It's interesting because we've written a couple of books and we were ready to defend our thesis. I remember there was this one head of a competition agency who then looked at us and said, “Okay, so what are we going to do about it?” It kind of caught us flat-footed because we were just identifying the problem without necessarily having the solution.
What I would encourage would be, basically, threefold. First is to ask what your competition authority is doing about the market power problem. Marshall Steinbaum and I wrote a piece that just came out from the Roosevelt Institute on reinvigorating antitrust.
To what extent is the Canadian competition authority prepared for the digital economy? I think that's an important issue for you to.... Should the standards change to make it easier to go after these anti-competitive restraints?
The second would be, then, what are the necessary preconditions for effective privacy competition? Some of the themes you heard from today already touch on this: GDPR-like provisions on data portability, issues on who owns the data. What I would encourage then is really to bring together scholars on what some of the things that are necessary that we could put in so that we don't have to regulate, so that we can allow then the market forces to provide optimal privacy by design.
The third component, which we really haven't touched on, would be consumer protection. Here would be both before and after. What is it that we can do to simplify it for consumers so it's not like surrender, so that they actually have the ability to choose and feel comfortable in using this data?
The risks that I hope that I identify show that it's really multifold. You have concerns about journalism right now that the ACCC is looking into. You have concerns about addictions of young individuals and the effects they have on well-being.
There are other important implications that these data-opolies will have. I just identified those three.