Debating Privacy in Venice

 

I’m looking forward to seeing lots of old friends at the upcoming Venice https://privacysymposium.org/  

For many years, I attended and spoke at privacy conferences around the world.

 

I believe in sustaining a dialogue amongst privacy professionals, regulators, academics and advocates. 

I always learned a lot from these events, and I did my best to contribute to the debates as well. 

I also believe in building human connections to the people in this field, and I’m happy to count many of them as personal friends.  

This year, I’ll join a distinguished group of regulators and practitioners on a panel entitled:  Privacy and Antitrust.

This should be interesting!  I have, after all, spent 30 years guiding Microsoft and Google… 

Like privacy itself, Venice is precious and fragile. 

We’re lucky to be there together in May, before another tech monopolist rents the city for himself in June.  

A Gaggle of Monopolies

 

One of the peculiarities of monopolies in the age of Big Tech is how they tend to leverage quickly into a group of monopolies. 

Historically, building a monopoly was a rare business event, and it usually just happened in a single industry, like oil or finance. 

But the tech industry is different:  businesses build one monopoly (legally, let’s assume).

Then they quickly manage to leverage it into multiple monopolies across an array of businesses. 

You can read recent press reports about antitrust enforcement actions against Google and Meta, to take those prominent examples.  

Traditional antitrust/competition law developed to restrain individual monopolies from leveraging their existing monopolies unfairly into new markets.  But historical law seems to struggle with how to address this new phenomenon of companies that develop a portfolio of monopolies.  Of course, these tech companies leverage their monopolies to develop and support each other, in particular by sharing user data, given that all these monopolies are based on processing vast amounts of user data.  The more you have, the better you can leverage into a new market.  That’s why this antitrust/competition conundrum is also a privacy challenge.  Monopolies that process personal data and share them across their portfolio of services are processing personal data at a scale unprecedented in human history.  Europe took a first step to try to address this problem with its Digital Markets Act.  

We don’t have a legal word for a portfolio of monopolies.  Calling a company a “monopolist” doesn’t capture the nature of a portfolio of interlocking monopolies.  So, I looked to the wildly colorful words of English vocabularies to describe a group of animals, for inspiration.  

A bloat of hippopotamuses

A parliament of owls

A gaggle of geese

A flamboyance of flamingos

A murder of crows

A company of parrots

A charm of finches

A shiver of sharks

An aggregation of snakes

A gamble of alligators

A skulk of foxes

Antitrust/competition law will have to come up with new tools to deal with this new phenomenon of portfolios of monopolies, as will the field of privacy.  Any remedies that the authorities impose will need to take into account the nature of these interlocking monopolies.  And yes, forcing a company with a portfolio of monopolies to divest one of its monopolies might be the right way forward, or to stop it from acquiring new ones.  I doubt though that a “murder of crows” will suffer terribly if it loses one crow.  

But first, let’s find a name:  a “gaggle of monopolies”?, a “bloat of monopolies”?  Any of the above might do, with all due respect to the animals.  I’m happy to let Llama or Gemini choose.  

The end of US clouds in Europe?

 

How should Europe riposte to the Trump tariff wars? I visited with some friends in Madrid recently.

I was surprised how quickly the consensus was reached:  “it’s time to liberate ourselves from the US cloud providers.”

As background, if you don’t already know, the global market is dominated by three US cloud service providers:  Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, in that order of dominance.  It’s no secret that all three of these entities run giant tech monopolies in other markets, which they leveraged into the cloud market.  The cloud market isn’t particularly high-tech.  It’s more about scale:  the bigger you are, the more you can build a global infrastructure network and lower costs for all.  There are lots of smaller local competitors, but none can match the scale of the US giants.  

But Trump has changed the global understanding of the risks of entrusting your critical national infrastructure to three US companies.  Could Trump order these US companies to terminate their services, immediately, in Europe or any other country?  What was once unthinkable, is now a possible (hopefully, improbable) scenario.  European business and political leaders are now asking what they would do if the US government ordered these US cloud services to terminate them.  Bedlam hardly describes what would happen.  Relying heavily on US cloud providers is reckless, leaders are realizing.

There have long been criticisms of US cloud providers.  In Europe, for example, they have been criticized for utilizing tax haven structures in Ireland and Luxembourg to earn vast revenues, while paying tiny taxes.  Want to compare the income tax rates of a Madrid bus driver to the tax rates paid by Amazon, Microsoft, Google in Europe? Guess which is higher. 

Europe already has lots of laws on the books that could be used to drive forward to a US cloud-free future.  Europe’s main privacy law, the GDPR, has prohibitions on transferring personal data from Europe to the US, as long as the US does not have “essentially equivalent” data protection laws.  (I’ll blog on this separately, but the chances for the European Court of Justice to decide that any new data transfer scheme between Europe and the US meets that test are about as high as my chances to win the Paris marathon next weekend.)

In purely trade terms, the US runs a huge trade surplus with Europe in digital services, with cloud services high on the list.  As Europeans look at ways to riposte to Trump’s trade war, consider the risks to US cloud providers.  If I was a US West Coast cloud executive, I’d be quaking in my birkenstocks.  Meanwhile, the sky over Madrid is cloud free. 

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who’s the wokest of them all?

 

I spent most of my life in woke organizations, namely Harvard and Google.  Both of those institutions have lots in common:  both have very talented and intelligent communities, and both are amongst the wokest organizations on the planet.  They were both meritocracies, or at least, they used to be, and to a lesser extent, still are.  But both became radical converts to wokism, and both developed cancel-cultures to stifle any dissenting voices.  

Harvard appointed a black female President, with an underwhelming academic record, who later resigned, as you’ll recall, in part because she couldn’t figure out if calling for the genocide of Jews was against Harvard policy.  I was in the Google legal department, and so I celebrated when Google also appointed a black female general counsel, as my department’s boss.  I’m sure she’s brilliant, and like me, a former Harvard student.

The one thing that the woke brigades all agree on is simple:  the insufferable inherited privilege of the white male.  I wasn’t surprised to see a former Googler sue the company for discrimination:  https://nypost.com/2025/04/02/business/google-executive-discriminated-against-male-employees-bombshell-lawsuit-alleges/

To be clear, I know none of the people mentioned in the article above, and I have no opinion on the merits.  Even if I did know them, I wouldn’t publicly comment on it, out of loyalty to my former employer.  

The truth, however, is that it’s hard to be a white male at Google.  And even harder to be an older white male at Google.  When I left Google, I was a 60-year-old white male.  I never met another one at Google, not a single one.  You might be surprised that there was even one.