Tech Regulation - Thematic Research

Tech Regulation - Thematic Research

Summary

The international legal system, based on separate national sovereignties, is struggling with its task of providing a framework for internet governance, given the cross-border flows of online services. Yet a raft of online abuses culminating with the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal is likely to force authorities to act unilaterally to regulate companies in certain areas, including:

Data privacy: aimed at internet advertisers who sell our personal digital information for a profit.

Data protection: aimed at companies with poor data controls who run the risk of losing personal data through negligence.

Anti-trust: aimed at internet ecosystems that behave in an anti-competitive manner, but for whom current anti-trust laws do not work.

Tax avoidance: aimed at tech companies who aggressively avoid local taxes by moving profits to low tax jurisdictions.

Legal status as a content platform: aimed at online publishers who claim to be “content neutral platforms” and therefore have no responsibility for monitoring the content published by their users.

Net neutrality: aimed at heavy users of internet bandwidth who have hitherto been shielded from paying the full costs for the internet bandwidth they consume.

Anti-social behaviour: aimed at online platforms who wilfully break the law and violate society’s ethical norms by assisting terrorists, promoting pornography, and selling banned goods.

Obstruction of justice: aimed at tech titans who refuse to help law enforcement agents investigating a crime by concealing evidence behind encrypted walled gardens under the guise of protecting their customers’ privacy.

Companies mentioned in this report: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, DeNA, Facebook, Gree, Groupon, Kakao, Line, Mail.Ru, Match, Microsoft, Mixi, Momo, Naver, Renren, Sina, Snap, Tencent, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Weibo, Xing, Yahoo!, Japan, Yandex, Yelp, YY

Scope

This report is part of our ecosystem of thematic investment research reports, supported by our “thematic engine”. About our Thematic Research Ecosystem:

The author has developed a unique thematic methodology for valuing technology, media and telecom companies based on their relative strength in the big investment themes that are impacting their industry. Whilst most investment research is underpinned by backwards looking company valuation models, the author’s thematic methodology identifies which companies are best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats. To do this, the author tracks the performance of the top 600 technology, media and telecom stocks against the 50 most important themes driving their earnings, generating 30,000 thematic scores. The algorithms in the author’s “thematic engine” help to clearly identify the winners and losers within the TMT sector. Our 600 TMT stocks are categorised into 18 sectors. Each sector scorecard has a thematic screen, a risk screen and a valuation screen. Our thematic research ecosystem has a three-tiered reporting structure: single theme, multi-theme and sector scorecard. This report is a Multi-Theme report, covering all stocks, all sectors and all themes, giving readers a strong sense of how everything fits together and how conflicting themes might interact with one another.

Reasons to buy

Our thematic investment research product, supported by our thematic engine, is aimed at senior (C-Suite) executives in the corporate world as well as institutional investors.

Corporations: Helps CEOs in all industries understand the disruptive threats to their competitive landscape

Investors: Helps fund managers focus their time on the most interesting investment opportunities in global TMT.

Our unique differentiator, compared to all our rival thematic research houses, is that our thematic engine has a proven track record of predicting winners and losers.