What Zoom can tell us about network effects and competition policy in digital...
Zoom, one of Silicon Valley’s lesser-known unicorns, has just gone public. At the time of writing, its shares are trading at about $65.70, placing the company’s value at $16.84 billion. There are good...
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Breaking up Facebook Would Be a Technical and Organizational Nightmare — and...
[This post is the fifth in an ongoing symposium on “Should We Break Up Big Tech?” that features analysis and opinion from various perspectives.] [This post is authored by William Rinehart, Director of...
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A Regulatory Failure of Imagination
Underpinning many policy disputes is a frequently rehearsed conflict of visions: Should we experiment with policies that are likely to lead to superior, but unknown, solutions, or should we should...
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Kochland: An Inadvertent Paean to the Glories of the Free Market
A recently published book, “Kochland – The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America” by Christopher Leonard, presents a gripping account of relentless innovation and the power...
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Does Apple’s “Discrimination” Against Rival Apps in the App Store harm...
A spate of recent newspaper investigations and commentary have focused on Apple allegedly discriminating against rivals in the App Store. The underlying assumption is that Apple, as a vertically...
View ArticleBig Ink vs. Bigger Tech
[TOTM: The following is the fifth in a series of posts by TOTM guests and authors on the politicization of antitrust. The entire series of posts is available here.] This post is authored by Ramsi...
View ArticleRybnicek: The Draft Vertical Merger Guidelines Would Do More Harm Than Good
[TOTM: The following is part of a symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. The entire series of posts is available here. This post is authored by Jan Rybnicek...
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Ongoing Blog Series: The Law, Economics, and Policy of the COVID-19 Pandemic
[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here. The outbreak...
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Prices are Information, Even During a Crisis
[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here. This post is...
View ArticleThe CARES Act and the Tantalizing Promise of a Universal Basic Income
This week, Americans began receiving cold, hard cash from the government. Meant to cushion the economic fallout of Covid-19, the CARES Act provides households with relief payments of up to $1200 per...
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First Amendment Conflict of Visions Redux: The Case of Facebook’s Oversight...
In the wake of the launch of Facebook’s content oversight board, Republican Senator Josh Hawley and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, among others, have taken to Twitter to levy criticisms at the firm...
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The Antitrust Case Against Google’s Adtech Business, Explained
This week the Senate will hold a hearing into potential anticompetitive conduct by Google in its display advertising business—the “stack” of products that it offers to advertisers seeking to place...
View ArticleIt’s Not So Simple Who Owns “Your” Data
What kind of regulation? Treating digital platforms like public utilities won’t work, Petit argues, because the product is multidimensional and competition takes place on multiple margins (the larger...
View ArticleBuck’s “Third Way”: A Different Road to the Same Destination
Congressman Buck’s “Third Way” report offers a compromise between the House Judiciary Committee’s majority report, which proposes sweeping new regulation of tech companies, and the status quo, which...
View ArticleCommentary: In the race for a COVID-19 vaccine, how do we balance risk and...
(Ed. Note: the following is an excerpt from a piece published by the Chicago Tribune on Oct. 16, 2020. Click here to read the full piece) No matter your Twitter feed, “vaccines have been one of the...
View ArticleThe Dishonesty of Conservative Attacks on Section 230
President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for repeal of Section 230. But while Trump and fellow conservatives decry Big Tech companies for their alleged anti-conservative bias, including at yet...
View ArticleFacebook and the Pros and Cons of Ex Post Merger Reviews
The Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general (along with the District of Columbia and the Territory of Guam) filed their long-awaited complaints against Facebook Dec. 9. The crux of the...
View ArticleInvestors and Regulators Can Both Fall for Platform Bubbles
In current discussions of technology markets, few words are heard more often than “platform.” Initial public offering (IPO) prospectuses use “platform” to describe a service that is bound to dominate...
View ArticleThe Digital Markets Act Shouldn’t Mandate Radical Interoperability
Despite calls from some NGOs to mandate radical interoperability, the EU’s draft Digital Markets Act (DMA) adopted a more measured approach, requiring full interoperability only in “ancillary”...
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The Virtues and Pitfalls of Economic Models
Interrogations concerning the role that economic theory should play in policy decisions are nothing new. Milton Friedman famously drew a distinction between “positive” and “normative” economics,...
View ArticleAntitrust Statutorification
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since my book was published last year. To close this symposium, I thought I would discuss the new phase of antirust statutorification taking place before our...
View ArticleAmazon Italy’s Efficiency Offense
Early last month, the Italian competition authority issued a record 1.128 billion euro fine against Amazon for abuse of dominance under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European...
View ArticlePrivacy and Security Risks of Interoperability and Sideloading Mandates
There has been a wave of legislative proposals on both sides of the Atlantic that purport to improve consumer choice and the competitiveness of digital markets. In a new working paper published by the...
View ArticleThe FTC UMC Roundup – May 27 Edition
Welcome to the Truth on the Market FTC UMC Roundup for May 27, 2022. This week we have (Hail Mary?) revisions to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minn.) American Innovation and Choice Online Act, initiatives...
View ArticleThe FTC UMC Roundup – Welcome to June Edition
Welcome to the FTC UMC Roundup for June 3, 2023–Memorial Day week. The holiday meant we had a short week, but we still have plenty of news to share. It also means we’re now in meteorological summer, a...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – Welcome to the Press Tour
Welcome to the FTC UMC Roundup for June 10, 2022. This is a week of headlines! One would be forgiven for assuming that our focus, once again, would on the American Innovation and Choice Online Act...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – Circular Firing Squad Edition
Welcome to the FTC UMC Roundup for June 17, 2022. This week’s roundup is a bit shorter – but only because your narrator would rather be out climbing mountains in Squamish, BC, than reading or writing...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – OT22 Edition
Fireworks came a bit early this year. Between the Supreme Court’s end-of-term decisions and this week’s January 6th Committee hearings, it wasn’t a week with much antitrust news coming out of either...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – Can’t a Man Eat in Peace Edition
This week’s news can be divided into PM and AM editions – pre-Manchin and after-Manchin. Anything that seemed possible in Congress before Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Schumer (D-NY) announced their...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – A Quantum of Wonder Edition
Early August is an unpredictable time in the policy world. With Congress about to go on recess, one never knows if there will be a mad rush to get something done, or what that something may be. And it...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – Well That Happened Edition
I thought this was going to be a slow week. The Senate is in recess and, with so much recent attention focused on the Senate and AICOA – and the FTC’s had only just started things with the Meta/Within...
View ArticleFTC UMC Roundup – Call for Submissions Edition
It’s been a busy summer, and promises to be a busier fall. So the UMC Roundup is on hiatus this week. But because the news doesn’t stop even when we do, we’re using this week’s Roundup to announce a...
View ArticleFTC Biweekly Roundup – A Change in Title Edition
You’d think things would be calm during these last weeks of August – the Senate in recess, folks wrapping up summer vacations or seeing their kids back off to school, and the big news being that...
View ArticleWhat Antitrust Scholars Can Learn from the Bronze Age Collapse
There is an emerging debate regarding whether complexity theory—which, among other things, draws lessons about uncertainty and non-linearity from the natural sciences—should make inroads into...
View ArticleKnowledge, Decisions, and Noncompetes
One of my favorite books is Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions, in which he builds on Friedrich Hayek’s insight that knowledge is dispersed throughout society. Hayek’s insight that markets can...
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Why I’m a Skeptic of a Noncompete Ban
Under a recently proposed rule, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would ban the use of noncompete terms in employment agreements nationwide. Noncompetes are contracts that workers sign saying they...
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How Will the Law Deal with AI Getting Facts Wrong?
It seems that large language models (LLMs) are all the rage right now, from Bing’s announcement that it plans to integrate the ChatGPT technology into its search engine to Google’s announcement of its...
View ArticleWhat the European Commission’s More Interventionist Approach to Exclusionary...
The European Commission on March 27 showered the public with a series of documents heralding a new, more interventionist approach to enforce Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the...
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The Law & Economics of Children’s Online Safety: The First Amendment and...
Legislation to secure children’s safety online is all the rage right now, not only on Capitol Hill, but in state legislatures across the country. One of the favored approaches is to impose on platforms...
View ArticleThe FTC’s Gambit Against Amazon: Navigating a Multiverse of Blowback and...
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reportedly poised some time within the next month to file a major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon—the biggest yet against the company and the latest in a long...
View ArticleThe Marketplace of Ideas: Government Failure Is Worse Than Market Failure...
Today marks the release of a white paper I have been working on for a long time, titled “Knowledge and Decisions in the Information Age: The Law & Economics of Regulating Misinformation on...
View ArticleWhy Armen Alchian Is the GOAT
Tyler Cowen has a new online book out titled “GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time, and Why Does it Matter?” While there are potential problems in treating ideas like basketball, the project...
View ArticleMaking Sure New Medicines Are Safe, Effective, and Approved Quickly: A...
This is the first in what will be a series of posts discussing how new medicines are introduced and regulated in the United States, and how the status quo could be improved. As will be established over...
View ArticleA Brief History of the US Drug Approval Process, and the Birth of Accelerated...
This is the second post about the U.S. drug-approval process; the first post is here. It will explore how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) arose, how disasters drove its expansion and regulatory...
View ArticleOncology Drives Most Recent Accelerated Approvals
In my most recent post on medicine approvals I explored how the HIV/AIDS crisis drove a reevaluation of what was truly essential to demonstrate a new drug’s efficacy. Allowing HIV patients to take...
View ArticleHow the FTC’s Amazon Case Gerrymanders Relevant Markets and Obscures...
As Greg Werden has noted, the process of defining the relevant market in an antitrust case doesn’t just finger which part of the economy is allegedly affected by the challenged conduct, but it also...
View ArticleAntitrust at the Agencies Roundup: Supply Chains, Noncompetes, and Greedflation
The big news from the agencies may be the lawsuit filed today by the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and 16 states against Apple alleging monopoly maintenance in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman...
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Capital Confusion at the New York Times
In a recent guest essay for The New York Times, Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution claims that the merger between Capital One and Discover would “keep intact the broken and predatory system in...
View ArticleAntitrust at the Agencies Roundup: The Supply Chain, Part Deux
But First, Money Makes the World Go ‘Round For all my carping about this or that program or enforcement matter, it seems to me a very good thing that Congress passed—and President Joe Biden signed into...
View ArticleDoes the DMA Let Gatekeepers Protect Data Privacy and Security?
It’s been an eventful two weeks for those following the story of the European Union’s implementation of the Digital Markets Act. On April 18, the European Commission began a series of workshops with...
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