See our commentary, with Michael Mandel, in today’s Wall Street Journal: Robots Will Save the Economy.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai gives speech announcing new approach to Internet regulation, in Washington, D.C., April 26, 2017.

Here’s our latest in Forbes . . . Ajit Pai’s Welcome Return to Internet Innovation:

“Yesterday, Ajit Pai, the new Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, announced a roll back of the Obama administration’s aggressive regulatory approach to the Internet, adopted in early 2015. This afternoon, Pai will release the text of the proposed rule-making, which will launch several months of public comment.

“In yesterday’s speech, Pai emphasized the Internet’s historic success, based on a bipartisan approach adopted in the Clinton administration, which elevated innovation over regulation by consciously rejecting the old telephone rules for the emerging digital economy:

Under this framework, a free and open Internet flourished. Under this framework, America’s Internet economy produced the world’s most successful online companies: Google, Facebook, and Netflix, just to name a few. Under this framework, the private sector invested about $1.5 trillion to build the networks that gave people high-speed access to the Internet. And under this framework, consumers benefited from unparalleled innovation. But two years ago, the federal government’s approach suddenly changed.

continue reading . . .

Here is video of a presentation from last October’s Dawn or Doom technology conference at Purdue University, where I previewed the Coming Productivity Boom research.

We’re excited to share this new research, conducted with Michael Mandel, and commissioned by the Technology CEO Council. Here’s the Executive Summary:

See our latest at Forbes: How the Internet Will Become the ‘Exanet’

Today’s Internet has transformed media and delivered prodigious value to consumers, in entertainment, ecommerce, and personal productivity.

Yet the next waves of the Internet will extend to new industries in the physical world, delivering a far greater variety of services and requiring connectivity that is even faster, more ubiquitous, and more robust than today. To drive and accommodate this information embrace by the real economy, we’ll need something bigger and better than the Internet. We’ll need the “exanet.”

In 2016, global Internet traffic likely topped 1,000 exabytes. A thousand exabytes equals one zettabyte (ZB), or a billion trillion (10²¹) bytes, which is roughly 114 million years of high-definition video. Over the last 20 years, since the dawn of the dot-com era in 1996, monthly Internet traffic has grown around 90 million-fold. continue reading . . .

Tomorrow, a host of Silicon Valley firms will visit Trump Tower for a meeting with the President-elect. Last week, AT&T and Time Warner visited Capitol Hill to testify about their proposed merger. These diverse companies build lots of things, from software to networks to original content, but they also have one thing in common. Increasingly they are all vying for bigger chunks of the video market, and in the process they are creating an entirely new media universe.

Too often when policymakers look at these companies, individually or in small sets, they see only what it right in front of them, rigidly defined and static, or even stereotypes of what these companies were a generation ago. But these companies — and the markets in which they play — are changing every day.

Several years ago, in a report called “Life After Television,” we noted that the YouTube and Netflix phenomena were only just the most obvious and earliest manifestations of the Web video revolution. We noted that, yes, the more abundant bandwidth of cable TV and then satellite had been improving the video market for years, but that even bigger changes were coming. This process, we said, would be intense, and messy, and often exhilarating.

Here is the graphic we used to describe, in simplified form, the overlapping activities of firms competing in the video market, often approaching from very different angles and starting points.

Graphic describing simplified video value chain, circa 2014, in Life After Television.

The firms pictured are still at the center of the new media tussle. But others have joined the fray, and the battlefield is constantly shifting. Facebook, for example, was not even on our 2014 graphic, but in the subsequent two years it has become a giant player in the Web video (and thus advertising) market. At the time of our report, only Comcast covered the full spectrum, from connectivity to content. But in the meantime Verizon added content via its purchases of AOL and Yahoo, and AT&T is adding content with its Time Warner acquisition. Netflix and Amazon have only expanded as award-winning  production houses of original content. Google and Apple, of course, continue to approach video with distinct business models — Google via advertising and the Web, Apple via a la carte and apps — but each remains a powerful player. And we are still only, perhaps, at the end of the beginning of this media reshuffling.

This new media world is emblematic of an even larger phenomenon of dynamic competition across the technology landscape. I described this even wider playing field in another report called “Digital Dynamism: Competition in the Internet Ecosystem,” which illustrated the multidimensionality of the market. This new market was characterized by intensive innovation, product differentiation, and cascades of competitive and complementary products and services.

There is both more competition, and more complementarity, than ever before. Which is why policymakers or pundits who are quick to shout “monopoly” in any of these contexts is almost surely wrong. Yes, some of these firms have large market shares in small portions of this overall digital world, but these share are often gained through real innovation, and even then they are often fleeting. These markets are way too fluid to assume anyone has a lock on any part of it, let alone a dominant position overall. So a merger of, say, AT&T and Time Warner, might to some look like “consolidation,” when in fact it potentially provides highly innovative and beneficial new competition in the online advertising business, where at the moment Google and Facebook are the biggest players.

It’s way too early to predict where all this will end up, let alone to dictate and end game.

On Wednesday, the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee will take up AT&T’s pending acquisition of Time Warner (the owner of HBO and TBS, not the cable company). Congress has no direct role in merger approval, but the hearing will no doubt highlight the arguments for and against the merger that the Department of Justice, and possibly the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), will hear next year.

As odd as it may sound, I think the AT&T-TWX alliance is chiefly a 5G wireless infrastructure story. Time Warner, combined with DirecTV, will provide a huge amount of popular video content to act as a killer app for a new nationwide wireless infrastructure, not only delivering video to proliferating mobile devices but also competing with cable for residential TV and broadband subscribers.

While video may be the killer app, this 5G wireless network will also serve as the strategic platform for most of the rest of the economy, from connected and autonomous cars to health care to the retail and industrial Internet of Things (IoT). For an incoming administration focused on infrastructure and reviving the lagging sectors of our economy, 5G is attractive. It offers not only tens of billions of dollars of direct infrastructure investment and jobs (at no cost to taxpayers) but also a means to boost productivity and incomes in industries that so far have been left out of the information revolution.

Much of the opposition to the deal takes the vague and familiar form of big-is-bad. Among specific critiques of the deal, however, the most prominent is opposition to “zero rating.” Zero rating, or free data, is the practice of content firms paying for the data consumption of their viewers or listeners. Free data comes in different forms — some are like 1-800 toll-free numbers, other exempt sponsored content from data limits.

Critics worry that AT&T, like Comcast before it, will use zero rating to favor some content over other content, and the outgoing FCC is trying to pick a fight. Last week, AT&T launched its new DirecTV Now service, which delivers bundles of cable-like video channels over the internet and which won’t count against users’ AT&T data limits. You’d think the FCC would be thrilled with this new, attractively-priced, competitive offering. Yet the FCC promptly hit AT&T (and Verizon, which has a similar service) with letters skeptical of their free data programs.

The FCC’s attack on free data is probably legally indefensible, but it is also economically unsound. Opposition to zero rating is based on zero-sum fallacies, where one party’s gain necessarily means another party’s loss. If HBO or ESPN or Netflix or NBC or Spotify subsidize your consumption of their content, then you or other content firms must somehow lose, or so the theory goes.

But the opposite is true. What if most everyone can get more of what they want? This is the way innovation works. In competitive markets like mobile broadband and digital content, free data is additive. It’s positive-sum. By allowing content firms to contribute to the economic equation where they see a benefit, it promotes the consumption of more total data by consumers, their ability to access more third-party non-zero-rated content, and the ability to build faster networks. It’s a win-win-win for consumers, ISPs, and content providers.

Free data is likely to be a widely used business model for connected cars, health care and educational apps, and the Internet of Things. And so proscribing the use of this commonplace business model would not only hurt digital content but also the emerging apps and services we are planning to build using 5G networks.

There’s lots more to say on these topics, but opposing a merger based on refusing free data for consumers is unlikely to be a winning argument.

USA Today reports that:

Google Fiber is halting its rollout in 10 cities and laying off staff as its chief executive Craig Barratt steps down, dealing a major setback to the Internet giant’s ambitions of blanketing the nation in super-speedy Internet.

Several years ago, Google Fiber was the darling of both Silicon Valley and most of Washington’s tech policy wonks. It was supposed to bring “gigabit speeds” to supposedly woefully underserved American consumers. The facts were more complicated. It turned out existing broadband firms were already investing hundreds of billions of dollars in wired and wireless broadband, and the U.S. topped the world rankings in the most important measures of Internet performance. Google Fiber’s demise, or pause, or whatever it turns out to be, shows that large scale infrastructure projects are hard. And expensive. And competitive. Especially when deploying fast-changing technologies. And especially when the costs of regulation are rising.

Which points to an ironic facet of this news. At the Wall Street Journal‘s annual WSJ.D conference yesterday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson plainly acknowledged Google’s victory in the biggest tech policy debate of the last 15 years: “On neutrality. You guys from Google, you won. It’s done.” Yet the sad irony is that Google’s “win” on policy — the imposition in 2015 of old and voluminous monopoly telephone rules onto modern broadband — made Google’s own broadband deployment efforts even more difficult. We long said that Title II regulation would make broadband less competitive, and Google’s exit of the business is evidence of this effect.

What regulation taketh in terms of innovation and investment, however, technology can in some significant portion often give back. Enter 5G wireless.

Fifth generation wireless, or 5G, is a suite of technologies that will be the foundation of the Internet, and of most of the economy, for the next 20 years. It includes more advanced air interface protocols, new “software defined” network architectures, use of huge new swaths of high-frequency spectrum, and deployment of millions of small cells, all of which will dramatically expand coverage and capacity. But not just for mobile. 5G will also power connected cars and the Internet of Things. It could even become a real competitive offering for fixed residential broadband, delivering both interactive Web video and TV-like high-definition video the way only cable and fiber-to-the-home do today.

It is this facet of 5G that AT&T and Time Warner have emphasized over the last few days since announcing the $85-billion merger of the two firms. Verizon and AT&T over the last decade have built fiber networks into neighborhoods where it made financial sense. But as Google learned the hard way, the business case for fiber is tough even in densely populated urban or suburban areas, let alone exurbs or rural communities. (Google does deserve credit for the progress it made in prying open the local regulatory bottlenecks that too often discourage broadband deployment — things like burdensome infrastructure permitting and local cable franchise rules. Larger broadband firms are now taking advantage of these beneficial bottleneck openings to lay more fiber deeper into communities and neighborhoods across the country.)

A key component of 5G is the opening up of huge amounts of spectrum, at far higher frequencies than are used today for mobile wireless. Today’s mobile devices send and receive signals mostly in the 1-2 gigahertz range. Most Wi-Fi signals are in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. But 5G will make use of bands in the 20, 30, and even 70 GHz range. These higher frequencies contain large blocks of mostly unused bandwidth that can transmit more data far faster than today’s mobile cell networks. In a neighborhood setting, fiber-connected small cells could blanket not only hundreds of home receivers but also thousands of mobile devices. But bringing fiber to the neighborhood is far more cost-effective than taking it all the way into the home.

5G could be powerful enough to deliver a video service on par with cable TV/broadband. Satellite will still have an important role for high definition TV, but 5G can overcome satellite’s limited capacity for interactivity (given the latency incurred over the 46,000-mile round trip to space and back).

This new competitive broadband service might be enough to push the AT&T-TW partnership over the line with regulators. And it should also serve as a warning to future market meddlers at the FCC: technology is almost always far more powerful, and pro-consumer, than clever attempts to shape yesterday’s markets.

An underreported story of the last two decades is the sharp decline in the number of publicly traded U.S. firms. In 1996, U.S. stock markets boasted 7,322 listed firms. By 2015, however, that number had dropped by more than half, to 3,200. If we adjust for population, the U.S. had 2.2 public firms per hundred thousand people in 1975, but today that number has fallen to 1.1 public firms per hundred thousand people. The peak in 1996 was 2.7 public firms per hundred thousand.

There’s been an initial public offering (IPO) winter for the last 15 years.  We know that Sarbanes-Oxley, the set of post-Enron financial regulations enacted in 2002, substantially boosted compliance burdens for public companies and, at the margin, discouraged listing publicly. But the drop in total public listings began before Sarbox and was in fact coincident with the late-1990s boom of technology IPOs. The mid-1990s peak of tech IPOs almost assuredly skews the chart, and yet the U.S. still has fewer public firms today than it did 40 years ago.

So I still have more questions than answers. For example:

Over the past few decades, the rate of new businesses formed in the U.S. has fallen. Is the plunge in the number of public firms partly a result of the slowing rate of net business starts? Or perhaps just the reverse: Is reduced new firm formation a function of a less healthy public equity market?

Does this represent a benign shift in the way companies are financed? In other words, are private markets – bank loans, venture capital, private equity – now so large and sophisticated that they can replace and compensate for shrinking public markets? Or are weaker public markets starving businesses of funding?

Is the drop a function of slower economic growth overall? Or is it a cause of slower growth? In a similar vein, is the drop a cause or effect of the recent productivity plunge?

Are there a significant number of foreign firms that used to be listed on U.S. stock markets now listed on their home markets?

Is the reduced number of public firms a result of a higher rate of mergers and acquisitions (M&A)? And if so, is higher M&A activity a secular shift in industrial organization? Or is it a response to policies that encourage M&A and discourage firm independence?

Does the knowledge economy, which rewards network effects and scale economies, tend toward a smaller number of winner-take-all firms? In a distinct but related phenomenon, might modern communications tools allow firms to more efficiently integrate than was previously possible? Or might these network and scale effects produce both winner-take-all mega-firms (Apple, Google) and also lots of complementary firms (start-up app developers, graphic designers, etc.), with the problem lying elsewhere?

Are private firms better at investing and innovating for the long term, given the regulatory incentives faced by public firms and investors to focus on the short term? (Sarbox and other “fair disclosure” [FD] rules, for example, are designed to increase transparency and provide a level information playing field for all investors. But in practice the FD paradigm concentrates information releases into discrete quarterly announcements. It thus may contribute to the dreaded “short-termism” – a myopic focus on next month’s earnings rather than long term innovation. Because real information is less available, it also encourages short-term quantitative computer trading over fundamental analysis and long-term investing.) If so, private firms may be a solution to the information desert afflicting public markets.

Is the public firm reduction concentrated in particular industries – manufacturing, retail, health care, finance, technology, etc.? Or is it spread evenly across industries?

Does globalization mean that former U.S. firms now spread around the world just aren’t replaced by domestic firms? The timing with the rise of China suggests perhaps this is a factor. And yet the world economy is not zero sum. Why couldn’t globalization, which allows for more specialization and growth, allow new types of American firms to replace the ones that “moved” abroad?

Is the tax code an important factor? For example, publicly traded firms fell after the 1986 tax reform (after which much income reporting was shifted away from corporate income and toward individual income), rose after the 1993 tax increase, and then fell again after the 1997 capital gains tax reduction. In addition, the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35% has, over time, become the highest in the developed world. We know U.S. firms keep several trillion dollars in retained earnings overseas because they can’t bring it home. Can corporate inversions, in which U.S. firms move abroad, at least notionally, often to escape punitive taxes, explain a significant part of the phenomenon?

How do fewer public firms affect R&D investment and employment? Is the fall in the labor force participation rate related?

What does the investment environment look like in a world of reduced public equity vehicles? How do equity markets behave with fewer domestic public firms but many more investors? How does this change affect individual retail investors, who don’t have much access to private markets, versus sophisticated investors who enjoy many more options, such as venture capital, private equity, M&A, and private credit?

The most comprehensive treatment of the topic comes from a paper by Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin, and Roni Michaely. They attempt to tease out some, but not all, of these questions and focus especially on the market concentration issue. They find that “product market concentration has increased across most industries,” profits have increased because of “increased market power,” and “competition could have been fading over time.”

A new report from the White House Council of Economic Advisors picks up this theme and laments higher firm concentration and less competition in the U.S. economy. The CEA says more rigorous antitrust enforcement and agency specific regulation could help promote competition.

And yet the CEA report ignores perhaps the most important factor in falling competition: regulation itself. Dodd-Frank has made the big banks bigger and reduced the number of small community banks. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) accelerated the consolidation of hospitals, clinics, and other health care providers into massive health care systems. The ACA has also reduced product and supplier choice, and boosted premiums, in the health insurance market. Washington is trying its best to shut down private colleges and other non-traditional educational offerings. Its “war on coal” has been successful at killing coal companies and thus reducing energy competition. And the Federal Communications Commission’s new Title II net neutrality rules – which were designed for a monopoly industry! – are likely to discourage new entrants into the wired and wireless broadband arena. I could go on.

If Washington had set out to frustrate entrepreneurship, reduce competition, and discourage public equity financing, it would have enacted policies much like the ones of the last 15 years. The entire apparatus of regulation and taxation, taken as a whole, has slowed the economy and thus the diminished the possibilities for smaller competitive firms to get started, expand, and perhaps go public.

No one knows what the “correct” number of public firms is. But we’d get a much better picture of that number by freeing competitors to compete and allowing the market to fund firms with the best mix of financing.

__________________

This post originally appeared at the U.S. Chamber Foundation blog – https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/blog/post/what-s-cause-and-effect-plummeting-public-firms.

I’ve been updating this chart for too many years now. I think it explains a lot.

As a native Hoosier, born in La Porte, now living in Zionsville, I feel a responsibility to share my views on the upcoming primary between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

The nation is at a crucial inflection point – on the economy, the culture, and foreign affairs. As for the Republican Party, it will be running against a very weak Democratic candidate, and it has a historic opportunity to change the trajectory of the economy and right the dysfunction in Washington. If you are a Republican, or an independent or Democrat who’s dissatisfied with the nation’s current path, this is a big decision. The bottom line is that Ted Cruz would likely win in the fall, while Donald Trump would almost certainly lose in a historic wipeout. Even if Trump were to win, however, he would continue, not revise, Washington’s harmful policy path.

A few considerations:

1. If Indiana votes for Cruz, the nomination will be decided at the Cleveland convention in July. In that scenario, Cruz likely wins the nomination – and likely wins in November. Trump is a historically unpopular candidate beyond his narrow band of supporters. He is today losing to Hillary Clinton in Utah – UTAH! – the reddest of red states. Even his home-state New York victory was unimpressive. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders each got more votes last week in New York than did Trump. Ted Cruz got more votes in Wisconsin than Trump got in giant New York. The idea that Trump puts New York and other blue states in play is thus silly. And he could easily lose traditionally Republican states – a red/blue wipeout. Voters who want to win in the fall should not succumb to the false idea that this nomination is over. Far from it.

2. Cruz has the best pro-growth economic agenda in decades (watch this interview on CNBC). The U.S. economy is stagnating under the weight of heavy taxation and regulation and misguided monetary policy. Cruz’s two chief priorities are (1) replacing the current abominable tax code with a simple flat tax and (2) repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a health system that’s personal, portable, innovative, and affordable – one that’s better for patients and doctors, not for bureaucrats. Combined with a dramatic shrinking of the regulatory state and a sane monetary policy, Cruz’s agenda would likely unleash waves of growth similar to, or even surpassing, the two decade boom of the 1980s and ’90s.

3. Cruz is razor sharp and principled and has effectively challenged Washington’s run-away spending and regulation. He’s selected an equally sharp running mate in Carly Fiorina, a technology executive who understands the economy, is a terrific communicator, and offers a bright and effective contrast with the Democratic nominee.

4. Trump, on the other hand, supports Washington’s run-away spending, taxation, and regulation. He supports single-payer government health care and, to the extent he knows or cares, supports much of the Democratic agenda. If implemented, his views on international trade could crash the economy. Trump is not a serious person. He is a showman without substance. To the extent he believes in anything beyond himself, he’s a big-government liberal progressive.¹

5. Some say Trump is a good businessman, but he’s a good businessman in the sense that Kim Kardashian is a good businesswoman. They are geniuses at grabbing attention with ridiculous and prurient stunts and turning celebrity into dollars. But celebrity is not leadership. Attention-grabbing stunts do not unite people to do big and important things. Any president by definition already has the world’s attention. It’s what you DO with that attention that matters. And Donald Trump has no clue what to do.

6. Voters should not reward dangerously juvenile behavior. Donald Trump insults women, minorities, and disabled people. When challenged, he calls people names and makes fun of their appearances. He rambles on about personalities and inane topics. Why? Because he has no clue about anything of substance. He dissembles (lies) almost constantly – pathologically, in fact. To the extent he can form a declarative sentence, he’ll switch positions three times in five minutes, and does so day after day. He won’t debate on substance because he knows he’ll get clobbered. Most politicians are of course ambitious and self-involved. But the best among them at least aspire to do important things. For Trump, he is that important thing. (For Cruz, surely an ambitious person, those things are reviving the economy, cleansing a corrupt Washington, D.C., and restoring the Constitution.) For Trump, there is nothing beyond himself. His entire life is an exercise in ego inflation. This is Trump’s ultimate self-aggrandizing confidence game. He’s trying to fool people into giving him more fame than ever. Trump is a vile, vain, insubstantial, insecure, dishonest, divisive, dangerously ignorant con artist.

7. Some tactical considerations. If you are interested in winning in the fall, vote Cruz. If you don’t like Trump and think you like John Kasich, I’d suggest you should still vote Cruz. Only two people can win the GOP nomination – Cruz or Trump. A vote for Kasich is thus a vote for Trump.

8. Read this terrific column by George Will, one of our most sober and smartest defenders of liberty. Two excerpts:

“Ted Cruz’s announcement of his preferred running mate has enhanced the nomination process by giving voters pertinent information. They already know the only important thing about Trump’s choice: His running mate will be unqualified for high office because he or she will think Trump is qualified . . . .”

“Trump would be the most unpopular nominee ever, unable to even come close to Mitt Romney’s insufficient support among women, minorities and young people. In losing disastrously, Trump probably would create down-ballot carnage sufficient to end even Republican control of the House.”

Let’s finish on a happy note. Despite the bizarre and frustrating election season, the fact is we still have a very good shot to right the American ship . . . If Indiana does the right thing on Tuesday.

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¹ I corrected this description to big government “progressive” because of Trump’s authoritarian views on free speech, for example, and other Constitutional and natural liberties.

* Here are my previous ramblings on the genesis of the Trump phenomenon – “My Two Cents on Trumpism.”

** UPDATE: This story from Tuesday, May 3 – “Trump accuses Cruz’s father of helping JFK’s assassin” – reinforces my point about the vast gulf between Donald Trump and reality. He is, as I wrote above, pathological. 

The Supreme Court today said it will hear the Apple-Samsung dispute over the “total profits” question in design patent cases. Specifically, the Court said it will address only question 2 from the cert petition:

Where a design patent is applied to only a component of a product, should an award of infringer’s profits be limited to those profits attributable to the component?

This is good news. It means the Court recognizes patent law from the 1800s often does not work in the modern high-tech economy. The Court can help clarify the law so we get more real innovation and less clever, predatory litigation. The patent reformation continues.

We wrote about the case here: Will Apple-Samsung Case Help Clarify Patent Law?