March 12, 2019

Elizabeth Warren wants to turn the internet into a literal sewer (service)

Geoffrey A. Manne & Alec Stapp

Near the end of her new proposal to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, Senator Warren asks, “So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?” To Warren, our most dynamic and innovative companies constitute a problem that needs solving.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

March 11, 2019

TIM WU’S BAD HISTORY: BIG BUSINESS AND THE RISE OF FASCISM

Alec Stapp

The recent increase in economic concentration and monopoly power make the United States “ripe for dictatorship,” claims Columbia law professor Tim Wu in his new book, The Curse of Bigness.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

March 1, 2019

Kristian Stout Debates Matt Stoller on the Bigness of Big Tech at Cato Institute Conference, "Who’s Afraid of Big Tech?" 03/01/19

Kristian Stout

ICLE Associate Director, Kristian Stout joins Matt Stoller of Open Markets Institute on the panel titled "Is Big Tech Too Big?" at the Cato Institute conference, "Who’s Afraid of Big Tech?"

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

February 28, 2019

ICLE Letter on The proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger and the state of the relevant economic literature

Geoffrey A. Manne & Eric Fruits & Gus Hurwitz & Julian Morris & Kristian Stout

We write to address a crucial question relevant to your upcoming, March 12 hearing on “The State of Competition in the Wireless Market: Examining the Impact of the Proposed Merger of T-Mobile and Sprint on Consumers, Workers, and the Internet.”

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

February 10, 2019

Doing double damage: The German competition authority’s Facebook decision manages to undermine both antitrust and data protection law

Geoffrey A. Manne

The German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office or FCO) this week reached a decision in its nearly 3-year-old Facebook investigation.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

February 1, 2019

STRUCTURALIST INNOVATION: A SHAKY LEGAL PRESUMPTION IN NEED OF AN OVERHAUL

Dirk Auer

How does a market’s structure affect innovation? This crucial question has occupied the world’s brightest economists for almost a century, from Schumpeter who found that monopoly was optimal, through Arrow who concluded that competitive market structures were key, to the endogenous growth scholars who empirically derived an inverted-U relationship between market concentration and innovation.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

January 29, 2019

The Australian approach to “consumer protection” policy is a threat to consumer welfare and free speech

Kristian Stout & Akiva Malamet

The US Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights recently held hearings to see what, if anything, the U.S. might learn from the approaches of other countries regarding antitrust and consumer protection.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

January 22, 2019

Boom, bust, and collusion: Does it really matter?

Eric Fruits

A recent working paper by Hashmat Khan and Matthew Strathearn attempts to empirically link anticompetitive collusion to the boom and bust cycles of the economy.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

January 22, 2019

FTC v. Qualcomm: Innovation and Competition

Geoffrey A. Manne

Just days before leaving office, the outgoing Obama FTC left what should have been an unwelcome parting gift for the incoming Commission: an antitrust suit against Qualcomm.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection