
Jim Bessen’s new guide examines how tech isn’t at all times the good disruptor its advocates declare
Software program is an earthquake of innovation, as new variations developed by upstart corporations topple business leaders and remake the expertise panorama. That’s the favored story.
It’s fallacious. Or at greatest, it’s incomplete.

So says Jim Bessen in his newest guide, The New Goliaths: How Companies Use Software program to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale College Press, 2022). Bessen, a College of Legislation lecturer and government director of LAW’s Know-how & Coverage Analysis Initiative, argues that in business after business, huge corporations have developed their very own software program to handle the varied sides of their enterprise—and suppress the competitors, fostering financial inequality within the course of. Within the final quarter century, an organization’s probability to knock down the main agency in its business has halved, Bessen says.
“We have a tendency to consider expertise as selling innovation that disrupts industries and brings main social advantages,” he tells BU As we speak. “That also occurs, however now expertise can be getting used to suppress disruption, to permit dominant companies to change into more and more dominant. Too usually, expertise at this time is getting used to steal enterprise from different companies reasonably than to extend the widespread good. This paradigm shift poses a problem to the dynamism and long-run well being of our economic system.”
Bessen’s guide dissects examples from main banks, insurers, and drug makers to Walmart, Google, and Fb. He discusses his findings with BU As we speak.
Q&A
with Jim Bessen
BU As we speak: Might you outline “proprietary software program” in layperson phrases and clarify why it has hampered innovation?
Bessen: Folks usually consider software program as a prepackaged, standardized product that may be purchased shrink-wrapped or downloaded. However the proprietary software program my guide focuses on is one thing completely different. These are massive, custom-built techniques designed to deal with the particular wants of a person agency. These techniques generally price billions of {dollars} and sometimes embrace the acquisition of huge quantities of information, laptop tools, and organizational modifications. This expertise is often not bought or licensed, however is used to extend the agency’s aggressive benefit.
BU As we speak: From the persevering with power of the job market, which has stunned economists, to our COVID-19 vaccines, that are higher than these of a number of different nations, might it’s argued that we haven’t but suffered significantly from entrenched business leaders and stifled innovation?
Bessen: The considerations I elevate are about long-term developments that may not be apparent from present occasions. Within the quick run, the economic system goes up and it goes down, however developments in innovation and productiveness have a big affect on how we’ll fare in 10 or 20 years. And right here the information just isn’t so good. Productiveness—the quantity of output produced for a given quantity of labor and different inputs—has been rising far more slowly than prior to now. This locations a restrict on our future incomes.
Extra concretely, progressive start-ups have been rising far more slowly—it takes them longer to lift funds and it takes them longer to go public or to be acquired. Which means whereas we nonetheless will see innovation, it tends to be much less, diminishing our future financial prospects.
We have a tendency to consider expertise as selling innovation that disrupts industries and brings main social advantages. That also occurs, however now expertise can be getting used to suppress disruption.
BU As we speak: What insurance policies would possibly assist handle this innovation drawback and the way would they be useful?
The big-scale proprietary applied sciences that dominant companies use deliver actual worth to shoppers. Because of this, the objective shouldn’t be to interrupt up massive, highly effective companies, as some have argued. As an alternative, we have to consider methods to encourage or compel them to make elements of their techniques and knowledge obtainable to others, particularly progressive smaller companies. This may permit progressive corporations to develop and it’ll improve competitors.
An instance of that is Amazon Internet Companies, the primary “cloud” service. With the intention to meet the IT calls for for its e-commerce web sites, Amazon developed extremely subtle IT infrastructure that might deal with very excessive ranges of transactions. By the mid-2000s, they realized that this IT functionality represented an necessary aggressive benefit. However as an alternative of clinging tightly to this proprietary benefit, Amazon selected to supply their infrastructure to the general public for a payment. The smallest corporations can now entry these extremely superior capabilities, and analysis has proven it permits them to be considerably extra productive. Amazon’s actions created at this time’s cloud business; it additionally introduced great earnings to Amazon, and it has helped enhance our mixture productiveness.
Authorities coverage can encourage extra corporations to make their proprietary applied sciences extra broadly obtainable. One instrument is antitrust enforcement. Previously, antitrust authorities have inspired or required dominant companies to license their patents and applied sciences. In a single well-known instance, at a time when software program was included with laptop {hardware} without cost, the federal government coaxed IBM to promote its software program individually from its {hardware}. This “unbundling” permitted the rise of a big, impartial software program business. It additionally proved extremely worthwhile to IBM and useful to society.
One other set of insurance policies pertains to worker mobility. One necessary manner that new expertise has unfold is by way of the information of people that work with it. Latest developments concerning commerce secret regulation and worker noncompete agreements, nonetheless, have made it harder for workers to take jobs at different companies the place their information is perhaps precious. Slowing the unfold of information makes the economic system much less dynamic.