Friday March 19, 2021
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom Meeting
Dear Colleagues:
Greetings, and I hope the new year and new semester are going well for you as Spring approaches. It has been a year since much of the world went into degrees of lockdown in reasonable fear of the virus. May we all stay very well and the vaccines eventually allow something more like normal life.
One of the effects of the pandemic has been that we’ve become even more dependent on “Big Tech” – on Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon – for both our business and social lives. But their reach into our lives has been expanding for many years.
Over the past year worries about their power rose towards the top of political agendas. In July the CEOs of all four companies were grilled, virtually, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Monopoly Power.” This was followed by an extensive report on “Competition in the Digital Marketplace” based on seven hearings and further research. In October the Department of Justice and eleven Republican state attorneys general sued Google for allegedly violating antitrust laws. In December two more cases were brought against Google by groups of attorneys general. In December also the Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook for “illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.” Simultaneously, 48 state attorneys general also sued Facebook for its allegedly anticompetitive behavior. Meanwhile, European regulators had begun to take on “Big Tech” earlier, and now various private lawsuits are building on the evidence from the government cases.
Some suits have been brought by conservative outlets, Parler and Rumble, which claim that the tech giants are biased against conservative organizations. They object, for example, to Amazon having dropped hosting of Parler on Amazon Web Services due to incitement to violence on the site. It’s fair to say that politicians across the partisan spectrum have proclaimed their concerns, though it’s not clear that they share the same concerns. For example, the Trump administration pushed to repeal Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields internet service providers from any liability for content on their platforms. But then conservatives have objected to the platforms banning content that could incite violence and thereby – if Section 230 were repealed – create liability risk for them. Meanwhile, in spite of all the complaints about monopoly, lots of people seem to think the products are a good deal – as we will see in our March 26 program about Amazon!
So what’s the problem, or what are the problems, that we should be worrying about? They include, potentially, monopolistic behavior in violation of antitrust statutes and restrictions on competition. But the controversies also include concerns about privacy, free speech (and hate speech), and political identity. Other issues, less visible to some of us but prominent within the firms, include labor-management relations, management of human capital, and activism from both within and outside the companies. Ultimately the power of these companies raises the profile of an issue that is only beginning to emerge from decades of suppression: who are the stakeholders in corporations? Since the 1970s economic and legal theory has been dominated by a view that only shareholders have a legitimate stake – not workers, not customers, and not others affected by corporate behavior. But when corporations start looking more and more like they have power much like a government’s over us, that becomes harder to defend.
Professor Alon-Beck studies legal and regulatory structures that shape corporate behavior. She also is a frequent contributor to Forbes, including recent pieces on antitrust, venture capital, corporate governance and tech employees. Join us as she shares perspectives and we all can guess if all these lawsuits and hearings are “sound and fury, signifying nothing”….
Signing In
This semester’s discussions will begin at 12:30 p.m., the usual time. The meeting will be set up as from Noon to 2:00 p.m., so people are not all signing in at the same time and to allow for the discussion to run a bit long. Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. Every Monday the same information will be posted on our website: fridaylunch.case.edu.
If you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. This week’s link for registration is:
https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkd-yqrz8tG9KRJZPtEOAVseIUPSk1-fmj
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
Professor Alon-Beck’s research focuses on corporate law and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on how legal and regulatory structures influence entrepreneurial opportunities and firms. She is passionate about empowering women to advance in entrepreneurship and leadership positions in the business world.
Professor Alon-Beck joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve from the New York University School of Law, where she served as the Jacobson Fellow in Law and Business. Prior to NYU, she was a visiting assistant professor of International Business and Management at Dickinson College.
Professor Alon-Beck holds SJD and LL.M degrees, with honors, from Cornell Law School, where she served as an editor of the Cornell International Law Journal. She received her LL.M from Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law and served as an editor of Theoretical Inquiries in Law.
Schedule of Friday Lunch Upcoming Topics and Speakers:
March 26: Behemoth: Amazon Rising. With Robin Gaster, Ph.D., President, Incumetrics Inc. and Visiting Scholar, George Washington University.
April 2: Student Debt: What Are the Problems? For Whom? And What Could Be Done? With Richard Kazis, Senior Consultant, MDRC, Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, and Board Chair of The Institute for College Access and Services.
April 9: Healthcare, Public Health, and Population Health. With Scott Frank, MD, Associate Professor and Director of Public Health Initiatives, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.
April 16: Dropping the Pilot? Assessing Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship. With Kenneth F. Ledford, Ph.D., Chair, Department of History.
April 23: Depression’s Past and Future. With Jonathan Sadowsky, Ph.D., Theodore J. Castele Professor of History.
April 30: The Republican Party and Demographic Change. With Girma Parris, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science.
May 7: Defending Disability Insurance. With Kathy Ruffing, Senior Fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. |
