European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager announced Sept. 5 that she was leaving her position after nearly a decade in charge, which for the last four years has also included holding the title of “executive vice president of the European Commission for a Europe fit for the Digital Age.” Her departure caps off an uncharacteristically tumultuous couple of months for the EU’s competition watchdog, amid a backdrop of looming elections and political infighting. Where the agency goes from here is anyone’s guess.

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We at the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) have written extensively on the intersection of the First Amendment, the regulation of online platforms, and the immunity from liability for user-generated content granted to platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

One of the proposals we put forward was that Section 230 immunity should be conditioned on platforms making reasonable efforts to help potential plaintiffs be able to track down users for illegal conduct. This post is the second in a series on the right to anonymity. In this edition, I will explore the degree to which the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech, and whether it forecloses the application of such a statutory duty of care.

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ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann was a guest on the Heard Tell Show podcast to recent passing of Jimmy Buffett, how his influence went well beyond music to business, the identity of modern Florida, the culture of “work hard, play hard”, and how he combined several styles together into a lifestyle folks gravitated to. The full episode is embedded below.

Coming out of Labor Day weekend, there’s not a lot of earth-shaking happenings at the Telecom Hootenanny. But like a visit to the state fair, there’s always something to see.

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If you spend a lot of time in the world of competition policy—or any time at all on the announced Kroger/Albertsons merger—you will eventually stumble on the unfortunately named and greatly misunderstood “waterbed effect.” In a congressional hearing regarding the merger, this purported effect was mentioned at least a half-dozen times.

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What is anonymity? Do we have a right to it? And against what other values should this right be balanced when it comes to government regulation? This blog post will be the first in a series that looks at what anonymity is, why it is important, and what tradeoffs should be considered when applying a right to anonymity in specific contexts.

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Concentration is a terrible measure of [insert basically anything people actually care about]. Have I said that before? Concentration tells us nothing about market power, efficiency, or whether policy changes can do anything to increase welfare. Economists know that, especially industrial organization (IO) economists.

If we want to measure market power for a seller, a better measure is the markup, defined as the ratio of price over marginal cost. If we want to measure market power for a buyer, we can look at the markdown. Either one is a better measure of market power (possibly bad) and often the very definition of market power.

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This Labor Day, America’s labor movement is at the brink of a pivotal moment. Conservatives are now joining liberals in embracing the vital role of labor unions for advancing a worker-centric society—albeit with some crucial reforms in mind.

This comes at a time when workers are feeling apprehensive about their future labor market prospects, especially with recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence. Concurrently, the independent economy—comprised of freelancers, gig workers, and conventional contractors—is revolutionizing how we work and challenging the relevance of traditional, employee-centric labor unions.

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Labor Day approaches with most of us looking forward to a long weekend off, but there’s much in competition world looming on the horizon. As I am looking forward to a couple of days off, I’ll offer more of an annotated bibliography than analysis. But also a bit of discussion, because I am what I am.

Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division announced a series of workshops “aimed at promoting a dynamic discussion about the draft [merger] guidelines to complement the comments currently being submitted to the agencies by the public.” The first of these workshops is slated for Sept. 5, the day after Labor Day. Workshops two and three have yet to be announced. The timing is tight, given that the deadline for submitting public comments on the guidelines is Sept. 18. There might indeed be a dynamic discussion, even if the agenda for the first workshop doesn’t promise a balanced one.

Read the full piece here.