February 21, 2019

ICLE Comments, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry

Gus Hurwitz & Chris Berg

The analysis in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Preliminary Report for the Digital Platforms Inquiry is inadequate in several ways. There is a real danger that if the policy recommendations outlined in the preliminary report were to be adopted, Australian consumers would be severely harmed.

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 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

December 5, 2018

Drifting toward nonsense on EU vs. US competitiveness: The profits puzzle

Eric Fruits

A recent NBER working paper by Gutiérrez & Philippon has attracted attention from observers who see oligopoly everywhere and activists who want governments to more actively “manage” competition.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

November 19, 2018

EU markets are more competitive than U.S. markets? Not so fast

Eric Fruits

A recent NBER working paper by Gutiérrez & Philippon attempts to link differences in U.S. and EU antitrust enforcement and product market regulation to differences in market concentration and corporate profits. The authors are not clear what they mean by lower.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

August 10, 2018

Senator Warner’s proposals could harm entrepreneurs and consumers

Kristian Stout

Last week, I objected to Senator Warner relying on the flawed AOL/Time Warner merger conditions as a template for tech regulatory policy, but there is a much deeper problem contained in his proposals.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

July 27, 2018

How blockchain will upend competition law

Thibault Schrepel

PARIS — Not a day goes by without some discussion of Bitcoin — and, by extension, blockchain. Soon, not a day will pass without blockchain being discussed in competition law…

Financial Regulation