Competing to Mine the Tech Landscape

The Washington Post yesterday gave us a piece covering antitrust law as a competitive field:

BRUSSELS — Europe may be a financial disaster and a faded military force, but in at least one arena it has emerged as champ: Regulators here are challenging the power of America’s technology titans. And they are winning.

Apparently European authorities are enforcing their visions of the ideal marketplace with stricter laws, bigger fines, and "courts more supportive of aggressive government action." And as a result, "many experts say the legal landscape of the technology industry is being shaped more profoundly here than in the United States."

Considering that what antitrust does is handicap productive businesses precisely because they produce values that customers want, it might be more appropriate to say the landscape is being mined. If this is a competition, it's a competition at limiting freedom and destroying production. Companies such as Google are competing to offer value to their customers -- racing to innovate faster and better than their rivals, including rivals the rest of us haven't yet heard of. They have to keep running, because -- especially in the case of Google's core product, which users choose anew with every search -- if they don't, other companies will win away their customers.

Meanwhile, if we go by the Post's suggestion, antitrust regulators are competing to blow away Google's legs with rules limiting Google's ability to offer its customers valuable tools .

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