Data Cartels
Data Cartels

Author: Sarah Lamdan

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-11-08

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1503633721

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In our digital world, data is power. Information hoarding businesses reign supreme, using intimidation, aggression, and force to maintain influence and control. Sarah Lamdan brings us into the unregulated underworld of these "data cartels", demonstrating how the entities mining, commodifying, and selling our data and informational resources perpetuate social inequalities and threaten the democratic sharing of knowledge. Just a few companies dominate most of our critical informational resources. Often self-identifying as "data analytics" or "business solutions" operations, they supply the digital lifeblood that flows through the circulatory system of the internet. With their control over data, they can prevent the free flow of information, masterfully exploiting outdated information and privacy laws and curating online information in a way that amplifies digital racism and targets marginalized communities. They can also distribute private information to predatory entities. Alarmingly, everything they're doing is perfectly legal. In this book, Lamdan contends that privatization and tech exceptionalism have prevented us from creating effective legal regulation. This in turn has allowed oversized information oligopolies to coalesce. In addition to specific legal and market-based solutions, Lamdan calls for treating information like a public good and creating digital infrastructure that supports our democratic ideals.

Harboring Data
Harboring Data

Author: Andrea M. Matwyshyn

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009-10-06

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0804772592

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As identity theft and corporate data vulnerability continue to escalate, corporations must protect both the valuable consumer data they collect and their own intangible assets. Both Congress and the states have passed laws to improve practices, but the rate of data loss persists unabated and companies remain slow to invest in information security. Engaged in a bottom-up investigation, Harboring Data reveals the emergent nature of data leakage and vulnerability, as well as some of the areas where our current regulatory frameworks fall short. With insights from leading academics, information security professionals, and other area experts, this original work explores the business, legal, and social dynamics behind corporate information leakage and data breaches. The authors reveal common mistakes companies make, which breaches go unreported despite notification statutes, and surprising weaknesses in the federal laws that regulate financial data privacy, children's data collection, and health data privacy. This forward-looking book will be vital to meeting the increasing information security concerns that new data-intensive business models will have.

The Costs of Connection
The Costs of Connection

Author: Nick Couldry

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1503609758

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

Data Borders
Data Borders

Author: Melissa Villa-Nicholas

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-07-11

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0520386078

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Data Borders investigates entrenched and emerging borderland technology that ensnares all people in an intimate web of surveillance where data resides and defines citizenship. Detailing the new trend of biologically mapping undocumented people through biotechnologies, Melissa Villa-Nicholas shows how surreptitious monitoring of Latinx immigrants is the focus of and driving force behind Silicon Valley's growing industry within defense technology manufacturing. Villa-Nicholas reveals a murky network that gathers data on marginalized communities for purposes of exploitation and control that implicates law enforcement, border patrol, and ICE, but that also pulls in public workers and the general public, often without their knowledge or consent. Enriched by interviews of Latinx immigrants living in the borderlands who describe their daily use of technology and their caution around surveillance, this book argues that in order to move beyond a heavily surveilled state that dehumanizes both immigrants and citizens, we must first understand how our data is being collected, aggregated, correlated, and weaponized with artificial intelligence and then push for immigrant and citizen information privacy rights along the border and throughout the United States.

How Do Cartels Operate?
How Do Cartels Operate?

Author: Joseph Emmett Harrington

Publisher: Now Publishers Inc

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1933019409

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This paper distills and organizes facts about cartels from about 20 European Commission decisions over 2000-2004. It describes the properties of a collusive outcome in terms of the setting of price and a market allocation, monitoring of agreements with respect to price but more importantly sales, punishment methods for enforcing an agreement and also the use of buy-backs to compensate cartel members, methods for responding to external disruptions from non-cartel suppliers and handling over-zealous sales representatives, and operational procedures in terms of the frequency of meetings and the cartel's organizational structure.

Regulating Competition
Regulating Competition

Author: Susanna Fellman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 131769399X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cartels, trusts and agreements to reduce competition between firms have existed for centuries, but became particularly prevalent toward the end of the 19th century. In the mid-20th century governments began to use so called ‘cartel registers’ to monitor and regulate their behaviour. This book provides cases studies from more than a dozen countries to examine the emergence, application and eventual decline of this form of regulation. Beginning with a comparison of the attitudes to regulation that led to monitoring, rather than prohibiting cartels, this book examines the international studies on cartels undertaken by the League of Nations before World War II. This is followed by a series of studies on the context of the registers, including the international context of the European Union, and the importance of lobby groups in shaping regulatory outcomes, using Finland as an example. Section two provides a broad international comparison of several countries’ registers, with individual studies on Norway, Australia, Japan, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. After examining the impact of registration on business behaviour in the insurance industry, this book concludes with an overview of the lessons to be learnt from 20th century efforts to regulate competition. With a foreword by Harm Schroter, this book outlines the rise and fall of a system that allowed nations to tailor their approach to regulating competition to their individual circumstances whilst also responding to the pressures of globalisation that emerged after the Second World War. This book is suitable for those who are interested in and study economic history, international economics and business history.

Macroeconomic Effects of Market Structure Distortions: Evidence from French Cartels
Macroeconomic Effects of Market Structure Distortions: Evidence from French Cartels

Author: Flavien Moreau

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2022-05-27

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

We provide systematic evidence on cartels’ characteristics, using novel data on cases investigated by the French Competition Authority. These practices are widely spread across sectors and cartel members are typically among the top firms in their industries. In a model with heterogeneous firms and collusion, cartels amplify misallocation by charging supracompetitive markups. Breaking down French cartels would increase aggregate productivity by 2%, welfare by 3.5%, bringing the economy 37% closer to the efficient frontier. These numbers shed light on the aggregate importance of collusion.

Empirical Studies with New German Firm Level Data from Official Statistics
Empirical Studies with New German Firm Level Data from Official Statistics

Author: Anja Malchin

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 3110510286

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since 2001 the Statistical Offices in Germany offer access to micro level panel data that linked information from various waves of a survey over time. These panel data enormously extended the research potential of data from official statistics by allowing dynamic analyses and control for unobserved heterogeneity via panel econometric methods. A second generation of data sets which became available recently has an even higher research potential. These new data combine information for firms gathered in different surveys (or from external sources) that could not be analyzed jointly before. Merging firm level data from different surveys to construct data sets that cover information on a wider range of variables than the ones collected in any of these surveys, one at a time, is the basic idea of the project AFiD. AFiD is an acronym for the German Amtliche Firmendaten fr Deutschland (official firm data for Germany). The papers in this issue present first results generated with this new type of firm level data and discussions.

Regulating Cartels in India
Regulating Cartels in India

Author: Sudhanshu Kumar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-23

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1000800539

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book presents a comprehensive assessment of anti-cartel enforcement and investigative procedures in India. It makes a case for enhanced sanctions for cartel conduct in India. Cartels are considered the most pernicious violation of competition law, referred to as "cancer to the free market economy". While competition laws in most jurisdictions prescribe strict sanctions against cartels, Indian Competition Law provides only civil penalties, with an upper ceiling for proven cartel conduct. This volume assesses the effectiveness of anti-cartel enforcement of the Competition Commission of India (CCI). It explores investigative procedures of the CCI through multiple qualitative and quantitative indicators and the extent to which enforcement of anti-cartel laws in India has led to cartel deterrence. Further, it also examines the priorities and processes of the CCI in terms of anti-cartel enforcement, their sanctioning mechanism and their dependency of computation of penalty on varied factors. Featuring detailed case law studies and engaging data, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers of law and legal studies, competition law, corporate law, intellectual property law, and business law.

A Step Ahead
A Step Ahead

Author: Martha Martinez Licetti

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2017-06-29

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1464809461

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sustainable economic development has played a major role in the decline of global poverty in the past two decades. There is no doubt that competitive markets are key drivers of economic growth and productivity. They are also valuable channels for consumer welfare. Competition policy is a powerful tool for complementing efforts to alleviate poverty and bring about shared prosperity. An effective competition policy involves measures that enable contestability and firm entry and rivalry, while ensuring the enforcement of antitrust laws and state aid control. Governments from emerging and developing economies are increasingly requesting pragmatic solutions for effective competition policy implementation, as well as recommendations for pro-competitive sectoral policies. A Step Ahead: Competition Policy for Shared Prosperity and Inclusive Growth puts forward a research agenda that advocates the importance of market competition, effective market regulation, and competition policies for achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity in emerging and developing economies. It is the result of a global partnership and shared commitment between the World Bank Group and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Part I of the book brings together existing empirical evidence on the benefits of competition for household welfare. It covers the elimination of anticompetitive practices and regulations that restrict competition in key markets and highlights the effects of competition on small producers and employment. Part II of the book focuses on the distributional effects of competition policies and how enforcement can be better aligned with shared prosperity goals.