Economist, The

The Index provides an international benchmark of internet inclusion across four categories: availability, affordability, relevance and readiness. Among the countries included in the Index, the proportion of men that access the Internet is, on average, 33.5% higher than the proportion of women. Among low-income countries, the gender gap is 80.2% in favour of men.

[Commentary] A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era.

These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Internet companies’ control of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy”. A new approach is needed. Rebooting antitrust for the information age will not be easy. It will entail new risks: more data sharing, for instance, could threaten privacy. But if governments don’t want a data economy dominated by a few giants, they will need to act soon.

The good news is that correcting the cultural, institutional and unconscious biases that push grils away from information technology is not all that difficult. A blueprint for doing so was drawn up by Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, a small science and engineering powerhouse in Claremont (CA). Dr Klawe raised the percentage of women graduating in computer science from less than 15% in 2006 to 55% in 2016, primarily by removing intimidation in the classroom, and abolishing all notions about some people being good at computer science and others not. Overall, Dr Klawe has seven tips for getting more women into IT, including early internships and hiring lots of female faculty members as mentors and role models. The incoming White House could do much to bridge the widening gap in America’s IT workforce by embracing the Harvey Mudd model. In particular, as a way of getting more computer-science teachers into high schools across the country, it would be a far more “innovative approach to training” than anything tried so far.

[Commentary] One of the biggest problems facing America’s economy is waning competition. In the home of free enterprise two-thirds of industries have become more concentrated since the 1990s, partly owing to lots of mergers. Fat, cosy incumbents hoard cash, invest less, smother new firms that create jobs and keep prices high. They are rotten for the economy. Boosting competition should be a priority for whoever occupies the White House in 2017, and for Congress. Now a test case is waiting in the in-tray. AT&T, America’s fifth-biggest firm by profits, wants to buy Time Warner, the second-biggest media firm.

The $109 billion megadeal isn’t a simple antitrust case, because it involves a firm buying a supplier, not a competitor. But there is a strong case that it will limit consumer choice in a part of the economy that is rife with rent-seeking and extend a worrying concentration of corporate power. It should be stopped. Precedent suggests that the trustbusters in the Department of Justice (under the auspices of the president), and not the Federal Trade Commission (a creature of Congress), will have the biggest say on the tie-up. This means the deal is being struck just as there is a change of leadership at the top. Those advising on the merger may be gambling that this makes the authorities unlikely to initiate a strong line on vertical mergers. That is all the more reason to be bold. Politicians and regulators may eventually resolve to open up the industry more, for example through “unbundling”, which lets upstart firms use others’ pipes. Until then they should block the AT&T-Time Warner deal and make clear that competition, not consolidation, is the way to get America’s economy working better.

BF Skinner turned out to be the last of the pure behaviourists. From the late 1950s onwards, a new generation of scholars redirected the field of psychology back towards internal mental processes, like memory and emotion. But behaviourism never went away completely, and in recent years it has re-emerged in a new form, as an applied discipline deployed by businesses and governments to influence the choices you make every day: what you buy, who you talk to, what you do at work. Its practitioners are particularly interested in how the digital interface – the box in which we spend most of our time today – can shape human decisions. The name of this young discipline is “behaviour design”. Its founding father is B.J. Fogg.

On July 25th, Verizon, a telecommunications giant that is also America’s biggest mobile operator, announced it would buy Yahoo’s main internet business for $4.8 billion (a price that does not include the firm’s properties in Asia or its portfolio of patents). The sum is paltry compared with Microsoft’s offer of $45 billion in 2008, which Yahoo’s management turned down, arguing that the firm was worth far more. Google and Facebook have invested heavily in technology that allows them to sell digital ads in an efficient, automated fashion. Verizon is hoping to take them on. Advertising is going through (yet another) digital transformation, meaning that marketers are not only spending more money online but also using technologies to buy ad space more efficiently, targeting their message to the specific people they are interested in.

AOL has a smoothly functioning new platform for this, but Yahoo underinvested. Verizon reckons it will be able to use AOL’s technology to sell a lot of Yahoo’s inventory of ads to marketers. All the same, Verizon will be taking on rivals whose main business is advertising, and in which they each have more than a decade of experience. It will need to move nimbly, not something telecoms firms are known for. Another reason why Verizon may struggle to challenge Facebook’s and Google’s duopoly has to do with new plans from the telecoms regulator. Internet-service providers and mobile carriers like Verizon know more about their customers than do Google and Facebook. They know their billing addresses, their precise location at any moment and all their online habits, says Harold Feld of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group.

[Commentary] Comcast announced that it would buy Time Warner Cable, the largest provider of TV and broadband after Comcast, for around $45 billion. The Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission are scheduled to begin reviewing the merger soon.

They should be skeptical. The deal would create a Goliath far more fearsome than the latest ride at the Universal Studios theme park (also Comcast-owned). Comcast has said it would forfeit 3 million subscribers, but even with that concession the combination of the two firms would have around 30 million -- more than 30% of all TV subscribers and around 33% of broadband customers. In the cable market alone (i.e., not counting suppliers of satellite services such as DirecTV), Comcast has as much as 55% of all TV and broadband subscribers.

If the takeover is approved, Comcast would control 20 of the top 25 cable markets, according to MoffettNathanson, a research firm. For consumers the deal would mean the union of two companies that are already reviled for their poor customer service and high prices.

David Cohen, Comcast’s chief lobbyist has said, “We’re certainly not promising that customer bills are going to go down or even that they’re going to increase less rapidly.” Between 1995 and 2012 the average price of a cable subscription increased at a compound annual rate of more than 6%.

The biggest worry is Comcast’s grip on the Internet. Unlike Britain and France, America unwisely has no “common carriage”, allowing for Internet service providers to rent cable companies’ pipes and compete on price and speed. Already Americans pay far more than people in other rich countries for slower Internet. Comcast will have extraordinary power over what content is delivered to consumers, and at what speed.