November 13, 2019

Economics is Dead. Long Live Economics! A Review of The Economists’ Hour

Ben Sperry

The central irony of the Economists’ Hour is that in criticizing the influence of economists over policy, Appelbaum engages in a great deal of economic speculation himself. Appelbaum would discard the opinions of economists in favor of “the lessons of history,” but all he is left with is unsupported economic reasoning.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

September 3, 2019

The District Court’s FTC v. Qualcomm Decision Rests on Impermissible Inferences and Should Be Reversed

Geoffrey A. Manne & Ben Sperry

Contrary to established Supreme Court precedent, the district court’s decision relies on mere inferences to establish anticompetitive effect. The decision, if it stands, would render a wide range of potentially procompetitive conduct presumptively illegal and thus harm consumer welfare.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

June 15, 2019

ICLE Comments on Department of Justice Workshop on Competition in Television and Digital Advertising

Geoffrey A. Manne

The Department should be commended for undertaking this workshop “to explore industry dynamics in media advertising and the implications for antitrust enforcement and policy.... and the competitive dynamics of media advertising in general.” The competitive dynamics of advertising markets—and digital advertising markets, in particular—are complicated and not well-understood.

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

October 18, 2018

Telemarketing, Technology, and Why the Telephone Sucks (and how to fix it)

Gus Hurwitz

It is a truth universally acknowledged that unwanted telephone calls are among the most reviled annoyances known to man. But this does not mean that laws intended to prohibit these calls are themselves necessarily good. Indeed, in one sense we know intuitively that they are not good.

Telecommunications

July 30, 2018

AOL/Time Warner merger conditions are a template for disastrous tech policy

Kristian Stout

Senator Mark Warner has proposed 20 policy prescriptions for bringing “big tech” to heel. The proposals — which run the gamut from policing foreign advertising on social networks to regulating feared competitive harms — provide much interesting material for Congress to consider.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

July 18, 2018

Schrepel - The European Commission Is Undermining Innovation

Thibault Schrepel

This article introduces an empirical study conducted over the period 2004 to 2018 (Android included) on all the fines imposed by the European Commission on the basis of Article 102 TFEU. We show that the European Commission’s decisions may have the effect of slowing down R&D for numerous sanctioned companies.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

July 2, 2018

Big Tech’s Big-Time, Big-Scale Problem

Geoffrey A. Manne & Gus Hurwitz

High-tech and network industries have a long history of evoking populist scrutiny. New technologies frequently disrupt incumbent, often less centralized, business models and interfere with existing relationships between sellers and consumers.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection

April 16, 2018

The illiberal vision of neo-Brandeisian antitrust

Geoffrey A. Manne

The urge to treat antitrust as a legal Swiss Army knife capable of correcting all manner of social and economic ills is apparently difficult for some to resist. Conflating size with market power, and market power with political power, many recent calls for regulation of industry — and the tech industry in particular — are framed in antitrust terms.

Antitrust & Consumer Protection