The Canadian App Economy is strong both in terms of app exports and compared to its industrialized peers. The Canadian App Economy has 262,000 App Economy workers as of November 2018, according to a recently released report by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). App Economy workers are those that develop, maintain, or support mobile applications. What’s more, Canada is outperforming many of its industrialized peers.
Read the full piece on Medium by clicking here.
Many of the Democratic presidential candidates are vying to see who can be toughest on the tech sector. But here’s the paradox: New data shows that the tech boom is a major force driving down unemployment, lifting economic growth, and helping voters — precisely the people that the Democratic candidates are trying to reach.
The key here is that the economic data produced by the government is not typically presented in a form that easily shows the benefits of the tech boom. Software firms, for example, are spread across at least three different industries. Ecommerce — related activities are spread across at least two industries, electronic shopping and warehousing. And telecom includes at least two three industries, telecom services, communications equipment, and data processing and hosting.
Read the full piece on Medium by clicking here.
Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007 just as the Global Recession was about to begin. While central bankers and national leaders struggled with a deep financial crisis and stagnation, the fervent demand for iPhones and the wave of smartphones that followed provided a rare force for growth.
The smartphone also triggered a new era for job creation around the world. Apple opened the App Store in 2008, followed by Android Market (now Google Play) and other app stores. This unexpected “side-effect” of the smartphone quickly took on a life of its own, creating a whole new class of iOS and Android developers who were writing mobile applications that could run on smartphones anywhere.
It’s not an exaggeration to speak of a global App Economy, with an army of app developers writing mobile applications for billions of users. For businesses, apps have become the essential front door for their customers, providing access to everything from shopping to customer service to banking services to entertainment to information to essential health knowledge.
What’s more, the App Economy still has room to grow. Internet of Things (IoT) mobile connections are estimated to reach 4.1 billion by 2024, increasing at an annual growth rate of 27 percent.2 Consumers and businesses are increasingly interfacing with physical objects and processes through their smartphones and tablets via the IoT. Companies and individuals are utilizing apps to control everyday items and processes such as smart homes, e-commerce shopping, manufacturing analytics, smart. This report updates our 2017 paper, “The Rise of the Australian App Economy”.
[gview file=”https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/PPI_AustraliaAppEconomy_V4-1.pdf” title=”PPI_AustraliaAppEconomy_V4 (1)”]
For Immediate Release (3/6/19)
WASHINGTON – “Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Congressman Mike Doyle (PA-14) today unveiled a bill that will only continue to delay real action on net neutrality. Congress last passed significant legislation on our communications networks in 1996 and this new proposed bill is a continuation of the DC game of rhetoric and no action as this bill has no chance of passing Congress.
“For the last two decades, different versions of net neutrality have bounced between Congress, the FCC, the courts, and most recently within states — but even with today’s proposal, many of the issues surrounding Net Neutrality will still go unsolved.
“Bipartisan compromise on strong, permanent, clean net neutrality is clearly within reach. We are confident that a practical deal that will protect consumers, strengthen the internet, grow the digital economy, and add jobs in an evolving and modern sector is on the horizon, but this proposal doesn’t pass the smell test.
“It’s not enough to hold press conferences and introduce message bills – American consumers deserve effective action that actually solves the problem of net neutrality. The backward-looking poison pill approach we have seen so far only makes it harder to achieve. Hopefully, Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate will work together moving forward on changes to this legislation that can get us over the finish line and deliver a lasting solution on Net Neutrality – not just more talking points and fundraising emails.
“We continue to urge Congress to solve this problem for good by enacting a strong, pro-consumer, clean net neutrality law ensuring an open internet for all that does not apply European style regulations to a true American success story: the communications sector.”
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Members of the news media may contact media@ppionline.org, or by phone (202) 525-3926.
Net neutrality is the basic idea that all internet traffic must be treated equally on the network and no company should be able to block or throttle online traffic in order to gain a competitive leg-up. This is a pro-competitive, prophylactic policy to ensure internet providers don’t unfairly become gatekeepers for online services. It’s a sound bi-partisan pragmatic public policy agreement.
For the last two decades, different versions of net neutrality have bounced between Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, the courts – and most recently the states – but the issue remains unresolved. Even today, the FCC’s most recent “Restoring Internet Freedom” order and local net neutrality rules in California and Vermont remain mired in court while Congress considers several different legislative approaches – none of which have been able to gain majority support.
This chaotic and uncertain approach drags down our economy, undermines investment needed to connect new communities and close the digital divide, and sucks up all the oxygen in the room so that other issues like increasing rural connectivity and reducing the digital divide, protecting elections from foreign interference, and finding ways to bring new competition to digital markets get crowded out. Economists estimate that the overhang of this debate drives away nearly $35 billion a year in network investment and consumer upgrades.
It is time for Congress to solve this problem for good by enacting a strong, pro-consumer net neutrality law – an outcome that is politically possible even in this era of maximalist gridlock and deeply divided government, given the broad consensus that has formed around the vital issue of ensuring an open internet.
Chinese hackers stealing technology from U.S. companies, Russian trolls interfering in our elections, U.S. tech leaders hauled before Congress to explain some new data breach or misuse of personal information – hardly a week goes by without Americans being bombarded with new revelations about assaults on our privacy.
The problem will only get worse as America’s physical industries – autos, construction and manufacturing of all kinds – go online. That will trigger explosive growth in the volume of personal information companies collect – and try to sell.
And while the United States leads the world when it comes to digital technology and data-driven commerce, we lag in updating our cybersecurity and privacy laws. Unlike Europe, which is implementing its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Washington has no national standard for privacy.
States are moving to fill this policy vacuum. Following Nebraska and Alabama, California recently passed a law giving consumers the rights to know what information a business has collected about them, to “opt out” of a business selling their data, and to have their data deleted. That’s understandable, given growing public demands for data security, but a state-by-state approach to privacy makes little sense.
It would balkanize the seamless digital marketplace that has been key to America’s high-tech leadership, forcing consumers and businesses to run a bewildering gauntlet of varying standards, rules and enforcement regimes. Instead, we need a national privacy law that’s simple but strong, with one common standard and one set of rules that every company must follow and every consumer can understand.
U.S. voters need little convincing. A recent Expedition Strategies poll for PPI found that voters are very concerned about abuses of their personal information. 60 percent said they are worried about tech companies’ handling of privacy and data protection. It’s no wonder a solid majority (58 percent) backs national legislation enshrining consumers’ private rights, as shown in Figure 1.
PPI believes the new Democratic House majority should make a national privacy law a top priority for the next Congress convening in January. Since California’s new rules take effect in 2020, Congress should pass a national law by the end of the year.
Can a Democratic House and Republican Senate find common ground next year on a national privacy bill? The good news is that privacy is not intrinsically a partisan issue. It could provide an early test of Republicans’ willingness to work with Democrats to break the spell of tribal partisan warfare that hangs over Washington, and get our national government back in the business of solving national problems.
The U.S. economy almost certainly has a problem with rising market power. A bevy of recent economic studies show that concentration in many sectors of the economy has increased over the past 20-30 years. These increases in concentration have been convincingly linked to such economic ills as rising prices, weak productivity growth, stagnant real wages, slower job growth, weak investment, and falling labor share.
Indeed, there is little doubt that strong and consistent competition policy plays an important role in a market economy. Longstanding incumbents in a wide range of industries can exercise market power to choke off innovation and growth, protecting the status quo and driving up prices rather than benefiting workers and consumers.
How fast the tables have turned. Only a few years ago, the major technology platform companies — Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple and Facebook — were widely admired.
Now, they are in the dock, accused of limiting competition; chilling startups and the innovation they bring; widening income and wealth inequality; threatening our privacy; enabling foreign actors to poison our elections; and engaging in political bias.
Some urge the government to break up the tech platforms. Others want to regulate them as public utilities. In my new e-book, “A Scalpel, Not an Axe,” recently published by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), I effectively say, “Hold on.”
The antitrust laws, as long interpreted by the courts, do not punish companies for successes achieved through innovation and luck, or from benefiting from economies of scale and networks that become more valuable with more users.
There is no credible evidence that any of the tech platforms has engaged in unlawful monopolization that warrants their breakup, such as AT&T’s refusal to interconnect long-distance rivals with its local phone companies (which led to its breakup in the 1980s) or Microsoft’s restrictive practices that entrenched the dominance of its Window’s operating system (which was not punished by breakup).
U.S. proponents of breaking up Google are closely watching the European Commission’s anti-Google actions and are urging U.S. regulators to take a similarly aggressive line. Despite its regulatory zeal, however, the EU is not calling for breaking up Google.
Instead, Google changed its algorithm to ensure it wasn’t favoring its price comparison engine over others. And even if American courts were to rule against Google’s tying of it apps to its Android mobile operating system, they could simply order the company to stop.
Do these big companies freeze out startups, creating what The Economist has called a “kill zone” around their markets?
As of March 2019, the United Kingdom will have the status of a “third country” from the perspective of the European Union and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Will the EU accept that UK data protection standards are high enough to grant them the status of “adequacy,” which will allow data to flow more easily between the UK and the EU? Or will a “data wall” appear overnight between the UK and the EU? The answers to these questions obviously matter to the UK. These data-related issues arise at a crucial moment in the development of the EU economy, which will be badly hurt by a post-Brexit data wall. The UK finance and tech sectors are at special risk, since they require a firehose of cross-border data transfers.
Fixating on the traditional aggregate measures of the economy’s health — GDP growth, the unemployment rate, or the inflation trade — ignores not only rising income and wealth inequality, but the fact the American Dream machine has been sputtering for at least two or three decades. Stanford’s Raj Chetty and his co-authors have shown that only half of Americans born in 1980 or later were out-earning their parents at the age of 30, compared to 90 percent of those born forty years before. No wonder so many Americans across the political spectrum have been so anxious or even angry, with racial resentment and political incivility on the rise.
Three broad narratives for fixing our American Dream machine, which admittedly won’t cure all problems, have been advanced by political leaders and researchers. The two that have received the most media attention are both either misleading or inadequate.
One narrative, pushed by President Trump and in more muted tones by some Democrats, blames increased and “unfair” trade for the decline of manufacturing jobs and stagnant or slow real-wage growth. Trump and many Republicans also wrongly blame illegal immigrants, who are working (if they can) at low wages doing jobs like cleaning dishes or mowing lawns that few American citizens want to do.
Continue reading at RealClearPolicy.
WASHINGTON—As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) kicks off public hearings today on economic concentration and competition, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) weighs in with a new e-book by economist and antitrust lawyer, Robert Litan, one of America’s leading authorities on antitrust law and competition policy.
In A Scalpel, Not an Axe: Updating Antitrust and Data Laws to Spur Competition and Innovation, Litan takes a deep dive into the growing debate here and abroad about the market power of big U.S. companies, especially in the tech sector. The emergence of “tech-lash,” he says, highlights some valid public concerns, but none rise to the level of justifying the drastic solutions peddled by “antitrust populists:” breaking up the big tech firms or regulating them as public utilities.
Instead, Litan offers a measured policy response to economic concentration. “While there is a temptation to turn to radical solutions to fix our problems – with growing income inequality and our newfound worries about a loss of privacy – major departures from existing policies, especially toward some of the most successful private sector firms and the major economic and social benefits they have generated, also risk unintended costly consequences with uncertain benefits,” he writes.
“Bob Litan’s timely new ebook establishes a new benchmark for rigorous and systematic thinking about the impact of America’s dominant tech platforms on competition and inequality,” said PPI President Will Marshall. ” It illuminates the real problems progressives should tackle and offers pragmatic remedies that won’t jeopardize America’s crucial lead in high-tech innovation.”
Among his key findings, Litan concludes that while tech platforms on balance have not harmed economy-wide innovation, there is evidence that the strength of competition throughout the economy has lessened somewhat. There is also evidence that the rise of the tech platforms and concentrated employer markets across multiple sectors at the local level are contributing to wage inequality.
Anti-trust policy, however, isn’t the right lever for dealing with these concerns, Litan maintains. Other targeted policies, outside antitrust, would improve the state of competition in America, including lifting unnecessary occupational licensing requirements, an end to “no poaching” agreements, and a return to freer trade, which disciplines pricing by U.S. companies.
“There is yet no sound legal or policy basis for to break technology platform firms up for antitrust or other reasons. The law justifiably requires severe and/or sustained anticompetitive conduct as a precondition for court-ordered breakups,” he writes.
Noting the trend toward mergers between firms with dominant positions in different markets, the book proposes tightening the statutory test for mergers and establishing a rebuttable presumption against mergers where the acquiring firm has a dominant position in its market and has the ability to effectively enter any market in which the acquired firm competes.
Nonetheless, the growth of these firms has generated significant non-antitrust concerns about data security and privacy. Litan recommends updating data laws to protect privacy and security by requiring all firms, not just those in tech, to provide plain English explanations of what data the firms collect about consumers and how it is used, the ability to opt out of having their information shared with third parties, and the full disclosure of funding for political ads. He argues that federal law should also require all large data warehouses – a term that would require further definition in an authorized rulemaking – to adopt reasonable measures to ensure data security.
A Scalpel, Not an Axe also warns that the strongest regulations tech’s critics demand may also pose a threat to competition. “In all that they do to regulate the tech industry more intensely, policymakers must be aware that additional data-related regulation is likely to favor large incumbent tech firms relative to smaller competitors and new entrants. Regulatory compliance is a fixed cost, and larger firms can take advantage of their economies of scale to comply,” Litan writes.
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Americans justifiably have long taken great pride in the unmatched ability of the U.S. economy to enable entrepreneurs to launch and grow highly innovative companies that drive growth and advance living standards. Bold entrepreneurs and the companies they founded brought us modern communications, airplanes, automobiles, computer software and hardware, and electricity and other forms of energy to power them all.
These innovations and others have constantly reshaped and remade our economy – displacing less efficient technologies and ways of doing business in a process of “creative destruction” that economist Joseph Schumpeter, many decades ago, singled out as the most important feature of capitalist economies.
The most innovative and valuable companies of our time are the leading “technology platform” companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – a group New York University Professor Scott Galloway simply labels “The Four.” Except for Apple, none of these companies existed before 1990. That they have eclipsed in the public mind – in such a relatively short amount of time – such other tech giants as Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and Intel is a testament to the remarkable acumen of the founders and leaders of The Four, their highly skilled workforces, and to the economy and society that have enabled them to flourish.
In 2011, Sly James won election to his first term as mayor of Kansas City, Mo. Within roughly 48 hours of his victory, he was swept into a meeting room to close a long anticipated deal: the approval of an agreement to make the City of Fountains the site of the first Google Fiber ultra-highspeed broadband network.
But, while the award of Google Fiber represented a unique civic opportunity, it could not change a basic fact: Kansas City was an aging Midwestern metropolis with a lot of very typical urban challenges, including worn-out infrastructure and tightly constrained public budgets.
Since 2016, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) have tried to promote more competition in the mobile market in order to encourage economic growth and promote fairness. In particular, the government agencies have restricted handset subsidies in an effort to lower rates.
The results of these policies have fallen short of expectations. Mobile service prices in Japan have dropped by 10 percent over the past two years, far less than the 25 percent decline in the United States in the same period.
One piece of good news for competition is the impending entry of Rakuten Mobile as the fourth mobile network operator. However, we show in this paper that the restriction on handset subsidies makes it significantly harder for Rakuten to attract customers from the incumbents, since the challenger will be forced to charge customers for the “privilege” of switching to a new network.
日本語の記事：PPI_JapanMobile_Japanese
Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 initiated a profound and transformative new economic innovation. While central bankers and national leaders struggled with a deep financial crisis and stagnation, the fervent demand for iPhones – and the wave of smartphones that followed – was a rare force for growth.
Today, there are five billion mobile broadband subscriptions, an unprecedented rate of adoption for a new technology.1 Use of mobile data is rising at 65 percent per year, a stunning number that shows its revolutionary impact.2
More than just hardware, the smartphone also inaugurated a new era for software developers around the world. Apple’s opening of the App Store in 2008, followed by Android Market (now Google Play) and other app stores, created a way for iOS and Android developers to write mobile applications that could run on smartphones anywhere.
En Español: PPI_ArgentinaAppEconomy_TRANSLATED
Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 initiated a profound and transformative new economic innovation. While central bankers and national leaders struggled with a deep financial crisis and stagnation, the fervent demand for iPhones – and the wave of smartphones that followed – was a rare force for growth.
Today, there are five billion mobile broadband subscriptions, an unprecedented rate of adoption for a new technology.1 Use of mobile data is rising at 65 percent per year, a stunning number that shows its revolutionary impact.2
More than just hardware, the smartphone also inaugurated a new era for software developers around the world. Apple’s opening of the App Store in 2008, followed by Android Market (now Google Play) and other app stores, created a way for iOS and Android developers to write mobile applications that could run on smartphones anywhere.
En Español: PPI_ChileAppEconomy_TRANSLATED-1
