Big Data Concerns Are NOT Competition Concerns, Says ITIF
WASHINGTON—With today’s hearing in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee on the implications of big data for consumers, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the leading think tank for science and technology policy, issued the following statement from Aurelien Portuese, director of ITIF’s Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy:
Big data is a means rather than an obstacle to competition—companies collect and use data to innovate and provide digital services, but data itself does not determine business success.
Congress should not create obstacles for companies to leverage capabilities from data based on erroneous ideas regarding what constitutes anticompetitive conduct. In other words, big data itself should not be a competition concern.
Rather than erect new barriers, policymakers should make it easier for companies to leverage data. Such regulation should preserve and reward fair, competitive efforts to accumulate data, an essential part of our economy’s digital transformation.
For more on this issue, please see:
- Joe Kennedy, “The Myth of Data Monopoly: Why Antitrust Concerns About Data Are Overblown” (ITIF, March 2017).
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The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute focusing on the intersection of technological innovation and public policy. Recognized by its peers in the think tank community as the global center of excellence for science and technology policy, ITIF’s mission is to formulate and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress.
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