Lightning in a Bottleneck: How Regulatory Gridlock Is Choking America’s Energy Boom

America’s power grid has plenty of new customers and no shortage of new ideas. What it lacks is a regulatory system capable of connecting the two.

Artificial intelligence data centers, advanced manufacturing, and cryptocurrency operations are driving electricity demand sharply higher. Yet the rules for connecting new power sources and major users remain slow, fragmented, and rigid. The grid’s emerging bottleneck is therefore less a failure of technology than of institutions.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has begun to confront that mismatch. It is pursuing two major reform tracks: a series of Section 206 “show cause” orders focused on connecting large electricity users to the grid, and an overhaul of the Natural Gas Blanket Certificate program aimed at speeding infrastructure approvals.

That turn toward market realities is welcome. But success will depend on whether FERC resists the temptation to replace one thicket of rules with another. Its final policies should instead draw on basic law & economics principles: reduce transaction costs, clarify property rights, and avoid overconfident central planning.

Reform will also require addressing the regulatory friction between FERC and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which can leave even promising projects trapped between agencies.

Read the full piece here.

America’s multibillion-dollar broadband push rests on an unglamorous piece of infrastructure: the utility pole. Fiber may carry the future, but first someone has to pay for the wood holding it up.

Broadband providers rarely own the poles their networks use. Reaching a new community usually requires attaching equipment to poles owned by a utility or another company. Who pays the resulting costs can determine whether a rural build makes economic sense—or never gets built.

The trouble often starts with the poles themselves. Many are old, overloaded, or burdened by safety and code violations left by earlier attachers. Pole owners may then try to make the newest provider pay to fix problems it did not create.

Appalachian Power Co.’s (APCo) “cost causer” policy put that practice squarely before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). When Comcast sought to attach to a pole carrying someone else’s violation, APCo required Comcast to pay to replace the entire pole. In effect, APCo treated the arrival of a broadband builder as an opportunity to shift deferred-maintenance costs onto the party least responsible for them.

In February 2026, the FCC sided with Comcast and struck down the policy. In the first decision under its accelerated docket for pole-attachment disputes, the FCC held that APCo could not force a new attacher to pay the full cost of replacing a pole that was already out of compliance. The new attacher could be charged only for the incremental cost of installing a taller or stronger pole needed to accommodate its equipment beyond what correcting the existing violation would require.

The ruling should have settled the matter. It did not.

Rather than apply the FCC’s cost-sharing standard, APCo continued billing Comcast a flat 20% of the full replacement cost, whether or not Comcast’s attachments caused that expense. Comcast returned to the FCC earlier this month with a new complaint.

The dispute now tests more than one utility’s billing policy. It will show whether the FCC’s landmark broadband-deployment order has real force—or merely looks good on paper.

Read the full piece here.

Private credit has become the financial system’s latest designated villain: opaque, fast-growing, and—depending on the headline—one bad quarter away from dragging insurers, banks, and retirees down with it.

For the past two years, warnings about life insurers’ private-credit investments have become a staple of financial commentary. In 2024, the International Monetary Fund cautioned that private credit’s rapid growth and limited transparency could eventually threaten the broader financial system. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston examined whether the sector’s expansion poses stability risks, especially through bank credit lines to private-credit funds. Moody’s has flagged liquidity and concentration risks in insurers’ growing allocations. Axios suggested that annuities could transmit private-credit losses to ordinary households, while a Forbes columnist argued that rising defaults are already testing both banks and insurers.

The concern is not hard to understand. Life insurers hold $9.9 trillion in general-account assets against annuity and life-insurance obligations that may stretch decades into the future. Private loans do not trade on public markets, so insurers value them through models and appraisals rather than observable prices. Many also carry private ratings disclosed to the insurer but not to the market. If those valuations or ratings prove too rosy, insurers may hold less capital than their actual risks require—and the gap may surface only when policyholders expect payment.

That makes private credit a plausible source of risk. It does not make it a proven one. Whether the danger exists in practice is an empirical question, and regulators already collect the data needed to answer it.

In a recent International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) white paper, Lars Powell and I used National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) annual-statement data to test whether life insurers with larger private-credit holdings are financially weaker than their peers. They are not.

Read the full piece here.

Europe keeps asking where its technology champions are. In Google Android, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) offered part of the answer: build a successful platform, and Brussels may spend the next decade treating its architecture as evidence.

The CJEU’s final judgment in Google Android, handed down last week, will be celebrated in Brussels as a triumph of public enforcement over Big Tech. It deserves a less triumphant reading.

The judgment ends an eight-year legal fight by leaving Google and Alphabet with a fine of roughly €4.125 billion for contractual practices tied to Android, Google Search, Chrome, and the Play Store. The court accepted that Google abused its dominance by using Android distribution terms, preinstallation conditions, anti-fragmentation obligations, and related arrangements to favor its own search and browser products.

The fine is painful. The precedent is worse.

The CJEU approved important parts of the General Court’s analysis. It allowed courts to consider economic context without systematically constructing a counterfactual. It also confirmed that liability does not always depend on proof that the practices could foreclose an “as-efficient competitor” (AEC). That test asks whether a rival as efficient as the dominant firm could compete despite the challenged conduct.

That doctrinal signal matters more than the penalty. A €4 billion fine stings. But the larger cost comes from the precedent’s effects on platform design, investment incentives, and the legal expectations facing future European technology firms. If Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)—which governs abuse of dominance—condemns ordinary platform governance whenever rivals dislike the outcome, Europe will not get more innovation. It will get more litigation, more regulatory redesign of products, and fewer firms willing to build integrated platforms in the first place.

Read the full piece here.

The American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act rests on a sweeping claim about the ownership of value created by artificial intelligence. Because AI models are trained on data generated by the public, the bill treats the resulting gains as a public resource subject to state control and redistribution.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) proposal would require covered AI developers to transfer up to 50% of their corporate value to a new federal sovereign wealth fund. That fund would distribute “dividends” to the public and use its ownership stake to steer AI development “in the public interest.”

The bill therefore raises questions that go well beyond artificial intelligence. It implicates basic principles of value creation, property rights, corporate governance, political choice, and capital formation. Its central premise is that public data gives rise to public ownership. That premise confuses the availability of information with the entrepreneurial and technical process required to transform information into a productive asset.

This piece argues that the Sanders bill rests on four related errors. First, it treats raw data as the source of economic value, while discounting the entrepreneurial discovery and technical judgment that make data useful. Second, it assumes a federal commission can identify and impose a coherent public interest on a technology marked by conflicting preferences and rapid change. Third, it would weaken the market for corporate control and disrupt integrated firm structures that often reduce transaction costs and improve coordination. Fourth, it would distort capital formation by creating confiscation risk and encouraging firms to organize around a political threshold rather than consumer demand.

Read the full piece here.

The Supreme Court just told police they cannot turn your phone into a witness against you merely because you walked through the wrong patch of pavement. That is the good news. The less comforting news is that the Court reached that result by dragging some badly aging Fourth Amendment doctrine along for the ride.

In its June 29 Chatrie v. United States decision, the Court held 6-3 that law enforcement conducts a Fourth Amendment “search” when it forces companies like Google to turn over users’ location-history data through a geofence warrant.

That is a major win for digital privacy. A geofence warrant lets police demand information about every device in a defined area during a set time—essentially asking first and sorting suspects later. The Court was right to rein in that digital dragnet.

But peer under the hood of Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion, and the legal engine sputters. The Court reached the right destination, but took the scenic route through a swamp.

To preserve the aging Katz “reasonable expectation of privacy” test—and its creaky cousin, the third-party doctrine—the majority tied itself into a logical pretzel. Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurring only in the judgment, offered the cleaner and more textually grounded path the Court should have taken.

Read the full piece here.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) was built to police digital gatekeepers. The European Commission now wants to test how far that metaphor can stretch—past app stores, social networks, and marketplaces, and into the server racks.

The Commission has reached the preliminary view that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure should be designated as gatekeepers under the DMA. That would mark two firsts. It would be the first time cloud computing falls within the DMA’s reach, and only the second time the Commission uses Article 3(8)—the provision that allows it to designate firms that do not meet the law’s numerical thresholds after conducting a market investigation. While the Commission did invoke Article 3(8) in its iPad OS designation, quantitative thresholds still did most of the work in that case.

AWS and Azure are the two largest cloud providers operating in the European Union. But the DMA’s user-number thresholds were built for consumer-facing platforms, not cloud computing, which is overwhelmingly a business-to-business service. Both providers therefore fall outside those thresholds. To designate them anyway, the Commission must do more than invoke the DMA’s built-in presumptions. It must show, with actual evidence, that AWS and Azure serve as “important gateways” and enjoy “entrenched and durable” market positions.

That makes these designations far more interesting than another lap around the DMA enforcement track. Cloud services do not obviously operate as “gates” in the way two-sided platforms do. They do not sit between business users and end users in the familiar app-store or marketplace sense. One of the DMA’s core rationales—increasing contestability by prying open bottlenecks controlled by gatekeepers—appears, at least at first glance, to be missing.

So the question is not merely whether AWS and Azure are large. Plainly, they are. The question is whether “gatekeeper” remains a meaningful legal category that separates firms with durable bottleneck power from firms that are big in competitive markets. Or is it just Brussels-speak for size, with the statutory criteria serving as the ceremonial chant before the inevitable designation?

Until now, the Commission has relied on the quantitative presumptions in Article 3(2) to designate gatekeepers. The qualitative criteria have never had to carry the load on their own. With AWS and Azure, they finally do.

Read the full piece here.

n 1877, Thomas Doolittle strung the first hard-drawn copper telephone wire in Ansonia, Connecticut, replacing the iron lines that had carried Alexander Graham Bell’s earliest calls. Nearly 150 years later, most of the country is finally retiring the last copper in its telephone networks, replacing it with fiber-optic cable and wireless connectivity.

California, naturally, has other ideas.

Much of the state’s copper network remains in place—powered, maintained, and protected by rules written for a monopoly telephone era that no longer exists. AT&T still provides old-fashioned “plain old telephone service” (POTS) to roughly 3% of households in its California territory. Yet the company spends about $1 billion a year keeping that network alive.

The reason is not consumer demand. It is state regulation. And the costs do not stop at California’s border. They fall on customers across the country.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now has a chance to fix that. AT&T has asked the FCC to declare that, once the agency authorizes POTS discontinuance under federal law, California’s carrier-of-last-resort (COLR) requirements are preempted.

Read the full piece here.

Antitrust agencies have a habit of giving new labels to old anxieties. In artificial intelligence, the latest worry is that partnerships between large technology firms and startups are not partnerships at all, but mergers in clever disguises.

In the first article in this series, we examined how Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) has approached this new generation of artificial-intelligence partnerships. We focused on the agency’s treatment of “reverse acqui-hires”—deals in which a company hires much of a startup’s team without formally buying the company—as concentration acts; its renewed reliance on Article 88, §7 call-in powers, which allow CADE to review certain transactions that fall outside Brazil’s mandatory-notification thresholds; and the practical distinctions that pushed Microsoft/Inflection—but not Google/Character.AI—into formal merger review.

Those procedural moves raise a deeper question: What theory of harm is driving CADE’s enforcement agenda?

CADE’s decisions suggest that the agency is increasingly borrowing from international debates over “killer acquisitions,” “talent hoarding,” and the loss of potential competition in digital markets. A “killer acquisition” occurs when an incumbent buys a smaller firm to shut down a potential future rival. “Talent hoarding” is the related claim that large firms hire scarce technical workers not to deploy them productively, but to keep them away from rivals. These theories sound tidy enough. The harder question is whether they rest on evidence sturdy enough to support intervention.

Before CADE completes its review of Microsoft/Inflection or opens further investigations into AI partnerships, that question deserves a closer look. This second article takes it up.

Read the full piece here.