The Digital Economy

Alexandros Kazimirov discusses how Nvidia’s quasi-merger with Groq resembles a familiar pattern of regulatory evasion that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have adopted with emerging artificial intelligence companies. He notes that his proposed remedy that was available to antitrust enforcers in the large language model market is not applicable to chip manufacturers like Nvidia.

Mihir Kshirsagar argues that the evidence presented in FTC v. Meta shows that discussions about the application of First Amendment protections to social media must go beyond the binary set in Moody v. NetChoice between treating them as common carriers or editorial agents. Rather, a commercial conduct framework is needed to understand how speech operates on platforms designed to maximize user attention and ad revenue.

In new research, Dragan Filimonovic, Christian Rutzer, and Conny Wunsch find that generative artificial intelligence not only enhances the productivity of scientific researchers, but also lowers barriers to entry for early-career scholars and scholars who are not fluent in English. Rather than attempting to prohibit GenAI’s use, institutions should develop disclosure guidelines to facilitate trust and support adoption.

In new research, Muxin Li and Ksenia Shakhgildyan examine the 2018 “brand gating” agreement between Apple and Amazon and how it impacted competition and consumer welfare on Amazon’s platform.

For the first time in the history of mobile phones, Americans will be able to access a variety of app stores on Android phones, following game developer Epic Games’ legal victory over Google. Fiona Scott Morton and Nick Jacobson discuss how Google may try to undermine the court’s remedies to stifle competition and how both American and European regulators can respond to protect competition.

In recent research, Brian Broughman, Matthew Wansley, and Samuel Weinstein examine how startups are changing their traditional exit strategies in response to more stringent antitrust enforcement. Many startups are adopting alternative strategies to stay private longer, ultimately raising new questions for competition policy. 

Countries representing 98% of global GDP are exploring central bank digital currencies. They must devise digital infrastructure to maximize competition, writes Jeff Alvares.

Jérémie Haese and Christian Peukert present new empirical findings on core open source technologies for the web and AI. Open source holds promise for making AI systems more transparent and secure, but it risks masking continued centralized control under the guise of openness.

Matt Lucky reviews two new books exploring why digital platforms are failing users and how to rediscover the internet’s original promises of an abundance of high-quality and cheap services: Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

Jasper van den Boom provides a synopsis of his new book, Regulating Competition in the Digital Network Industry, which comes out at Cambridge University Press in December. The book can be pre-ordered here.