[powerpress]

Shane Tews was on two panels at the annual Tech Policy Institute Aspen Forum this year: one on the post-election transitions at the FCC and NTIA and the other on Internet fragmentation. The Forum was great this year, with a lot of emphasis on antitrust enforcement in the tech space. The opening keynote was delivered by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the leading Democratic attorney general in current litigation.

On the last day, the conference featured a fireside chat with Makan Delrahim, the head of the Antitrust Division at the US Department of Justice. The Delrahim chat was especially timely as news broke just before the talk that the state attorneys general were planning to open an investigation into Silicon Valley’s business practices. Antitrust is hot right now.

The new IETF standard for DNS over HTTPS (DoH), which we discussed with Stacie Hoffman on our previous podcast and explained in our previous post, illustrates the dominant firm problem. While DoH is privacy-enhancing in a very small way, it also stands to further entrench the positions of dominant firms in the Internet advertising and security space. So the benefits of emerging tech have to be examined along with the risk to markets that comes when dominant firms expand their control over markets.

Delrahim mentioned a talk he gave at Weiser’s Silicon Flatirons center in the Spring; check it out if you’re interested in antitrust, data collection, and whether antitrust has relevance in markets for “free” goods and services.

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