Joe Rogan: Stifling Competition is a Selfish Act

Do you foresee the possibility of alternative social media outlets sort of viewing all the issues that people do have with Google or Facebook or Twitter and any of these what are perceived to be biased sources of information and coming up with something that has clear protections in there and sort of like the founding fathers did when they established our system of government listen we don't want that let's let's organize that as we're starting to make sure that this doesn't doesn't ever turn into some sort of an echo chamber yeah look I'm way above my pay grade yeah but what I know gets us there is competition I know that the only thing that has ever gotten us to the next great innovation is the enforcement of competition which is why it's a problem when someone like Facebook absolutely buys in what gave us the internet yeah was interventions by the government against AT&T which was the dominant telecommunications company for more than a century that finally said enough of this you can't leverage your power to control all innovation and once that intervention happened people could layer on top of their wires a new network called the internet yeah and when they did that government said to companies like cable television companies okay yeah you've got broadband across your cable line but that doesn't mean you get to decide what applications go on that cable line so you your HP I mean you're the cable company you can't say that there can't be Netflix on the cable or you can't slow Netflix down now obviously they would want to slow Netflix down because Netflix is a competitor with their basic business model but the intervention to assure competition created the opportunity for these great new innovations now nobody at the beginning of that had any clue about what would come out of it all that they knew was that the only way to get something new and great was to assure competition and that's the commitment we've given up since 2000 since George Bush became president 2001 there's been no major enforcement action by the anti-trust department against any of these companies and that is a huge problem and until we rediscover the importance of competition not because we're geniuses and we can figure out what the future will bring but because we know from the past that the only way the future comes is if you guarantee competition unless we do that we're never going to solve any of these problems yeah ensuring competition is ensuring innovations ensuring and then anybody who doesn't want competition wants to stifle innovation and it's got to be thought to be a selfish proposition right and the basic so you know the basic argument in competition law you know this competition law got taken over by a bunch of Chicago economists who said the only question was efficiency or consumer welfare but there's another perspective that libertarians like Luigi Zingales who's an economist at University of Chicago Business School and and people who are not libertarians like Tim Wu who's a professor at Columbia embraced and this is the idea of political antitrust and the idea of political antitrust is you should also worry if companies are so big that they can corrupt the government like this is a dimension to worry about too because if they get to be so big that they can corrupt the government then you know that they will use that power to protect themselves against innovation because if an innovator comes he doesn't come with 50 lobbyists he just comes with a great idea I mean you know Elon Musk saw this dramatically as he's developing this incredible alternative and tried to figure out how to sell it inside of states and then the lobbyists for the car companies would go state by state and forbid them from being able to sell cars without a local dealership in the state right there's a huge fight as the incumbent industries leverage their power over government to protect themselves from this new competitor and this is the this is the fight we have to we have to make central again because if we don't do that then the dinosaurs will have the power through this corrupted political system to protect themselves against the future and this is just the moment when we need to figure out how to make the future come