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A Truth on the Market piece by ICLE Senior Scholar Daniel J. Gilman, President Geoffrey A. Manne, and Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was cited by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in a blog post about labor monopsony effects in merger enforcement. You can read the full piece here.

Finally, there is another problem with the Guidelines’ turn to labor: Benefits to labor can coincide with harms to consumers, creating challenges in merger reviews. Indeed, Gilman et al. highlight this conflict when they ask, “Are mergers to be challenged—and, if challenged, blocked—if they harm workers in a single labor market, even if they are procompetitive (and pro-consumer) in the relevant product market?” In other words, will the agencies be able to conduct effective merger reviews when a merger raises labor market concentration—which may or may not hurt workers—but reduces prices for consumers? Moreover, even if a merger does not result in a conflict between worker and consumer interests, it could result in conflicts between two labor markets that can further hinder effective merger review. Gilman et al. also highlight this when they assert that merger benefits in one labor market could offset the losses in another, resulting in net gains for the overall labor market. In this case, the agencies will also face another challenge in effectively conducting merger reviews when they have to balance gains and losses between labor markets.

ICLE Academic Affiliate John Lopatka was quoted by Bloomberg Law in a story about U.S. Justice Department efforts to regulate artificial intelligence. You can read the full piece here.

AI “doesn’t easily fall within one agency’s jurisdiction as opposed to the other,” said John Lopatka, a law professor at Penn State focused on antitrust. “So I think what you would hear from DOJ is, look, this is a deal with Google, and we’re the ones that are litigating Google—so we should be the ones investigating a Google Gemini deal.”

…While a licensing deal of this nature wouldn’t automatically trigger antitrust scrutiny, Lopatka said he would be “stunned” if regulators didn’t at least launch a probe.

…Before news of the companies’ AI talks broke, Lopatka said he would have expected the Justice Department to propose a remedy in the Google search case aimed at suppressing the growth of Google and allowing Apple to emerge as a search competitor. But an AI agreement could force the DOJ to rethink its approach to breaking up a search monopoly, Lopatka added.

An AI deal between the tech behemoths could block competition in the search market, which would raise red flags for federal regulators in the Google search case, Lopatka said.

“The government would want to be cognizant of any relationship when proposing remedies,” Lopatka said.

ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was quoted by The Dispatch in a story about the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple. You can read the full piece here.

Other observers, however, warn against dismissing the DOJ’s entire suit as frivolous. “It is a complex case,” Brian Albrecht, the chief economist for the International Center for Law and Economics, told TMD. “Anyone who mocks [it] as obviously ridiculous overall, is overstating it.”

ICLE Academic Affiliate Adam Mossoff was quoted by IPWatchdog in a story about intellectual-property rights being chosen as the topic for the 2024-2025 debate competition by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). You can read the full piece here.

“This is a clear indication that innovators and creators are succeeding in changing the public narrative about the role of IP rights in innovation economies and flourishing societies,” said Adam Mossoff, Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University and a member of the board of directors of the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding (CIPU).

“I competed in debate when I was in high school,” continued Professor Mossoff, an innovation policy expert. “It’s an excellent way for students to learn evidence-based advocacy as opposed to the name-calling and junk science that have dominated discussions about IP. ­­There is overwhelming evidence that IP rights are a launch pad for growing innovation economies and creative cultures.”

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was quoted by the New York Times in a story about the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Apple. You can read the full thing here.

And federal prosecutors are explicitly connecting the Apple lawsuit to that earlier fight. “They’re really presenting this case as a successor to that: Microsoft 2.0,” said Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

…Others say the Microsoft case’s legacy is less clear. Hurwitz told DealBook that the reality was more complicated. Netscape failed in part because a botched upgrade turned off users, while Microsoft missed out on the dawn of internet 2.0 services because of bad strategic decisions.

“In terms of actual industrial changes, I think the case yielded very little,” Hurwitz said.

…“That might open up opportunities for competitors,” Hurwitz said. But he added, “That’s not necessarily the best way of facilitating competition in the market.” 

ICLE research was cited by Americans for Tax Reform in a recent letter about the Credit Card Competition Act. You can read the full piece here.

The mandates in the bill are so costly that more than $75 billion in rewards that consumers receive every year would largely disappear. According to the International Center for Law & Economics, “86% of credit cardholders have active rewards cards, including 77% of cardholders with a household income of less than $50,000.” The disappearance of rewards would likely harm minority communities and small businesses.

ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was quoted by The New York Times in an item about the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Apple. You can read the full piece here.

But some experts think this lawsuit is a stretch. Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, told DealBook that antitrust policy traditionally hasn’t focused on issues like porting consumer data to different platforms.

He added that while prosecutors were seeking to help some consumers — those who favor switching devices — the lawsuit could end up hurting others. Users of iOS “derive a lot of value from their closed ecosystem,” he said. “Apple users like the closed ecosystem and the benefits that confers on them.

ICLE President and Founder Geoffrey A. Manne was quoted by Fortune in a story about the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple. You can read the full piece here.

“They must know this case will be hard to win. Maybe they feel their best path to victory is creating a strong public atmosphere that Apple is not some noble, pro-consumer actor,” said Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, a Portland-based nonprofit research center.

“A lot of these cases are about changing the public perception of these companies, which in turn deters the behavior.”

ICLE Senior Scholar Lazar Radic was quoted by The Drum in a story about the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Apple. You can read the full piece here.

But another concern about the case’s strength is raised by Lazar Radic, a professor of law and a senior scholar of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics. The case “seems slightly outdated,” Radic says.

In particular, he suggests that some of the issues raised by the plaintiffs appear to have been recently remedied. “One example is the cloud services complaint, which is accusing Apple of suppressing mobile cloud streaming services. Apple changed its policy on [cloud gaming services] earlier this year, to an extent that would address this [concern].”

…The DOJ, in its complaint, would seem to be grasping at straws on this front, Radic suggests. “The DOJ’s complaint is that the color of the text bubbles is different, which disadvantages Android [users]. Apple did address … the downgraded experience when messaging non-iPhone phones. But the DOJ seems to be saying that that’s not enough because having different colors for the bubbles of text still disadvantages non-iPhone users.”

…In addition to what Radic deems “outdated” complaints, others have pointed out that the DOJ’s case omits a handful of concerns that have been at the heart of other antitrust suits against Apple.