In the market for attention?

Often companies are trying to shift paradigms you didn't even know existed!

One of my resolutions for the new year has been to binge-watch less. Unfortunately, I am typing out this column sandwiched between two episodes of Cobra Kai. During a midnight binge earlier last week, I had gone on for so long that I got one of those prompts that asked me if I was still watching.

Every time I have got the prompt, a small part of me reflects on how Netflix is bad for my sleep cycle. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has (in)famously said that the app competes with sleep. While the statement sounds like a truism, it is an excellent starting point to learn about a basic tenet of how companies approach antitrust cases.

Let me explain. To prove that a business is too big and needs to be subject to antitrust action, complaints need to prove two things. First, that the company is dominant in a market; second, that the dominance has been abused to gain an advantage in a different market.

A crucial part of claiming that a business is dominant in a market is defining the market itself. I find there exists a sort of a tug of war in how a market is defined.

Depending on how you look, businesses can appear smaller or bigger. For instance, a departmental store is a dominant player if you define the market as physically present store. For context, it is the only store operating in that area, so it enjoys the lion’s share of the customer base. On the flip side, it has close to no market share if your relevant market is departmental stores (online and physical) across India.

If you examine the complaints that the CCI makes public, it is evident that companies like to claim that they are in a big market and have loads of competition. A platform like WhatsApp can argue that it is in the market for attention. According to that logic, WhatsApp competes with Signal and Telegram for market share. It also competes with companies like Netflix and Prime Video and looks like a smaller player in comparison. On the flip side, the complaint can narrow down the market and claim that WhatsApp operates in the market for Over-The-Top (OTT) messaging apps through smartphones.

Sometimes relevant markets can sound flimsy; other times, they can be genuinely hard to narrow down. For example, consider Amazon. In addition to being a retailer, it is a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. It is a task to pin a business like this one to a single market and prove dominance.

So the next time you hear a company is in the market for attention, time, and so on, it is worth taking a step back and examining the truism. It might just be trying to shift paradigms that you did not know existed!

The writer is a policy analyst working on emerging technologies. He tweets @thesethist

Tech-Tonic is a monthly look-in at all the happenings around the digital world, both big and small.