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ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was cited by Meer.com in a story about the European Commission’s move to block Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot. You can read the full piece here.

Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law & Economics, argues the EC’s rationale is based on far-fetched hypotheticals about dramatic actions Amazon could take in the future, such as limiting or foreclosing competitors from selling on Amazon, rather than concrete evidence, ultimately undermining consumer interests.

ICLE Nonresident Scholar Joanna Shepherd was quoted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a story about recently passed Georgia legislation that would limit insurers’ liability for big-rig crashes. You can read the full piece here.

Georgia is one of four states that allow direct actions against the insurers of commercial vehicle operators, Emory University law professor Joanna Shepherd said. Evidence shows “insurance companies do charge higher prices when they expect to be involved in more litigation,” she said.

Potential downsides of the bill include that it might make it harder for some plaintiffs to get compensation and force some motor carriers to pay defense costs upfront, Shepherd said. She said she believes that “in the vast majority of cases, we won’t see a problem.”

…Shepherd and Eric Larson, a commercial litigation partner at Morris Manning, said lawmakers may soften the bill to get it approved in the next session.

“The way it’s written right now, it seems extremely difficult for a plaintiff to prevail,” Shepherd said. “I think it goes much too far.”

ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Communications Daily in a story about the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed 5G Fund order. You can read the full piece here.

Kristian Stout, director-innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, said without text it’s difficult to form “strong opinions” on the 5G Fund. “When there are items like this under consideration there is no good reason not to release them to the public as they are being considered,” Stout said.

ICLE Academic Affiliate Christopher Yoo was cited in a post at The Volokh Conspiracy about his recent piece dissecting problems with the argument that social-media platforms should be treated as common carriers. You can read the full piece here.

University of Pennsylvania law Prof. Christopher Yoo recently published an article that is the most thorough takedown of the common carrier theory so far. Here is the abstract…

…I agree with almost all of Yoo’s analysis. In particular, I think he is right that social media firms don’t fit any of the traditional rationales for common carrier status, and that states cannot simply create such status by legislative fiat (or at least, if they do, it cannot override constitutional constraints on their regulatory authority).

ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was quoted by The Oregonian on Portland voters unwillingness to raise property taxes to support the public school system. You can read the full piece here.

Voters are acutely aware of a host of other local and regional taxes and levies that have won approval in the past five years, some of which have been slow to yield measurable results, said Eric Fruits, an economics professor at Portland State University who has sent four children to Portland’s public schools.

ICLE Senior Scholar Lazar Radic was quoted by ExchangeWire in a story about how other jurisdictions are looking to copy the EU’s Digital Markets Act. You can read the full piece here.

ICLE’s Lazar Radic calls what the DMA is trying to achieve ‘the Brussels effect’ – “a regulatory contagion from the EU to other places. This would turn it into something like what you have called “the world’s digital police,” at least within the boundaries of the conduct covered by the DMA,” he explains.

…For advertisers, adapting to managing additional silos can further complicate an already tricky task. With the fragmentation of tracking and profiling individuals at scale without relying on third-party data, which is frequently stored in third-party cookies, many marketers are already grappling with this challenge. Radic describes this as “…clearly designed to drive a wedge in gatekeepers’ ad tech model, preventing them from cross-using data between a core platform services and any other service provided by the gatekeeper – for example, between an online search engine, a messaging app, and a social networking app.”

…“Gatekeeper’s ad tech might become less effective, and their ads less relevant. This hurts gatekeepers. In turn, given gatekeepers’ loss of control of advertising on their own platforms, end-users might be exposed to more irrelevant, random advertising noise from third-parties,” explains Radic. “This hurts consumers. The DMA could also impact gatekeepers’ incentives to invest in their platform, seeing as how the regulation purposefully facilitates third parties from free-riding on those investments. This, in the end, hurts everyone.”

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.”