The ideological conviction with which FTC Commissioner Lina Khan outlines her latest investigation into Microsoft highlights the current zeitgeist. The Wall Street JournalShe explains that Microsoft may have violated antitrust laws, or rather, policies and politics. That’s not the law– The company agreed to retain the co-founders and nearly all staff of startup Inflection AI and compensate them for their ongoing operations with licensing fees. Watch the video that accompanies this story.FTC launches antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s AI deals”, June 6, 2024. With the most rational political correctness, Khan declares:
There is a growing realization in Washington that the government cannot remain completely indifferent and stand by.
It will be interesting to see what evidence she has to back up her claim that Joe Biden’s young law professor thought for a second that the federal government was “totally hands-off” and “out of the way.”
She also says:
Certainly, this will look different in some ways. … And we, as policymakers and as a society, can make decisions and choices that steer technology in a direction that actually serves us, rather than a model where a few companies are increasingly exploiting society and creators, and people feel like they have no recourse.
Who are “we as policy makers” and “we as society”? The political “we” Is it the same? Surely “we as policymakers” represent at most 50% +1 of “we as society”? And that’s the best case. I suspect that Washington political bureaucrats don’t think much about these issues and have an intuitive and naive conception of democracy. 20th century welfare economics and social choice theory, often developed by economists who are passionate about economic and social planning like Kahn, showed that “we as society” gives rise to a problem of preference aggregation that can only be solved by authoritarianism, or “dictatorship” in the words of Kenneth Arrow’s famous theorem. Only a society of identical individuals can be imagined to be (collectively) “we”. James Buchanan and public choice economics added a realistic view of “we as policymakers” and a more reasoned view of democracy.
In reality, Khan’s phrase “we as policymakers” conceals an authoritarian desire to control society.
The FTC is scrutinizing the entire stack, from chips to computing clouds to models to apps. Many of the raw materials for these tools are in the hands of just a few companies. There may be self-dealing, discrimination, and exclusion that allows the big players to get bigger at the expense of everyone else.
Khan seems to unconsciously acknowledge that her movement is part of a general ideology of social engineering from above.
Could Microsoft and Inflexion have structured their deal so as not to run afoul of something the surveillance state dislikes? It’s certainly a possibility. It’s a frightening possibility, but not the one Khan imagines. Rule of law It is not about a majoritarian government using a broad and expanding complex of laws and regulations to block things “we the policy makers” don’t like and to mandate things “we the policy makers” want. Such a conception of government represents a “government of men” (OK, let’s say “government of the people”), not a “government of laws.” With the proliferation of laws and regulations, there must be at least one legal recourse against any potential power grab. To fail to acknowledge this ignores both the economic and scientific study of society and modern concepts of freedom, and suggests an unexamined and dangerous predilection for group choice over individual choice.
As an instinctive believer in majority democracy—We as policy makers Represent We are the majority of society today—Khan should be as happy if Donald Trump is elected as he is if Joe Biden is elected chief policy officer. In both cases, the people’s voice will be heard. Framing the problem in this light suggests that the dangers of collective choice are the same on the right and the left: under a strong leader, “we” impose “our” preferences on the rest of “us”. There is an urgent need to think outside the political box.
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Big Mother controls the evil corporations (by DALL-E, inspired by P. Lemieux)
