The Digital Economy

Brazil’s new child protection law has gained less global press than its new digital competition bill. However, the two are complementary efforts that demonstrate how governments must rethink how different regulatory concerns and mandates blend into one another in the digital economy.

In the second of two articles, Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss how governments can reimagine competition policy to protect democracy and citizen welfare without abandoning traditional consumer welfare goals like innovation.

In the first of two articles, Stavros Makris and Filip Lubinski discuss the connection between economic competition and democracy and how competition law allowed Big Tech to undermine both.

In new experimental research, Amit Zac and Michal Gal find that users who use artificial intelligence chatbots to conduct online shopping are being directed to established brands at higher prices without a clear improvement in quality. The logic of AI algorithms risks consolidating markets around established firms while reducing consumer welfare for shoppers.

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.