Online platforms have assumed a central role in the way people communicate with each other, transact commerce, and obtain news and other information. Individuals can retrieve relevant and useful information in seconds, make personal and professional connections, and access (at no financial cost to themselves) a range of valuable goods and services that otherwise would be costly or difficult to find. Companies and other organizations can find customers and other audiences that once remained elusive. Key to achieving these benefits is the ability of digital platforms to use algorithms to recommend particular content to a particular user based on that content’s likely relevance to that user – a process known as targeting.
The economic benefits of targeted content extend far beyond the revenues the platforms themselves generate from digital advertising. The targeting of search results, advertising, and other content to users fuels the overall digital economy and generates massive benefits for all consumers of information, goods, and services and for the firms that use the platforms to reach them.
In this brief, we present some economic considerations that the amici urge the Court to consider in its deliberations. Any decision in this case that could change the structure of the digital economy must consider the decision’s full economic consequences, including the effects on other firms and on consumer welfare resulting from online platforms’ targeting of relevant content to their users.
Sarah Oh Lam is a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. Oh completed her PhD in Economics from George Mason University, and holds a JD from GMU and a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She was previously the Operations and Research Director for the Information Economy Project at George Mason School of Law. She has also presented research at the 39th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference and has co-authored work published in the Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property among other research projects. Her research interests include law and economics, regulatory analysis, and technology policy.
Thomas Lenard is Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Technology Policy Institute. Lenard is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on telecommunications, electricity, antitrust, privacy, e-commerce and other regulatory issues. His publications include Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated?; The Digital Economy Fact Book; Privacy and the Commercial Use of Personal Information; Competition, Innovation and the Microsoft Monopoly: Antitrust in the Digital Marketplace; and Deregulating Electricity: The Federal Role.
Before joining the Technology Policy Institute, Lenard was acting president, senior vice president for research and senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. He has served in senior economics positions at the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Trade Commission and the Council on Wage and Price Stability, and was a member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis. He is a past president and chairman of the board of the National Economists Club.
Lenard is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in economics from Brown University. He can be reached at [email protected]
Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.
