The Growing Nostalgia for Past Regulatory Misadventures and the Risk of Repeating These Mistakes with Big Tech

Abstract: Digital markets are increasingly described as the ‘railroads’ of the 21st century. Extending that metaphor, some commentators argue we should revive stale railroad-era economic regulations and adapt them to the digital age. This enthusiasm appears to be buoyed by both a sudden nostalgia for railroad and airline regulations once administered by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and an equally sudden amnesia of the enormous harm those regulations caused to consumers. We should know better than to do the same thing again today and expect a different result.