The government subpoenas Google’s records, and also Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s. MSFT and YHOO cave: Their stocks are down a little over and a little under 2%, respectively. Google resists. Its stock drops almost 9%. And yet a headline for an article by MSNBC’s chief economics correspondent–with the relevant stock prices immediately alongside–notes, “Google stand could be good for business.” Maybe he’s talking about Microsoft’s business?

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Via the WSJblog, I see that Google and the government are tangling again over the government’s effort to obtain search records (this time relating to porn-viewing-by-children enforcement efforts) (I guess that should read anti-porn-viewing-by-children enforcement efforts). It reminds me of a post of Dan’s on Concurring Opinions from a while back that I wanted to comment on, but, well, I didn’t have a blog then. I do now.

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First, Joel Trachtman of Tufts’ (great and soon-to-be better) Fletcher School has started up a new international trade blog, called International Economic Law and Policy. If you know anything about international trade law and/or economics, you know Joel Trachtman and thus you know that this will be a must-read. He has been joined at the blog by Columbia Law’s Petros Mavroidis.

Read the full piece here.

Today’s New York Times reports on a new cigarette bar in Chicago, where the city council has just imposed a sweeping smoking ban. (I recently criticized the ban at Ideoblog.) The proprietors of the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge insist that the lounge is permitted because of a loophole allowing smoking in retail tobacco shops. Not surprisingly, Chicago’s anti-smoking zealots are seeking to shut down the business, which they say violates the intent of the anti-smoking ordinance.

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Price gouging regulations (PGRs) have been a popular topic of late in the blogosphere, particularly in the wake of increased post-Katrina (and Rita) gasoline prices. Becker and Posner make the now familiar economic case against PGRs here and here. The basic economic argument against PGRs is well tread ground which I will not repeat here. Suffice it to say, however, that the economic logic has not been sufficient to win the day with state legislatures for one reason or another. According to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Majoras’ Statement to Congress, at least 28 states currently have statutes that provide remedies for short term price spikes in the aftermath of a disaster. For example, Eliot Spitzer recently penned a new bill updating NY’s PGR to trigger upon a 25% markup rather than a “gross disparity” between cost and price. Some of the failure is for obvious reasons.

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We all know that our securities regulatory regime is predominantly a disclosure regime, meaning the regulators, for the most part, don’t impose substantive regulations on securities issuers, but require only accurate, timely disclosure of certain information. And as against a more intrusive, substantive regime, I think this is preferable, even in its current, fairly intrusive form. But too often disclosure is presumed by commentators (and regulators) to be fairly costless — meaning that, even if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it imposes no great cost, and if it succeeds it does so quite cheaply. This is what Larry means when he refers to regulations as “chicken soup.” I think this presumption is often under-supported.

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A few weeks back, Josh had a nice post (on Ideoblog) regarding Judge Alito’s antitrust record. He was pretty optimistic, dismissing Judge Alito’s antitrust critics and concluding that “what little Judge Alito has written on antitrust issues is properly described as fastidious analysis complemented by strict application of doctrine.”

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I’m no expert on the topic (I anxiously await Randy Barnett’s comments), but does anyone else think the opinion in Gonzales v. Oregon issued today (limiting the application of the Controlled Substances Act and upholding Oregon’s assisted suicide law) could have been a masterful dissent in Gonzales v. Raich (reading the Controlled Substances Act to preclude the legal use of medical marijuana). I’m getting my information from SCOTUSblog (as good as the Court itself, and edited, too!), so keep that in mind, but just read these sentences from SCOTUSblog describing the case:

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I didn’t pick the name of this weblog, but I really like it. It encapsulates, I believe, much of what the blogosphere is about.

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