Since the Reagan era, American economic policy has amounted to self-colonization. Democratic majorities have consistently supported legal regimes that have enabled corporations to extract the lion’s share of the gains from trade from the public. For example, they have supported a corporate law regime that denies the public democratic control over the behavior of corporations and instead gives dictatorial powers to shareholders and managers. The Internet has made it even easier for firms to extract surpluses from consumers through surveillance and algorithmic pricing. One small contribution toward a project of decolonizing the public would be for consumers to obtain a property right in their personal information. This would allow them to claw back some of the surpluses that technology has taken from them.

An online seller or platform is technically able to offer every consumer a different price for the same product, based on information it has about the customers. Such online price discrimination exacerbates concerns regarding the fairness and morality of price discrimination, and the possible need for regulation. In this chapter, we discuss the underlying basis of price discrimination in economic theory, and its popular perception. Our surveys show that consumers are critical and suspicious of online price discrimination. A majority consider it unacceptable and unfair, and are in favour of a ban. When stores apply online price discrimination, most consumers think they should be informed about it. We argue that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to the most controversial forms of online price discrimination, and not only requires companies to disclose their use of price discrimination, but also requires companies to ask customers for their prior consent. Industry practice, however, does not show any adoption of these two principles.

This chapter reaches more ambiguous conclusions with regard to the natural monopoly features of ride-hailing platforms such as Uber. While ride-hailing service providers benefit from indirect network externalities between drivers and passengers, which therefore represent a potential source of natural concentration on the demand side, their force is not infinite, and is likely to taper off after a thick and sufficiently large network is reached. The possibility of natural monopoly is as a result largely dependent on the local conditions of demand in a given geographical market. Given these more ambiguous conclusions, this chapter evaluates alternative policy approaches that may be pertinent to ride-hailing depending on the strength of natural concentration, including regulation, franchise bidding, and competition policy enforcement.