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Aaron Edlin and Carl Shapiro respond to Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s keynote speech at the 2025 Stigler Center antitrust and competition conference, in which he lays out his approach to regulating the content moderation policies of the major social media platforms. They explain why Ferguson’s approach threatens the exercise of free speech, is inconsistent with antitrust law, and politicizes the agency.

The following is a transcript of Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Roger Alford and former Principle Deputy Assistant Attorney Doha Mekki in conversation with Bloomberg reporter Josh Sisco.

Herbert Hovenkamp writes that the court presiding over the Google Ad Tech case gave the government an important win. However, by relying on the per se tying rule instead of rule of reason, the court perpetuated a flawed court precedent that can preclude serious market analysis for competitive harms.

The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta for monopolizing personal social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp serves as a warning of allowing Big Tech companies to acquire nascent competitors in the artificial intelligence market through quasi-mergers that dodge government scrutiny. Based on new research, Alexandros Kazimirov argues that antitrust agencies can look at a combination of circumstantial evidence, including market product proximity, price premiums and product discontinuation, to help adjust their approach to keep AI markets contestable, rather than trying to restore contestability ten years from now.

In new research, Xuelin Li, Sijie Wang, Jiajie Xu, and Xiang Zheng find that the involvement of specialized venture capital firms influences a biotech startup’s drug portfolio by focusing research and development on fewer products.

The following is a transcript of Tom Ginsburg's keynote address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference—Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas.

Rose Chan Loui explains the current controversy surrounding OpenAI’s decision to abandon its nonprofit status. To learn more about OpenAI’s proposed restructuring, what it means for the race to develop artificial general intelligence, and how it highlights the tricky legal concept of a nonprofit’s “purpose,” listen to Chan Loui’s recent appearance on Capitalisn’t.

A new field experiment sheds light on why Google continues to dominate the search engine market despite regulatory interventions and the availability of alternatives. The authors find that while Google offers higher quality, consumer overestimation of this advantage—along with inattention and default effects—helps entrench its market power and limits the effectiveness of proposed antitrust remedies.

The following is the second part to the transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s keynote at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and...

A new ProMarket survey of scholars reveals that while most view federal funding cuts under the Trump administration as a major threat to academic freedom, nearly half also see ideological bias within universities as a serious issue. The survey also found that many disagree with Columbia’s approach of capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands, and would prefer to see universities defend themselves in court or through collective action.