The Digital Economy

Andrey Mir writes that antitrust scholarship and enforcement seeking to break up platform monopolies overlook the benefits that these platforms provide because they are monopolies. He says the community must keep this in mind as it seeks to alleviate harms that any monopoly incurs to the economy.

The new Trump administration has thrust antitrust’s role in protecting free speech into the spotlight. Jan Polański discusses how this development should inform the European Union’s own debates about antitrust and free speech.

Kaleb Byars argues that while Big Tech censorship may constitute antitrust harm, without reform current law does not provide antitrust agencies or the courts a remedy.

The following is an excerpt from Angela Zhang's recent book, High Wire, out at Oxford University Press. Please join the Stigler Center on April 3 at 6:30-7:30 pm CT for a conversation with Zhang, where she'll discuss High Wire with Financial Times' China Technology Correspondent Eleanor Olcott. You can register for the livestream of the event here.

In new research, Dante Donati and Hortense Fong find that the brief TikTok outage in January benefited Meta as advertisers turned to its platforms to reach users. Small businesses, less able to switch, lost out.

Big Tech’s monopoly over online discourse threatens democracy. "Middleware" promises a path forward by adding competitive, customizable layers of recommendation algorithms. But can middleware...

Alissa Cooper and Zander Arnao argue that a lack of competition in social media has allowed dominant platforms to design algorithms to maximize for...

Utsav Gandhi relates recent developments in the American government’s ban on TikTok and shows how the case maps over broader debates about conflicts between...

Steven C. Salop argues that as part of any remedy outcome from the Google Search case, Google cannot be permitted to enter agreements with...

New research from Christopher Stewart, John Kepler, and Charles McClure shows that thousands of large mergers and acquisitions bypass antitrust review because current regulatory thresholds ignore intangible assets like intellectual property and customer data. These unreported deals, particularly in tech and pharma sectors, show signs of being more anticompetitive - with higher premiums paid, increased market power for acquirers, and evidence of "killer acquisitions" in pharmaceuticals.