News

Herbert Hovenkamp reviews Epic Games’ lawsuits against Apple and Google for restraining users’ ability to access Epic’s offerings through third-party app stores. A comparison of the two ecosystems sheds light on what remedies would improve benefits to consumers and how the Department of Justice’s own lawsuit against Apple may fare.

Diana Moss reviews four recent examples of the Trump administration weaponizing antitrust and regulation to stifle opposing ideological and political viewpoints.

Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reviews Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan’s recent book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing). The book presents an optimistic vision for the educational and pedagogical role of AI-assisted chatbots as personal tutors and teaching assistants. Khan discusses his book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

It is an economic truism that markets operate more efficiently and fairly when there is more transparency. However, in the case of sovereign debt markets, the virtues of transparency are partially offset by its costs, writes Mark Weidemaier. Without an international regulator or bankruptcy court, opacity sometimes advances the public interest, including by helping financially distressed governments protect assets.

Member of the European Parliament Alexandra Geese writes that illiberal politicians and Big Tech social media platforms have abused the principle of freedom of speech to suppress ideas with which they do not agree and promote hate speech. She provides three recommendations for retaking speech from the social media platforms that constitute today’s public sphere.

In new research, Benjamin Wood, Sven Gallasch, Nicholas Shaxson, Katherine Sievert, and Gary Sacks write that competition underenforcement and a narrow regulatory focus on prices and output has allowed industries that produce harmful consumer products, such as tobacco or ultra-processed foods, to increase demand and, consequentially, harm to society. They argue that competition law must evolve to consider health impacts.

The abundance movement, which seeks to lift the burden of inefficient regulation off the private sector to unleash equitable growth, has become the policy platform for many liberals. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argues that the movement fails to account for the costs of externalities that many of the regulations it derides seek to address.

Gary Kalman writes that actions under the second Trump administration to dismantle recent anti-corruption initiatives, including those pioneered during the first Trump administration, will cost dearly the American and global economy and enable many of the nefarious actors President Trump has publicly admonished.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York reflects on the history of cryptocurrency and his experience adjudicating criminal cases involving it.

The following is an excerpt from "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, now out at Princeton University Press.