With all the upheaval and social disruptions caused by the current COVID-19 pandemic, it will not take long for legal issues to rise to the top as well. We offer some very preliminary answers.
The Law of Coronavirus
Category Archives: Technology Law
Still Crazy After All These Years (How Social Media Continues to Disrupt Internet Copyright Law)
There is still an inherent and unfortunately unresolved tension between U.S. law and the content-sharing functions that epitomize, social media today.
Antitrust Is About Constraining Market Power
It makes no sense — and would flatly contradict the fundamental role of antitrust in constraining abuse of market power — to jettison the long-standing music industry antitrust consent decrees without an appropriate regulatory framework to replace them.
Debunking the Myth of the “Retail Apocalypse”
For retailers, over-leveraged balance sheets, immense debt service obligations and a failure to adapt to changing consumer preferences are clearly far more significant than anything Amazon has done.
Don’t Revoke the Music Licensing Antitrust Decrees
The Justice Department should not lift the antitrust decrees constraining ASCAP and BMI because nothing of legal or competitive significance in music licensing has changed.
Why Amazon is Good For Traditional Retailers
The “retail apocalypse story” is false. The lesson from Christmas ‘17 is that Amazon is good for consumers, good for competition and, yes, good for traditional retailers. Leave it be.
How Digital Assistant AI Competition is Undermining “Hipster Antitrust” – Part II
The malleability of market boundaries and aggressive AI competition among online services should help rebut claims that not only Google, but Facebook and Amazon as well, are somehow illegal monopolies.
How Digital Assistant AI Competition is Undermining “Hipster Antitrust” – Part I
The hipster antitrust narrative about Internet “monopolies” runs headlong into the reality of fierce artificial intelligence competition among the largest tech companies in the emerging voice-controlled digital assistant space.
Alt-Antitrust. When Antitrust Becomes Anticompetitive.
We should not return to an era when rivals were able to make strategic and unprincipled use of antitrust doctrine to demand special treatment to save themselves from the brutal consequences of competitive failure. America should not let antitrust itself become anticompetitive.
A Toxic Mix of Antitrust, Politics and Jobs
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.