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What Antitrust and Science Fiction Have in Common

By Hanno Kaiser

Merger antitrust is in the business of making predictions about the near future. Market definition in particular rests on the premise that product markets today will be reasonably similar to product markets tomorrow, or else it makes little sense to speculate about effects in the post merger world. Rapid innovation makes this exercise all the more challenging, as discussed in a recent post. Antitrust lawyers are not alone in that predicament. Charles Stross, one of my favorite SF writers, recently remarked on his blog:

Here, in a nutshell, is why writing near-future SF has become so difficult. Say you want to set a story 30 years out, and as part of your world-building exercise you want to work out what technologies will be in widespread use by the time of the story. Back in 1900 to 1950 you could do so with a fair degree of accuracy; pick a couple of embryonic technologies and assume they’ll be widespread (automobiles, aircraft, television): maybe throw in a couple of wildcards for good measure (wrist-watch telephones), and you’re there. But today, that 30-year window is inaccessible. Even a 15-year horizon is pushing it. Something new could come along tomorrow and overrun the entire developed world before 2023.

SF, of course, is not really about predicting the future. If anything, it is about predicting the present. In other words, what we predict for the future tells us more about our present state of the world than about any future state of the world. Much of 1950s and 1960s SF is ludicrous in its technological predictions (where’s my jetpack?), however, it speaks volumes about pre-Chernobyl, pre-global warming technological optimism. The same can be said for antitrust opinions. Was Philadelphia National Bank right in predicting a tendency towards concentration? How about Von’s Grocery? As predictions of the future, those opinions are of questionable value. As diagnoses of the then present state of the legal hive mind, however, they are uncanny.

Given that antitrust and SF are both in the future business, we might usefully apply SF genre categories to antitrust decisions! Here are my picks.

• Hard SF: U.S. v. Oracle; FTC v. Staples
• Soft and Social SF: U.S. v. Brown University; Brown Shoe v. U.S.
• Cyberpunk: U.S. v. Microsoft
• Time Travel: FTC v. WholeFoods
• Alternate history: Hoffman-La Roche v. Empagran
• Military SF: U.S. v. Lockheed Martin Corp. (Complaint)

Technorati Tags: antitrust, science fiction

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).