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As Phillips argues, “we’re not going to solve the climate crisis if people just stop drinking water out of water bottles. But we need to start minimizing the amount of pollution that’s even put into the landscape. It’s a place to start; it’s not the place to end.”

There may not be a one-size-fits-all analogy for platforms, but “horizontalizing” can help us to understand which solutions worked in other industries, which were under-ambitious and which had unintended consequences. Comparing horizontally also reminds us that the problems of how to regulate the online world are not unique, and will prove as difficult to resolve as those of other large industries.  

The key to vertical thinking is to figure out how not to lock in incumbents or to tilt the playing field even more toward them. We often forget that small rivals do exist, and our regulation should think about how to include them. This means fostering a market that has room for ponies and stable horses as well as unicorns.

Vertical thinking has started to spread in Washington, DC. In mid January, the antitrust subcommittee in Congress held a hearing with four smaller tech firms. All of them asked for regulatory intervention. The CEO of phone accessory maker PopSockets called Amazon’s behaviour “bullying with a smile.” Amazon purportedly ignored the selling of counterfeited PopSocket products on its platform and punished PopSocket for wanting to end its relationship with Amazon. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed sympathetic to smaller firms’ travails. The question is how to adequately address vertical concerns.

Without Improved Governance, Big Firms Will Weaponize Regulation

One is the question of intellectual property. Pa

Big companies can marshall an army of lawyers, which even medium-sized firms could never afford to do.

A second aspect to consider is sliding scales of regulation.

A third aspect is burden of proof. One option is to flip the present default and make big companies prove that they are not engaging in harmful behaviour

The EU head of antitrust, Margrethe Vestager, is considering whether to turn this on its head: in cases where the European Union suspects monopolistic behaviour, major digital platforms would have to prove that users benefit from their services.

Companies would have to prove gains, rather than Brussels having to prove damages. This change would relieve pressure on smaller companies to show harms. It would put obligations on companies such as Google, which Vestager sees as so dominant that she has called them “de facto regulators” in their markets. 

A final aspect to consider is possibly mandating larger firms to open up.