The recent increase in economic concentration and monopoly power make the United States “ripe for dictatorship,” claims Columbia law professor Tim Wu in his new book, The Curse of Bigness. With the release of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to “break up” technology companies like Amazon and Google, fear of bigness is clearly on the rise. Professor Wu’s book adds a new dimension to that fear, arguing that cooperation between political and economic power are “closely linked to the rise of fascism” because “the monopolist and the dictator tend to have overlapping interests.” Economist Hal Singer calls this the book’s “biggest innovation.”

Read the full piece here.

ICLE President & Founder Geoffrey Manne participated in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s “Going Digital” summit in Paris, March 11-12. The summit served as the high-level closing event of the two-year Going Digital Project. The project’s main findings and policy messages were presented, including the final synthesis report, its companion publication on Measuring the Digital Transformation, and the Going Digital Toolkit, a new website that will grow to include indicators, evidence, experiences and innovative policy practices. Video of Geoff’s panel, “Competition in the Digital Age” is embedded below.

It is not uncommon—in fact it is expected—that parties to a negotiation would have different opinions about the reasonableness of any deal. Every buyer asks for a price as low as possible, and sellers naturally request prices at which buyers (feign to) balk. A recent movement among some lawyers and economists has been to label such disagreements in the context of standard-essential patents not as a natural part of bargaining, but as dispositive proof of “hold-up,” or the innovator’s purported abuse of newly gained market power to extort implementers. We have four primary issues with this hold-up fad.

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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?” The full video is embedded below.

Click here to read the full letter.

On Feb 12th ICLE President & Founder Geoffrey Manne joined Olivier Blanchard, Senior Analyst at Futurum Research on the Federalist Society Teleforum Podcast. On the podcast, they discussed the pending decision in the FTC’s controversial Section 5 lawsuit against Qualcomm.

Among other things, the FTC is seeking to permanently enjoin Qualcomm from engaging in certain industry-wide patent licensing practices, which the FTC alleges impair competition in violation of the antitrust laws. However, it has been argued that the FTC’s novel theory fails to meet the burden of proof by showing actual evidence of harm, as clarified recently by the US Supreme Court in Ohio v. American Express Co. The consequences of FTC’s legal theory, if upheld by the court, could reach well-beyond patent licensing arrangements.  Indeed, some experts fear that changes to Qualcomm’s business model will undermine U.S. national security interests and cede American leadership in the 5G race to a foreign adversary—the same concerns echoed last year by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) when it recommended that the President permanently prohibit Broadcom from acquiring Qualcomm.

The full episode is embedded below.

This teleforum will investigate the potential impact of the pending decision in the FTC’s controversial Section 5 lawsuit against Qualcomm, brought days before the change in administration two years ago, with the incoming acting chair writing an unusual and biting dissent. Among other things, the FTC is seeking to permanently enjoin Qualcomm from engaging in certain industry-wide patent licensing practices, which the FTC alleges impair competition in violation of the antitrust laws. However, it has been argued that the FTC’s novel theory fails to meet the burden of proof by showing actual evidence of harm, as clarified recently by the US Supreme Court in Ohio v. American Express Co. The consequences of FTC’s legal theory, if upheld by the court, could reach well-beyond patent licensing arrangements.  Indeed, some experts fear that changes to Qualcomm’s business model will undermine U.S. national security interests and cede American leadership in the 5G race to a foreign adversary—the same concerns echoed last year by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) when it recommended that the President permanently prohibit Broadcom from acquiring Qualcomm.

Featuring: 

Olivier Blanchard, Senior Analyst, Futurum Research

Geoffrey A. Manne, President and Founder, International Center for Law & Economics

The German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office or FCO) this week reached a decision in its nearly 3-year-old Facebook investigation. The decision appears to be based not on a violation of competition rules per se, but, at root, on alleged violations of European data protection rules. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some commentators — who view the case from a purely idiosyncratic, outcome-driven perspective — are praising the agency. But the reality is that the decision is unsound from either a competition or privacy policy perspective and will only make the fraught privacy/antitrust relationship worse.

Read the full piece here.