The Digital Economy

The largest artificial intelligence firms are able to afford access to quality data from content producers like the New York Times, while smaller startups are being left out. This dynamic risks concentrating markets and creating unassailable barriers to entry. Compulsory licenses offer one solution to lower barriers to entry for nascent AI firms without harming content producers and consumers, writes Kristelia García.

Christian Peukert argues that the market for licensing content from copyright owners like newspapers or online forums requires a standardized regime if access to this data, used to train artificial intelligence models, is to remain available for more than just the largest AI firms. A failure to maintain non-discriminatory access will result in the consolidation of both the AI and content production markets.

Is there a world where AI developers could get the training data they need through content licensing deals? Matthew Sag argues that content licensing deals between developers of artificial intelligence and content owners are only possible for large content owners and cannot feasibly apply to the bulk of producers and owners of content on the internet.

Large AI firms like OpenAI and Amazon are licensing content to train their models that they might otherwise have been able to access for free under the fair use doctrine. Mark A. Lemley and Jacob Noti-Victor write that this behavior may constitute anticompetitive acquiescence—where large firms agree to license content they don’t have to in order to raise rivals’ costs.

Roslyn Layton examines the recent Amazon Web Services outage and compares it with last year’s CrowdStrike outage to illustrate differences in scope, responsibility, and systemic impact. She argues that cloud providers should contribute to the Universal Service Fund, ensuring financial contribution to resilience and critical infrastructure for essential services.

Victor Oliveira Fernandes analyzes the contributions to digital market regulation presented in Brazil’s Fair Competition Act for Digital Markets. The proposed act reflects a careful balance between antitrust orthodoxy and innovation and, in its success or failure, will pave the way for additional digital regulation in the Global South.

The Google Search monopoly case focused on how Google’s agreements with Apple to set Google Search as the exclusive default search engine on Apple’s mobile devices allowed Google to solidify its monopoly in internet search. However, a less-explored dimension of these agreements is how they likewise fortified Apple’s monopoly power in the smartphone market, writes Steven C. Salop.

Drawing on her working paper, Giovanna Massarotto discusses three algorithmic approaches to how Google can fairly and efficiently share its data with rivals per the requirements of a court’s mandated remedy for illegally monopolizing the online search market.

States are beginning to impose idiosyncratic rules on artificial intelligence chatbots and other offerings in response to harms to consumers. Rather than create a...

Judge Amit Mehta shaped his remedies in the Google Search case on the assumption that startups developing generative artificial intelligence models can restore competition in internet search. Mihir Kshirsagar analyzes the barriers to entry these startups face—scale, distribution, defaults, data and integration advantages, and content access—to show how Big Tech is still in control of the future of the search industry.