Tom Wheeler

Does that mean the government?

One of the things that I propose is that we need a whole new approach to oversight.

So first, the first component is what you and I have been talking about thus far.

Is there...

a necessity for oversight of the activities of the dominant digital companies?

And my feeling is yes.

But the question then becomes, what kind of oversight?

And what I definitely do not believe in is the kind of oversight that we saw in the industrial era.

which is micromanagement, top-down kind of activities that inhibit innovation, inhibit investment in this dynamic economy.

So what we need is a whole new approach.

We need to be as innovative in our oversight of the companies as the innovators themselves are in creating their new ideas.

The reality today is if you want to have an online relationship, if you want to be able to do commerce, if you want to be able to exchange with your friends through a common platform,

um you have to do it there is the thing that changed the economics of the created the great opportunity for these digital platform companies is what the economists call network effects and a network effect is basically that you go to a site because that's where everybody else is

You go to Facebook because that's where your friends are.

You go to Google because that's where the information is.

And you may have another alternative to Google, but it doesn't have as rich information.

a source of information as google does and so these network effects tend to produce um a winner takes all kind of situation because all of the activities used to be

the competitive activities get wrung out by the very design of the system that takes advantage of these network effects.

So if we have a new set of realities like that, and again, I'm not for stepping in and having heavy-handed regulation, but I think that there should be

some basic ground rules.