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ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was quoted by WCPO-9 television in Cincinnati in a story about Kroger and Albertsons’ updated divestiture plan to head off a challenge to their proposed merger from the Federal Trade Commission. You can read the full piece here.

“When they go to court, they can tell the judge, ‘Look, we had this divestiture deal. The FTC pushed back on it. We responded to that pushback. And so this is as good a deal as we could come up with and still have the merger work,’” said Eric Fruits, a senior scholar who has followed the Kroger-Albertsons merger for the International Center for Law and Economics in Portland.

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was quoted by BiometricUpdate.com in a story about the American Privacy Rights Act. You can read the full piece here.

Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, says that regardless of any individual state law’s quality, there is an advantage to having diversity in law. Manne believes states should be allowed to choose whether their laws would remain in effect, superseding APRA. “Neither all consumers nor all businesses have the same kind of privacy risks and preferences,” Manne says. “As a practical matter, it’s very hard to prescribe rules that are optimal for 330 million people. And that’s true with all law. Instead, you could end up with a lot of much more tailored privacy regimes, and the opportunity for companies to match their needs with privacy regimes being offered.”

ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout was quoted by Racket about Minnesota’s new right-to-repair law. You can read the full piece here.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about right-to-repair legislation. Kristian Stout is a programmer and lawyer who is the director of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics. Stout loves to tinker with computers, but he’s not convinced that the right to repair makes sense for people who aren’t as technically inclined.

According to Stout, restricting repair to shops that have a special deal with a manufacturer can mean more peace of mind for consumers, because not every shop will have the resources to protect consumer data. “There’s more incentive for smaller firms to actually not invest as much in cybersecurity and data privacy,” he says.

Stout uses the example of Apple, which keeps a tight lid on its repair network in order to protect their business. “They want to make sure that consumer devices and data, specifically, are protected.” He adds that this isn’t just out of the goodness of their hearts, either—big tech companies want to protect their own brand by preventing things from going wrong with their devices.

Last week was the occasion of the “spring meeting”; that is, the big annual antitrust convention in Washington, D.C. hosted by the American Bar Association (ABA) Antitrust Section. To engage in a bit of self-plagiarism (efficient for me, at least), I had this to say about it last year…

Read the full piece here.

ICLE Academic Affiliate Liad Wagman was mentioned by Illinois Tech in an accouncement about his winning “Best Antitrust Academic Article, General Antitrust Category” in the 2024 Antitrust Writing Awards. You can read the full piece here.

Liad Wagman, the John and Mae Calamos Dean Endowed Chair at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business, has been named winner of the Best Antitrust Academic Article, General Antitrust Category, in the 2024 Antitrust Writing Awards.

The award recognizes “Towards a Technological Overhaul of American Antitrust,” an article co-authored by Wagman, Professor of Economics Ginger Zhe Jin at the University of Maryland, College Park, and D. Daniel Sokol, the Carolyn Craig Franklin Chair in Law and Business at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was cited in a column in Forbes about his proposal for a “choice-of-law” system for privacy law. You can read the full piece here.

A legislative alternative that could avoid difficult cost-benefit analysis while reducing the growing burden of proliferating state privacy regulation has been advanced by scholars Geoffrey Manne of the International Center for Law and Economics and Jim Harper of the American Enterprise Institute:

“[W]e propose a federal statute requiring states to recognize contractual choice-of-law provisions, so companies and consumers can choose what state privacy law to adopt. Privacy would continue to be regulated at the state level. However, the federal government would provide for jurisdictional competition among states, and companies operating nationally could comply with the privacy laws of any one state. Unlike a single federal privacy law, this approach would provide 50 competing privacy regimes for national firms. Protecting choice of law can trigger competition and innovation in privacy practices while preserving a role for meaningful state privacy regulation.”

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was quoted by Legal Newsline in a story about the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust suits and the way that they gerrymander relevant markets. You can read the full piece here.

The slicing and dicing of relevant markets is an “unfortunate trend,” antitrust scholar Geoffrey Manne has said, although it also could signal the weakness of the FTC’s case.

“An artificially narrow and gerrymandered market definition is a double-edged sword,” Manne wrote. “If the court accepts it, it’s much easier to show market power. But the odder the construction, the more likely it is to strain the court’s credulity.”

ICLE Senior Scholar Mikolaj Barczentewicz was quoted by IAPP News on the European Data Protection Board’s ruling that so-called “pay-or-consent” models will in most cases not comply with General Data Protection Regulation. You can read the full piece here.

University of Surrey associate professor of Law Miko?aj Barczentewicz said that had the EDPB issued a stronger opinion against pay-or-consent models, it would have “contradicted what the CJEU said last July” in the Meta v. Bundeskartellamt case.

“The most important take-away is that the EDPB — however grudgingly — confirmed that ‘pay-or-consent’ models are, in principle, compatible with the GDPR,” Barczentewicz told The Privacy Advisor.

In the opinion, Barczentewicz said, “the EDPB does not provide much clarity, speaking only of what they think is or isn’t allowed for large online platforms in ‘most cases.’ This opinion will certainly be considered by national data protection authorities in their investigations of Meta, but the opinion doesn’t prejudge what will be the final decisions that, for example, the Irish DPC will take.”

ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was cited by IP Watchdog in a story about the Federal Trade Commission’s planned vote on rules to ban nearly all noncompete clauses in employment contracts. You can read the full piece here.

Brian Albrecht, Chief Economist of the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE), said in an article for Truth on the Market that, while he recognizes the potential for abusive practices associated with noncompetes, he does not support a complete ban. “[T]here is a simple economic rationale for the contract: noncompetes encourage both parties to invest in the employee-employer relationship, just like marriage contracts encourage spouses to invest in each other,” Albrecht wrote. And in official comments submitted on the proposal, ICLE said the need for a complete ban is not supported by the evidence or the Commission’s experience.