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How A Little Known Company Conspired To Raise Rents On Millions Of Americans And What That Says About Competition In The AI Era
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” wrote Adam Smith in his classic, The Wealth of Nations. It is a lesson we seem to need to learn over and over again.
It is also at the heart of a recent suit brought by the Justice Department, along with eight state Attorneys General, against a little known real estate software company named RealPage. It may seem obscure, but its ripple effects are bound to be far reaching, affecting not only regulation and competition, but the distinctions we make between machine and man.
How did an obscure company, that few ever heard of, manage to drive up rent for millions of Americans? At what point does an algorithm become collusive? Is there any real difference between sharing information in some back room or on a server mediated by an algorithm? These are all questions we need to answer in an increasingly algorithmically-driven world.
How We Got Here
The Gilded Age in America that took place at the end of the 19th century was marked by rapid industrialization and amassing…