Series

Stacey Dogan writes that antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe are right to investigate Big Tech-AI partnerships. Even if AI markets remain competitive today, history and economics show that the Big Tech companies will push to monopolize segments of the AI market if given the opportunity. The investigations serve as a deterrent against anticompetitive behavior and give the regulators access to the knowledge and information that will be necessary to detect anticompetitive patterns as the AI market matures.

Adam Crews writes that Congress’s expressly broad grants of rulemaking power mean that the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision limiting federal agencies’ discretion will likely affect the Federal Communications Commission less than some other federal agencies. Instead, the major questions and nondelegation doctrines pose greater threats to the FCC’s regulatory discretion.

Many cities across the United States are experiencing structural budget deficits. However, in part due to salary and benefit promises to public-employee unions, there is little capacity to control spending. Local politicians have few electoral incentives to push back against union bargaining demands to address these rising costs.

Municipal and state governments provide input to the organization that creates their accounting standards. Such input by stakeholders can be helpful, but their influence has produced some accounting rules that diverge from both economic reality and private sector rules. These deviations allow governments to understate budget liabilities, including pensions plans, and put at risk the financial health of states and cities across the United States.

In contrast to a recent paper that argues the decline in antitrust enforcement over recent decades is due largely to the political influence of big business, Herbert Hovenkamp argues that small businesses and trade associations have historically had more influence over antitrust policy, often lobbying for less competition and higher prices.

Simonetta Vezzoso weighs in on the policy debate on algorithmic competition.

Michal Gal discusses the regulatory hurdles to deal with the impacts of algorithmic price collusion. In the meantime, she says, market fixes include algorithmic consumers and platform nudges to mitigate price coordination.

Axel Gautier, Ashwin Ittoo, and Pieter van Cleynenbreugel write that the practice of pricing algorithms tacitly colluding remains theoretical for now, and technological obstacles render it very unlikely in the short term. However, regulators must still prepare for a future in which artificial intelligence achieves the necessary sophistication to collude.

Oliver Budzinski and Victoriia Noskova discuss in their publication why merger simulations are not more widely used by competition authorities and in front of the courts to predict future effects of mergers despite advancements in availability of data, AI and computational power. The institutional setting is an essential factor for computational antitrust tools to be accepted and applied by competition authorities.

Maurice Stucke explains three policy approaches to algorithmic collusion and discrimination, and makes the case for a broader ecosystem approach that addresses not only the shortcomings of current antitrust law and merger review, but extends beyond them for a comprehensive policy response to the many risks associated with artificial intelligence.