Ask Paul: September 8 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And welcome to the end of what felt like a very long week despite the Monday holiday. Let’s dive in.
Gatekeeping
Based on the EU designating gatekeeper products, I wanted to ask:

What changes would you predict the EU implements for each product?

This is a rather broad topic, and I have some aggressive ideas. But related to my initial complaint about the FTC blocking Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard---"In a world in which Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta are abusing very real monopolies, you’ve decided to go after … Microsoft?”---I would go for the low-hanging fruit. Which in this case means the most abusive products and services. Looking at the letter of the law and the products and services I expect to be impacted, I would start with these five:

App stores. Apple and Google maintain a duopoly in mobile app stores, but it’s also a Japanese-style cartel arrangement by which they (explicitly or implicitly, doesn’t matter) both compete and collude by setting prices arbitrarily high because there is literally no direction competition. I’ve made this case before, but Mastercard and Visa, which are considered monopolies/duopolies by the U.S. government, charge vendors fee structures in the very low single-digit percentage (1.5 percent to 2.5 percent, AMEX is as much as 3.5 percent) and abuse their dominance in various ways. (Witness the recent antitrust suit over so-called “interchange” fees, which is exactly like Microsoft charging PC makers for Windows even on PCs that did not include it, which is the type of abusive behavior that occurs when there is no competition.) Apple and Google, meanwhile, still charge up to 30 percent for most transactions, about 10x established credit card companies. That is completely unacceptable, and Job One for regulators.

Advertising. I would prevent any Big Tech platform maker from also being a seller of advertising, since this behooves them to unethical and illegal behavior in which they undermine the user experience and violate user privacy, which is disadvantageous to users but advantageous to them. This is about the relationship we have as individuals (or businesses) and the platform maker, in which they are providing them a service that we pay for, but in undermining their customers they achieve even further riches. It’s also a key example of enshittification, where it makes financial sense for the platform maker to make things worse for the customer, which I think most would agree is not right in any sense of the word. This is why we have tracking, crapware, and forced Edge usage in Windows, for example. Taking that away is interesting---Google would drop off the face of the earth, for example, though I think spinning off parts of that company would work---but this is both the prickliest part of antitrust remedies---divestiture---and, in this case, quite necessary.

Big online services including e-commerce. Services like Google Search and Ama...