From big-box and grocery stores to airlines, “dynamic pricing” — where prices fluctuate in real-time based on supply and demand — is poised to become a larger part of the American shopping experience.

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With the release of the U.S. Supreme Court’s NetChoice opinion (along with some other boring case people seem to want to talk about), opinions for the October 2023 term appear to be complete. After discussing what Murthy v. Missouri means for online speech, it only feels right to discuss the other big social-media case of the term.

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A case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court stems from the efforts a multitude of federal agencies made to remove certain viewpoints from public view. In other words, they sought to abridge freedom of speech—you know, that thing that the First Amendment explicitly bans.

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After a lot of anticipation from Supreme Court watchers, the Murthy v. Missouri opinion has finally been released. As the oral argument suggested, standing was the issue for the Court, who in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled that none of the plaintiffs had standing, due to a lack of traceability and redressability of the alleged injuries. The result: challenging backdoor censorship just got a lot harder.

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The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major victory for free speech and struck a blow against government censorship-by-proxy yesterday in NRA v. Vullo: “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”

This is a major decision, and will have implications for free speech online, as the Court must soon consider similar facts in the social-media context in Murthy v. Missouri. But the case also illustrates the dangers that can attend government officials using even valid regulatory authority to strongarm private entities into doing things in ways they couldn’t do directly.

The Court’s unanimous opinion gets it right: “[A] government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly… [she] cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.”

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Artificial intelligence is in the public-policy spotlight. In October 2023, the Biden administration issued its Presidential Executive Order on AI, which directed federal agencies to cooperate in protecting the public from potential AI-related harms. President Joe Biden said in his March 2024 State of the Union Address that government enforcers will crack down on the use of AI to facilitate illegal price fixing. Congress is in the preliminary stages of considering legislation that could pave the way for future regulation of AI.

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Competition policymakers around the world have been expressing concerns about competition in emerging artificial-intelligence (AI) industries, with some taking steps to investigate them further. These fears are notably fueled by a sense that incumbent (albeit, in adjacent markets) digital platforms may use strategic partnerships with AI firms to stave off competition from this fast-growing field.

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The impetus for change in monopoly electric systems has ebbed and flowed for over three decades. Over the past 15 years the interest in and ability to update electricity system technologies has grown, due to the combination of changing policy objectives and widespread digital innovation. Whether you call it smart grid or grid modernization, digital technologies by now have long had the potential to transform electric systems, improving their operations, reducing waste and idleness, and (but I repeat myself) having more market-based systems. Separate but complementary improvements in the performance and production costs of distributed energy resources like solar PV, electric vehicles, and battery storage, along with the policy focus on decarbonization, have amplified interest in and work on digitalization. Digitalization has reduced transaction costs and created unforeseeable types and amounts of value in the rest of the economy. Shouldn’t it do so too in electricity?

With yet another net-neutrality order set to take effect (the link is to the draft version circulated before today’s Federal Communications Commission vote; the final version is expected to be published in a few weeks) and to impose common-carriage requirements on broadband internet-access service (BIAS) providers, it is worth considering how the question of whether online platforms (whether they be social media or internet service providers) have the right to editorial discretion keeps shifting.

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