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Judge Amit Mehta’s remedies for Google’s search monopoly stopped short of banning payments for default search placement, reflecting the hope that generative AI will erode the power of traditional search. Cristian Santesteban argues the opposite: in the AI era of search, defaults may matter more by steering critical data and learning signals from AI-powered search sessions to the most dominant product. This mechanism can potentially compound Google’s advantage.

Congressional attempts to ban cryptocurrency platforms from providing yield, or interest, on stablecoin holdings have so far failed, and will likely continue to fail, as long as they run up against economic logic, writes David Krause.

On the 150th anniversary of the first telephone call, John Haigh, Nancy Rose, and Jonathan Sallet reflect on lessons from the history of telecommunications...

In new research, Ben Bates examines the recent wave of funds designed to open private markets to retail investors. Such funds both underreport volatility and perform worse than comparable funds aimed at wealthier investors.

The following is an excerpt from “The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder" by Eswar Prasad," now out at Hachette Book Group.

In new research providing the first systematic evidence on public notices, Kimberlyn Munevar, Anya Nakhmurina, and Delphine Samuels examine how Florida's 2023 law allowing local governments to stop publishing public notices in newspapers has affected citizen engagement in local governance.

The EU’s proposed Digital Omnibus to simplify digital regulation suggests repealing the 2019 Platform-to-Business Regulation. This poses a problem for the Digital Markets Act, which relies on the P2B-Regulation for how to define core platform services like search engines. Moving forward with the repeal will require legislators to renegotiate first the DMA, which is necessary anyways to adapt the law to the age of artificial intelligence, writes Jan-Frederick Göhsl.

The Trump administration’s blacklist of Anthropic represents its greatest attack on free markets yet. America’s businesses must push back, writes Luigi Zingales.

In new research, Matthias Breuer and Qingkai Dong examine how federal data collection can influence local spending. They examine road surveys, showing that roads included in federal samples are more likely to be funded and those that are not often face funding and safety declines, reflecting a need for improved measurement systems.

Previous plaintiffs have argued unsuccessfully that Google’s Jedi Blue agreement with Facebook is anticompetitive and illegal. The agreement grants Facebook preferential access to Google’s dominant digital advertisement system in exchange for not building competing technologies. The plaintiffs’ challenges to Jedi Blue would have been on stronger ground had they argued that Jedi Blue is compelling evidence of illegal monopoly maintenance, as occurred in Microsoft, writes Joshua B. Gray.