Issue Brief: Pole Attachments and Broadband Build-out

The Ghosts of Antitrust Past

PPI Director of Technology Policy, Alec Stapp reviews the antitrust cases against IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft and discusses what we can learn from them today. He explains the relevant concepts necessary for understanding the history of market competition in the tech industry.

ICLE Issue Brief

Amazon is not essential, except to the EU’s flawed investigations

Amazon has largely avoided the crosshairs of antitrust enforcers to date (leaving aside the embarrassing dangerous threats of arbitrary enforcement by some US presidential candidates). The reasons seem obvious: in the US it handles a mere 5% of all retail sales (with lower shares in the EU), and it consistently provides access to a wide array of affordable goods.

ICLE Issue Brief

Is European Competition Law Protectionist? Unpacking the Commission’s Unflattering Track record

Last month, the European Commission slapped another fine upon Google for infringing European competition rules (€1.49 billion this time). This brings Google’s contribution to the EU budget to a dizzying total of €8.25 billion (to put this into perspective, the total EU budget for 2019 is €165.8 billion).

ICLE Issue Brief

STRUCTURALIST INNOVATION: A SHAKY LEGAL PRESUMPTION IN NEED OF AN OVERHAUL

How does a market’s structure affect innovation? This crucial question has occupied the world’s brightest economists for almost a century, from Schumpeter who found that monopoly was optimal, through Arrow who concluded that competitive market structures were key, to the endogenous growth scholars who empirically derived an inverted-U relationship between market concentration and innovation.

ICLE Issue Brief

Schrepel - The European Commission Is Undermining Innovation

This article introduces an empirical study conducted over the period 2004 to 2018 (Android included) on all the fines imposed by the European Commission on the basis of Article 102 TFEU. We show that the European Commission’s decisions may have the effect of slowing down R&D for numerous sanctioned companies.

ICLE Issue Brief