Paul Krugman: Barons of Broadband

We should be more worried than we are about monopoly power:

Barons of Broadband , by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Last week’s big business news was the announcement that Comcast ... has reached a deal to acquire Time Warner... If regulators approve the deal, Comcast will be an overwhelmingly dominant player in the business...

So let me ask two questions about the proposed deal. First, why would we even think about letting it go through? Second, when and why did we stop worrying about monopoly power?

On the first question, broadband Internet and cable TV are already highly concentrated industries... Comcast perfectly fits the old notion of monopolists as robber barons...

And there are good reasons to believe ... that monopoly power has become a significant drag on the U.S. economy as a whole.

There used to be a bipartisan consensus in favor of tough antitrust enforcement. During the Reagan years, however, antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power... have been rising fast.

At first, arguments against policing monopoly power pointed to the alleged benefits of mergers in terms of economic efficiency. Later, it became common to assert that the world had changed in ways that made all those old-fashioned concerns about monopoly irrelevant. Aren’t we living in an era of global competition? Doesn’t ... creative destruction ... constantly tear down old industry giants and create new ones?

The truth, however, is that many goods and especially services aren’t subject to international competition: New Jersey families can’t subscribe to Korean broadband. Meanwhile, creative destruction has been oversold: Microsoft may be ... in decline, but it’s still enormously profitable thanks to the monopoly position it established decades ago.

Moreover, there’s good reason to believe that monopoly is itself a barrier to innovation...: why upgrade your network or provide better services when your customers have nowhere to go?

And the same phenomenon may be ... holding back the economy as a whole. One puzzle ... has been the disconnect between profits and investment. Profits are at a record high..., yet corporations aren’t reinvesting their returns in their businesses. Instead, they’re buying back shares, or accumulating huge piles of cash. This is exactly what you’d expect to see if a lot of those record profits represent monopoly rents.

It’s time, in other words, to go back to worrying about monopoly power, which we should have been doing all along. And the first step on the road back from our grand detour on this issue is obvious: Say no to Comcast.