as being a racket, by which the consumer is fleeced in favor of inefficient small businessmen.
(An aside - that’s always how it was. http://mason.gmu.edu/~trustici/LAW108/The%20Origins%20of%20Antitrust-%20An%20Interest%20Group%20Perspective.pdf Anti-trust law was explicitly passed to increase inefficiency and prices)
( And a further aside, while I regard the author nowadays to be a noxious jackass, and extraordinarily petty jackass at that (just a year I stumbled on one of his articles on that lew rockwell site, and was so appalled by the sexism I sent him a polite, but bristling, email (it was about Sarah Fuller - he had no idea what he talking about) and got a sneering reply back, about me wanting *girls*, to play *mens’*, football. Truly charming)) this paper is still excellent, and from before he lost his mind. (I know this is hardly the way to introduce a paper, by steadily undermining the author via digression. I’ll do better in the future))
Yes. That’s why they are more worried about Facebook than Amazon.
I'm not too sure "economic efficiency" is all it's cracked up to be, particularly when it not only doesn't result in lower prices (cf. medical care, mobile telephone service), it eliminates consumer choice (cf. medical care, mobile telephone service).
As other examples, just in the past two years, economic efficiency gave the U.S. a massive PPE shortage at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, spot shortages of meat, produce, and consumer goods throughout the pandemic, and significant reductions in the availability of solid state devices for consumer electronic devices (including automobiles). None of that seems very efficient.
It makes some degree of sense that some socialists disdain anti-trust law. Large firms are easier to nationalize and competition is anathema to central planning. Of course, these socialists are ones who forgot their New Left counterparts who abhorred corporatism and centralized bureaucracies, who also wanted to turn British SOEs into co-ops.
There's maybe no more hilarious, bizarre alliance in all of politics than socialists who are pro corporate monopoly power because "we'll nationalize it during the revolution". It's a notable change in leftist philosophy, which spawned organizations like the Institute for Local Self Reliance in the 70s, which advocates for anti-trust efforts to this day.
In any case, it seems a lot of economists have gone the opposite route - if you are sufficiently globalist, you want our corporations to be big to compete on the global scale. I've heard seriously that Google isn't a monopoly, because someday, someone might edge them out. Someday.
I suspect a lot of this comes down to a bias for what's pleasing us now (Amazon - so convenient!), or a misunderstanding of how big got big (Walmart, an expression of nothing more than the free market)!
Needless to say, I'm cheering on the anti trust effort.
Big vs. small, centralized vs. decentralized is clearly a matter of context. If something is good, we want it everywhere, so it should be big. If we don't know how to do something well, we should have lots of experiments, so it should be decentralized. Neither is really an endpoint in itself, just a means to an end, and yet philosophies of government like Federalism ossify them into fossilized positions like "big government bad" or socialism's "big government good."
For most things in life, we either don't actually know how to do them well, or we don't know how to maintain a culture of doing them well, so decentralization and competition are good. But some things can't be decentralized, so the alternative is to closely guard a culture of virtue that insists that things are done well. For example, we can't have two US Armies, so instead it has a very elaborate culture about being "warriors" but also following civilian leadership.
I'm not a fan of big=bad. However big means we should be watchful. Getting big by organic growth seems like less of a problem then getting big then M&Aing your way to concentration. Traditional anti-trust law is fairly narrow in its application and is something that should be updated.
I do wonder what preventing more M&A activity from large companies would due to the VC funded companies who's entire model seems to be "get bought out"
Usually the economists revolt but today is the economists' revolt.
I feel us health economists could revolt more (not like that!). Massive consolidation in healthcare and pharma in recent decades. I don't get the impression that the implications of have been investigated enough.
Noah’s premise for this article is just plain mistaken. I am in a profession which causes me to meet lots of people, from exceedingly wealthy to homeless, and I can tell you I hear people from all walks of life complaining about monopoly, and a rigged economy. If anything, the complaints are louder and more common at the lower end. The idea that the anti-monopoly movement is arising because of economists simply isn’t true.
Yes, thank you!
I could not believe this statement was presented without citation or justification: "Overall, though, the idea that corporate concentration is choking off American capitalism is overwhelmingly an elite academic idea."
That is flatly false, without any factual basis at all.
One can coherently argue that elite academic ideas are determining the shape of the response to the widespread public disgust and anger. Folks have a notion about the rigged economy and lack of competition, but their response is to want someone to do something, to "get the bastards"; academic elites are playing a crucial role, as they often do, by coming up with and refining the concrete policy proposals and rules under consideration.
But the notion that elites are the only one pushing this ... I just can't imagine what kind of world a person has to live in to think that is the case.
Let's see, empirical evidence that Monopoly capitalism reduces wages and increases profit margins. Sounds vaguely like Marxism to me.
Marxists believe competition is inefficient duplication of production. This is the reason the left went along with slack enforcement of antitrust law decades ago.
Vigorous competition by lots of smaller businesses is kind of the opposite of Marxism.
Curiously, John D. Rockefeller had the same view that competition was wasteful. The point of the day is that increasing economic concentration allows firms to raise markups and suppress employee wages.
Not really that curious. Both Marxists and people like Rockefeller have sought monopolies. The key difference is that Marxists want the monopoly to be run by the government.
It's actually the exact opposite to Marxism. The Marxist conception of "exploitation" is that capital-owners capture as much of LABOR'S productive output as possible. The econ 101 view is that capital-owners capture as much of CONSUMER SURPLUS as possible.
Marx formulated the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF), which builds upon supply & demand, but lands on a different conclusion: as competition between firms increases, and profits fall, capitalists innovate by finding new ways to capture more of labor's value. So according to Marxists it's competition driving down profits that causes the exploitation of workers. So Marxists don't view functioning, competitive markets as a silver lining, where the biggest problem is that it makes capitalism so damn attractive and hard to get rid of - they literally think that falling profits drive exploitation. That's why Socialists scoff at Biden when he says "capitalism without competition = exploitation" - Marxists hold the exact opposite to be the truth.
Needless to say, TRPF is complete nonsense of course, but Marxists don't know this so that's not really the point.
Economic theory says that wages should be based on worker productivity. This was broadly true until about 1980 since growth of wages closely followed tend productivity. Since then, productivity has risen, albeit more slowly than previously, but wages have scarcely increased. This sounds a lot like exploration to me.
Economic theory says wages are a product of supply and demand, so if you see a fall in wages then all things equal the relative productivity of labor is stagnant. But the divergence is more complex than that.
The year you're looking for is around 1973, when the divergence occurred and also it's not a divergence between wages and productivity - it's a divergence between GDP and wages. GDP isn't the same as productivity. In fact when we look at Total Factor Productivity (TFP) it plateaued in 1973, and so did wages along with it. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vphoo8wS5LI/TZqSW-PJv1I/AAAAAAAAA1c/7Wp4nZ_pYBg/s1600/tfp.jpg
The stagnation is basically in the various sectors which have failed to leverage the benefits of Moore's Law since the 1970s. So basically service sectors, which is also where we find most of the stagnating wages. Interestingly, there was a period between 1995 and 1998 where productivity growth was at pre-1973 levels and that was due to information technology benefiting retail; much of it came from Walmart using IT to reorganize inventory control. So in the period when we actually saw widespread wage growth, including in service sectors, it was because the gains from IT actually managed to filter down into the service sector. But the last 50 years have been a story where mostly that hasn't happened.
So then why has GDP still managed to go up if not because of productivity growth, you may ask? Well part of it is the tech sector, which has had very real growth and wages have in fact exploded in tech. But the rest of it is through higher rents in education, healthcare, real estate, and infrastructure. We just spend vastly more on those things, often without much tangible results. Most of the jobs since 1970 have been in law and administration, and it's this bloating outside of tech that is responsible for the GDP growth. In other words, not real productivity growth.
Nobody knows exactly what happened to cause this productivity stagnation, but most hypotheses involve the oil crisis or Bretton Woods at least being the relevant shocks that kicked off the stagnation. However, oil prices have recovered since but productivity still never bounced back. I've seen some optimism about this lately though. Some have pointed to self-driving cars and the deployment of mRNA tech as evidence that the stagnation may be ending; that we're finally seeing technological advancements having real widespread impact outside of just the domain of computers and phones.
Isn't this also Econ 101?
Antitrust doesn't mean breaking up natural monopolies like networks. It means identifying which domains are natural monopolies, and which are not, and breaking up the latter. Networks need price-fixing, controlled by extra-market mechanisms, in order to function well for the general public. Antitrust isn't motivated by "big=bad" - it is motivated by a general interest in figuring out when competition rather than scale is the best way to maximize value for the general public.
This is deeply, deeply confused.
My sense is that Econ Twitter (like ____ Twitter, fill in the blank with anything you like) has moved left much faster than the actual consensus of the field.
It's not either/or. You can deal with a 'natural monopoly' social network (Facebook) by requiring full data portability and interoperability.