Chicxulubian Antitrust

There is a lot for industrial policy, including antitrust, to gain from reflecting upon evolution. Consider, for example, the theory that the demise of the dinosaurs in a catastrophic meteor impact at Chicxulub cleared the way for mammals to become the world’s dominant megafauna.

If we suppose that mammals are better creatures than dinosaurs — more advanced, more sophisticated, somehow — then the theory suggests that until the meteor impact the dinosaurs had short-circuited competition from mammals, preventing them from leveraging their superiority to overpower the dinosaurs.

Perhaps the short circuit was the mere fact of dinosaurs’ incumbency. Mammals couldn’t reach livestock size, for example, and compete with larger dinosaurs, simply because dinosaurs already occupied that niche, denying mammals the resources they would need to evolve into it. Similarly, antitrust and innovation economics have long recognized that there are first-mover advantages that can block competition. Indeed, the argument current today that Google and Facebook use their size to acquire startups before they can grow into serious competitors resembles the role dinosaurs’ incumbency may have played in obstructing the development of mammals.

But perhaps instead of confirming our fears about the anticompetitive character of incumbency, the story of dinosaurs and mammals undermines it. For there is no reason to assume that mammals really are the better — more advanced, more sophisticated, somehow — of the two groups. Perhaps if the advantages of incumbency could be eliminated, and dinosaurs and mammals, in fully-developed form, could be set against each other, dinosaurs would emerge victorious.

In that case the meteor impact did not operate the way some believe that using the antitrust laws to break up Big Tech would operate today. The cataclysm did not free up space for more innovative upstarts to develop and occupy the ecosystem, but rather wiped out a more advanced form, allowing less-developed upstarts to thrive, and then to turn around and use the advantages of incumbency to prevent the more advanced form from returning to its original position of dominance. The meteor laid low the dinosauric epitome of life, and mammals leapt into the space and prevented dinosaurs from coming back. It is hard, when looking at the dinosaurs’ descendants, the birds, with their obsession with beauty, long-term amorous relationships, and increasingly-well-documented intelligence, not to wonder what might have been.

In other words, there is no reason for industrial policymakers to suppose that periodically shaking up the business world using the industrial cataclysm of the deconcentration order must necessarily, through competition, lead to better firms. Some value judgment must be made by policymakers regarding whether what will come next promises to be better than what we have now. Competition is path dependent, a kind of roll of the dice, and there is no guarantee that a new roll will produce better forms than the last. The evolution of the mammals into man — an unmitigated disaster for the global ecosystem — stands as Exhibit One to that sorry fact.