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Big Tech is playing financial games

We know companies like Labels, Amazon, Meta (aka Facebook) and Microsoft follow a lot of things about us. What is not clear is how they earn the money on all the various platforms they have – from search and ecommerce, to social media and cloud computing. This asymmetry is one of the major objections to Big Tech.

Overseers across Atlantic are exploring how platform companies take advantage of the opportunity to create seamless interactions between themselves and their customers or customers. New report from the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose adds a lawsuit against Big Tech, alleging that such companies are also using proprietary information to enforce Securities and Exchange Commission 10-K laws that may require them to provide more financial information. .

Omidyar’s online-funded research project, led by UCL experts Ilan Strauss, Tim O’Reilly, Mariana Mazzucato and Josh Ryan-Collins, examined how the SEC’s disclosure rules harmonized with Big Tech’s monetary business model. Answer: not good. Just as the existing anti-trust laws in the US (which see consumer prices as a measure of fixed power) may not coincide with the digital transition period, existing SEC regulations expose them as insufficient for years to monitor capitalism.

This noise has two components. The first is that although the planets rely on “free” resources to attract more users, and thus create network results that they can monetize on all of their products and services, financial regulators focus more on financial reporting. This allows Big Tech to hide market forces, expand profit margins and expand control of their platforms in unfair ways.

Second, existing SEC regulations regarding the disclosure of shares within various groups such as the Big Tech platforms require a high, hidden value that is in the records that the platform removes, because reporting rules are limited to revenue generating resources. directly. As anyone who understands Big Tech knows, the cost is to combine and generate data revenue.

The current 10K requirement ignores market share, as well as “the key keys that these companies use to monitor the performance of their products and the potential for the future”, according to the report. As the proliferation of public and private records, conference calls and conferences shows, the people who run these companies spend most of their time thinking about “monthly users”, “consumer spending”, “customer purchasing power (CAC)” and “cost”. lifetime. (LTV) “, because metrics control the growth of money.

It is true even though they do not disclose such information to investors on a phase dose. Currently the SEC directive requires companies to define operating units using commercial operations that generate revenue and waste revenue; regularly monitored by the superintendent; and what financial information is available. If such a distribution generates at least 10 per cent of the uncompromising profits / losses, gains or assets of all consolidated shares, the company must provide the directors with additional financial information.

Big Tech is using this warning to avoid spiritism, perhaps even legalism. The well-known protection of the alphabet for not calling YouTube a special feature is that its CEO has not reviewed the results. Does anyone think that the largest movie platform in the world is not controlled by a C-suite? Apple, meanwhile, says the “big money” profits on the App Store “don’t”. Yet the company always mentions how it created new software companies.

In addition, the rules “did not grow with the growth of the company”, as the UCL report states. While all companies with a net worth of $ 100m or more adhere to the same SEC rules, the major giants hold all the shares in the top 100 companies in the US. Big sales lines at Big Tech may be only 1 percent of the total sales of the companies they sell, yet they control their market.

Significantly, the old rules make it increasingly difficult for regulators, investors, customers and citizens to understand the market for professional giants. This makes it impossible to protect markets – or democracy.

So what do we need to do? The authors of this report have a number of ideas, including a valid 10K user profile for users with a limited number of end-of-month users and business users. This is in line with EU regulations on “gatekeepers”, but makes them applicable at the drug level, worldwide.

He also recommends standing investments for any sales that have $ 5bn or more in annual revenue, or profits and losses. The idea is to remove the awareness of managers to decide what should be called a segment. This has been significantly delayed given the company’s economic growth over the past 20 years, both technically and in other sectors.

Finally, the UCL report calls for a SEC technical disclosure mechanism that recognizes the unique business model of digital giants. It’s a good idea. Data is valuable and should be read as follows.

rana.foroohar@ft.com


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