Big Tech

Anthropic has formed an exclusive artificial intelligence consortium to use its general purpose artificial intelligence model, Claude Mythos, to identify and fix vulnerabilities in critical internet and digital infrastructure. Madhavi Singh warns this consortium, called Project Glasswing, could contravene antitrust law and argues for regulatory oversight to ensure that it does not become a front for an illegal cartel.

Meta prevailed in its monopoly case against the Federal Trade Commission by showing that the FTC’s market definition of personal social media was too narrow. However, Meta’s argument—and Judge James Boasberg’s ruling—rested on a flawed empirical assumption that confuses how users divert their time to other activities when no longer able to use a Meta platform with true product substitution.

Judge Amit Mehta’s remedies for Google’s search monopoly stopped short of banning payments for default search placement, reflecting the hope that generative AI will erode the power of traditional search. Cristian Santesteban argues the opposite: in the AI era of search, defaults may matter more by steering critical data and learning signals from AI-powered search sessions to the most dominant product. This mechanism can potentially compound Google’s advantage.

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, 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. 

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.

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.