A five-decade consensus on the objectives of antitrust law is under threat today from the extraordinarily divisive politics of contemporary America. It took a long time and sordid episodes to get the politics out of antitrust—it would be a shame to go backwards and politicize competition policy again.
What should be of antitrust concern is how Apple has used its iOS monopoly power in anticompetitive ways that go far beyond what Microsoft was lambasted for doing to Netscape in the now-ancient 1990s.
Three recent speeches by Obama Administration officials provide key insights into the rather conflicted view of current policymakers on the appropriate role of competition regulation in today’s age of digital-fueled disruption.
There’s a famous old political adage — “where you stand is where sit” (also known as Miles’ Law) — meaning basically that government policy positions are dictated more by agency imperative and institutional memory than objective consideration of the public interest. A related concept is “regulatory capture,” where administrative agencies over time become defenders of the status quo and pursue objectives more for regulated firms […]
Three high-level FTC staffers are backing Tesla in its ongoing fight to sell electric cars directly to consumers.
US competition agencies say they have clarified that antitrust is, not “a roadblock to legitimate cybersecurity information sharing,” but the real story is that the risk of antitrust exposure for exchange of cyber risk information, even among direct competitors, was and remains almost non-existent.
We’ve been discussing the FTC and EU investigations of Google’s search practices for more than two years. The latest FairSearch contentions represent a transparent attempt to forestall resolution of the European process, moving the goalposts in light of the failure of their dire competitive predictions. It is time for Commissioner Almunia and the EU to close up shop, settle and move on.
Thirteen months after the FTC settled its antitrust investigation of Google by flatly declining to regulate the company’s search practices, the EU is poised to do just that.
Making a predictive judgment about future competition in an existing market is quite different from predicting that in the future new markets will emerge.
In the ongoing saga of governmental antitrust investigations of Google, recent weeks have witnessed a new level of rhetoric and disingenuous use of the regulatory process to handicap, rather than promote, competition and innovation. The current case in point relates once again to search neutrality, but this time complaining rivals remarkably object to getting exactly what they’ve asked for over many years.