Blockchain technology and smart contracts hold some promise for reinvigorating competition, providing more efficient and secure ways of doing business on the internet, while at the same time lifting the bar in data protection and privacy.

But is this new general purpose technology all that it’s made out to be? Will it challenge the power of the major digital platforms?  And what are the risks that blockchain itself will become concentrated and fall prey to anti-competitive conduct?

ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel joins the Competition Lore Podcast to take on these challenging questions. The full episode is embedded below.

Blockchain is not just bitcoin. It’s a general purpose technology that some say has the potential to revolutionise swathes of the economy, creating a new, more efficient, more secure way to exchange information and value.

But just as was true of the early days of the internet, a real understanding of blockchain technology eludes many of us, making it difficult to think meaningfully about its promise and its pitfalls.

ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepels joins this episode of the Competition Lore Podcast. Thibault has made blockchain and its antitrust implications his specialty and in this episode, he walks us through the nuts and bolts of the technology. The full episode is embedded below.

Last week we learned that the Senate has likely scraped together the four votes needed to join the House in passing a joint resolution to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico. The House passed its resolution with the votes of just 13 Republican members, all of them joining the Democratic majority over the vigorous efforts of Republican House leaders to prevent any defections. It is a virtual certainty that Congress will be unable to muster the two-thirds majorities in both houses required to override the president’s promised veto of the measure.

Read the full piece here.

Near the end of her new proposal to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, Senator Warren asks, “So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?”

Read the full piece here.

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.

Read the full piece here.

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.

On March 1, 2019, ICLE Research Fellow Alec Stapp appeared on a panel discussing “Big Brother in Big Tech” and the privacy implications associated with large tech platforms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. This panel is part of a day-long conference— “Who’s Afraid of Big Tech”—that will explore the larger legal and policy issues that arise around the privacy, censorship, and competition concerns that have been raised about the large tech platforms. Video of the panel is embedded below.