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ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was quoted by Báo Giao Thông in a story about the lawsuit the company filed challenging a recently passed law that would force its divestiture from Chinese-based ByteDance. You can read the full piece here.

ICLE’s comments to the Brazilian competition authority were mentioned in a story in Tele Sintese on proposals to revise the regulatory regime in ways similar to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. You can read the full piece here.

A U.S Chamber of Commerce , ou a Câmara de Comércio dos Estados Unidos, atacou com vigor a legislação europeia que regulou as plataformas digitais, incitando o Brasil a evitar esse modelo internamente. A manifestação do governo norte-americano à consulta pública do Ministério da Fazenda sobre plataformas digitais foi apresentada ao lado de opiniões de diferentes entidades e empresas norte-americanas, como Google, Amazon, Meta, The App Association, Legal Ground Institute, Sleeping Giants, Dynamic Competition Initiative, International Center for Law & Economics, TechFreedom, Motion Picture Association (MPA), Computer & Communication Industry Association (CCIA). Há ainda contribuições de entidades e empresas brasileiras e até do Ministério da Indústria e Comércio.

ICLE Senior Scholar Daniel J. Gilman was quoted by Deseret News in a story on the role that artificial intelligence is increasingly playing in the health-car sector. You can read the full piece here.

“I am excited about the technology,” said attorney Daniel J. Gilman, senior scholar at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center based in Portland, Oregon. “I think we’ve seen that as long as it is introduced and used in a careful and responsible fashion, AI seems to have tremendous promise.”

…Gilman said AI imaging refinements now do a more sophisticated job than human eyes alone to discern noise in an image without introducing artifacts or losing information. Another strength is “signal detection — finding things with better images that a time-pressed radiologist might miss with a quick scan and the naked eye.”

…It’s hard to overestimate the value, though, of AI trained on millions of images to free up the physician’s time by going through the entire image workload to flag those needing attention. And AI can regularly review to see what might have been missed. “The radiologist, the physician, the oncologist is not eliminated. What’s eliminated is a big pile of time they spend staring at these things. They’re still going to stare at images, but they’re going to stare at the ones that really need attention,” Gilman said. “A considerable amount of the workload is shifted so the practitioner’s involvement is much more efficient.”

…Fortunately, many of AI’s advantages reduce both time drag and administrative costs, “which have become staggering in health care,” per Gilman.

…Gilman warned it’s important to have a system on the back end in health care for “evaluation and scrutiny, to make sure things are going as they should and that there are ways to intervene if you’re getting anomalous results. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally strange about that; you’re always balancing,” he added, noting that with drug approval, for instance, there’s a terrific amount of testing beforehand, but also ongoing surveillance so problems can be reported if they arise after a drug is approved.

“You want real and serious checks on the quality of the tools you’re using, whether those are medical devices or drugs or software,” said Gilman. “By the same token, you don’t want to be so careful you impede patient access to care. You have to balance being high quality and efficient.”

…Still, experts who use AI see more benefits than problems. Gilman thinks “some of the dire worries that people talk about outside the health care sector seem to flirt with science fiction.” Inside the realm of health care, though, he has two concerns: quality control and data security. Being able to transmit data ever further offers advantages like connecting a physician in a very small town with a network of specialists at a big medical center. But that comes with security risks.

“To me, risks are risks to manage; they’re not big. I don’t have any grand science fiction fears for AI in health care. But that doesn’t mean I know what the future will look like in 20 years. Thus far, I can see some very useful applications,” he said.

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was quoted by USA Today in a story about the lawsuit the company filed challenging a recently passed law that would force its divestiture from Chinese-based ByteDance. You can read the full piece here.

While the law implicates free speech, “the national security justification is reasonably strong and courts are likely to take it very seriously,” said Justin “Gus” Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition at Penn Carey Law.

“It is a hard question how the Supreme Court would decide it,” Hurwitz said. “The current composition of the court does hold very strong First Amendment views. On the other hand, the justices are very likely to take the national security concerns very seriously.”

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was quoted by the Associated Press in a story about the lawsuit the company filed challenging a recently passed law that would force its divestiture from Chinese-based ByteDance. You can read the full piece here.

ByteDance will first likely ask a court to temporarily block the federal law from taking effect, said Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School who isn’t involved in the case. And the decision whether to grant such a preliminary injunction could decide the case, because its absence, ByteDance would need to sell TikTok before the broader case could be decided, he said.

An amicus brief signed by several ICLE scholars was cited in a story by Law360 in a story about the case, CoStar v. CRE. You can read the full piece here.

A group of former federal enforcers and academics filed an amicus brief on Monday supporting CoStar Group Inc.in the appeal from Commercial Real Estate Exchange Inc., which is trying to revive antitrust counterclaims in a suit accusing CREXi of “industrial-scale” copyright infringement.

The brief argues that the lower court correctly applied traditional antitrust principles when tossing the claims. It adds that the position advanced by CREXi and the FTC in the appeal threatens to upend those principles.

“The arguments pushed by CREXi and the FTC, if accepted, would open the floodgates to baseless antitrust suits,” Monday’s brief says. “In rejecting these arguments below, the district court properly concluded that CREXi failed to meet its pleading burden for its antitrust counterclaims. This court should affirm.”

ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was quoted by Axios in a story about the Federal Trade Commission’s opposition to Tapestry’s acquisition of Capri Holdings. You can read the full piece here.

Zoom in: The FTC may have been encouraged by its success in blocking the merger of JetBlue and Spirit, say Oliver and Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics.

…The intrigue: It’s rare that the U.S. is not in lock step with its antitrust counterparts in the European Union and Japan, which both cleared the deal, say Oliver and Albrecht.

ICLE Senior Scholar Ben Sperry was quoted by the New York Sun in a story about President Joe Biden signing legislation that would force ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok. You can read the full piece here.

“Do we really want to set the precedent that it’s a good thing to shut down communications platforms?” the analyst, Ben Sperry, a senior scholar at the International Center for Law & Economics, tells the Sun. He filed an amicus brief in a suit against the president. “Yes, we should make sure Americans are protected, but I think we all hope for more obvious evidence of harm to America’s national security.”

…That broad scope mitigates the risk of it becoming a bill of attainder, an expressly forbidden act that abridges due process, Mr. Sperry says. Yet, he asks, “what does it mean to be under the influence and control of a hostile foreign nation?” The legislation, as it’s written, fails to answer that question.

…Though some argue that foreign entities do not have constitutional rights, Mr. Sperry says, “corporations that have some degree of foreign ownership are allowed to participate in the marketplace of ideas as a general matter.”

…The government could also see lawsuits from Americans themselves. Businesses and services that use TikTok to promote their products, as well as consumers of that content, might invoke their First Amendment rights to access or promote their products, Mr. Sperry says.

…Mr. Sperry invokes another analogy. He calls the unfolding battle “a cat and mouse game between technology and the law, and the law might win — or at least win enough that most people won’t use the technology anymore.” Be it a “cat,” or a “dictator,” Communist China could retaliate through measures to stop Americans from conducting business on their turf.

ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was quoted by Communications Daily in a story about the net-neutrality order affirmed by the Federal Communications Commission. You can read the full piece here.

Title II is “much more than net neutrality,” said International Center for Law & Economics Senior Scholar Eric Fruits. The FCC’s rule is “a sharp reversal from decades of light-touch regulation,” Fruits said, and industry would “face the yoke of onerous federal regulation and meddling that would stifle and slow future investment and experimentation.” The American Consumer Institute warned the rules will be “a disaster for investment, deployment, and access.”