Back in August, we shed some light on global enforcement agencies’ oversensitivity to potential future competition risks in artificial intelligence (AI)-related markets. From the perspective of small businesses in the app economy, the costs of government intervention to stop major investments propelling these sectors forward far outweigh its potential benefits. A recent National Foreign Trade Council poll now reveals that voters appear to agree with ACT | The App Association members that the federal government should be working to bolster AI-related investment in the United States rather than trying to fry it under a magnifying glass.
According to the poll, 83 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats believe the United States has “taken a significant step back in its global leadership” in areas like technology and international economic policy. In an election year marked by strident divisions between the party bases, this broad agreement is notable and should be a message to candidates vying for any federal legislative or executive office. It should also help inform current public officials as to where finite enforcement resources ought to be deployed.
The United States Trade Representative’s (USTR’s) decision to step back from supporting long-standing U.S. digital trade priorities is not the only move that contravenes American voters’ consensus views. When U.S. antitrust enforcers joined the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) and European Union’s (EU’s) competition agencies in a joint statement casting a shadow over dynamic, U.S.-led, emerging AI-related markets, they unequivocally put European theories of competition before American technology leadership. The statement itself points to risks that attend a broad range of markets and that are not unique in any way to AI-related markets: concentration in key input markets, extension of market power from an adjacent market to a new market, and investments that may at some point include conditions that might later produce anticompetitive effects. That American antitrust agencies now suggest that while these risks are unremarkable in other markets but intolerable when it comes to AI—in which the United States still has an overall advantage—is likely disappointing to the voters in the poll sample. It is also disappointing for small companies in the app economy poised to benefit from two powerful trends that the antitrust agencies are trying to undermine: access to investments from the firms best positioned to provide it and access to dynamic, useful AI tools and services that are built on solid structural elements, from chip to foundation model.
The poll should be a wake-up call not just for digital trade wonks, but our own antitrust enforcers, which are not the greatest predictors of market evolution. If their approach is to err on the side of enforcement “for the people,” they should be more worried than ever about overreacting to a perceived impending AI concentration flood. More importantly, they should note that American voters, watching other countries capture the lead, won’t appreciate the drought that results.