The Digital Economy

Karina Montoya reflects on the end of the remedies phase of the Department of Justice’s case against Google for monopolizing the online search market. She argues that Google’s warnings against divestiture of its browser, Chrome, fall short and that a breakup will benefit the security of the internet, innovation, and users.

Georgios Petropoulos, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne review what the Meta antitrust case reveals about its merger and acquisition strategy and what lessons...

Joseph Price writes that how the court in the Meta antitrust case determines the relevant product market may have implications for merger activity among television broadcasters, who have similarly argued that the regulators and courts use outdated market definitions to block consolidation.

The artificial intelligence market is rapidly developing but antitrust regulators are failing to update their policies, write Tennessee Attorney General and Reporter Jonathan Skrmetti and Kevin Frazier. Regulators’ passiveness risks repeating what happened to social media markets, where a few tech giants were able to acquire nascent competitors and dominate the market. The authors propose three policies to help maintain a competitive AI market.

Recent government wins against Big Tech demonstrate the prudence of proactively stopping consolidation in the emerging AI startup ecosystem to prevent harm to innovation and consumers. OpenAI’s recent acquisition of Windsurf raises these competition concerns. The antitrust agencies should block it.

Regulators worldwide are debating how to rein in Big Tech's dominance over app distribution. Tiffany Tsai and Chuyue Tian explore how Apple’s clash with China’s WeChat complicates standard assumptions about platform competition and what it might mean for the next wave of antitrust enforcement.

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.

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.