<nettime> Long Read: Internet Economics by Geoff Huston, on RIPE Labs

[Vesna Manojlovic <becha@xs4all.nl>]

Dear nettimers,

I'd like to bring to your attention to one of the articles on the
platform called "RIPE Labs" - mainly used for the publications of
interest to the network operators, developers, researchers...

This specific article is about the Internet Economics, consolidations,
measurements, content providers, security, regulators, markets... by
Geoff Huston, the Chief Scientist at APNIC, where he undertakes research
on topics associated with Internet infrastructure:

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/internet-economics-is-a-thing-and-we-need-to-take-note

The article is very long, and I would love to hear your comments &
opinions - so here are some quotes to "wet your appetites":

"the dominant issue at present is all about the roles of the unabashed
titans in our midst (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet).

Are they now so big that they are essentially answerable to no
nation-state at all?  Or can we create a regulatory framework that
places the interests of these technology behemoths into a more even
balance with various national public policy objectives?"

"When is an enterprise so big that failure is untenable in terms of
social stability?"

"Like DoH, QUIC drags the end-to-end protocol into a darkened state
within the browser.
Both of these are examples of a deeper and perhaps more insidious form
of consolidation in the Internet than we?ve seen to date with various
corporate mergers and acquisitions. Here it?s not the individual actors
that are consolidating and exercising larger market power, but the
components within the environment that are consolidating. Much of this
is well out of normal regulatory oversight, but the results are not
dissimilar to the outcomes of corporate consolidation. The result in
these two cases of application consolidation is that the browser
provider attains significant gains in market power."

"Measuring consolidation is a difficult problem. As an example, Staples,
an office supplies retailer in the US, attempted to merge with Office
Depot in their efforts to counter their collective revenue loss to
Amazon. Such horizontal mergers have a difficult time with the
Department of Justice in the US, and the merger proposal was not
cleared. The result is, of course, inevitable, as neither enterprise has
the volume to effectively compete with Amazon and both are now in
challenging circumstances because of Amazon?s overarching presence.

On the other hand, it could be argued that the acquisition of WhatsApp
by Facebook should not have been approved, as the combination of social
media and messaging further consolidates Facebook?s position with its
user base and makes it a must-use platform for digital advertisers. The
arguments for regulatory decisions to allow or block mergers depends on
forecasted outcomes, and to conduct usable forecasts we need accurate
data."

"But to have an informed, relevant and effective public policy process
we need to understand this changing world. It seems to me that open
measurement platforms and open data sets are more important than ever
before. We need public measurements that are impartial, accurate,
comprehensive and of course unbiased as an essential precondition for
the fair and effective operation of markets."

Have a good weekend,
Vesna

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: