Platforms, Bundling and Kill Zones

important questions do tend to be full of complexity and trade-offs, not just in tech but in policy in general. That’s how policy works. There are always answers that are simple, clear and wrong, and each of the frameworks I’ve discussed here works in some cases but not others.

And a lot of these questions trade off competition, and the user benefits that result from that, with simplicity and ease-of-use, which are also user benefits (that network stack again).

The same question comes up if you apply this to Google search: you could require a choice screen to ask people if they want to see Yelp reviews or Google reviews when they search for a restaurant (and oblige Google to create APIs to enable third parties to plug into its results). But again, we’re not talking about one vertical search category, but ... See more

Choice screens were a coherent response to Microsoft including a web browser with Windows (both essential and modular). It’s harder to see how this would work on iOS or Android, where the issue is not one app but every app that comes on your new phone - do you want 20 choice screens?

Hence, Elizabeth Warren famously proposed that ‘if you run the platform you can’t compete on it’, which sounds good, until you realise this means that you’ve just banned Google Maps on Android. If this is your principle, a platform can’t do anything that anyone else might want to do. So your new iPhone has no calendar app, and no camera app, and no... See more

There are, very obviously, some things that absolutely are illegitimate tying and bundling. But how do you capture that without capturing everything else? There is a huge grey area between telling Microsoft it can’t force OEMs to bundle Office with Windows and telling Microsoft that it has to make consumers choose their network stack when they turn... See more