Todd Henderson on Digital Advertising

Forbes – ICLE Academic Affiliate M. Todd Henderson was quoted by Forbes in a story largely about his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee on competition in digital advertising. You can read full piece here.

M. Todd Henderson, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, appeared at the hearing on May 3, and made an eloquent case for why it is false equivalency to say selling and buying stocks and ads are alike. Just as he does in his recently published white paper for the International Center for Law and Economics, “Ads are not stocks, and any claim that they should be regulated as stocks is deeply misleading.”

He lays it out this way: The stock market is the primary means of wealth creation in the United States—enormous social stakes are implicated in ensuring that stock markets are well-regulated. In the stock market, companies can issue and sell shares of their stock to raise capital, and investors can buy and sell those shares in the hopes of making a profit.