antitrust and competition

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.

The House v. NCAA private antitrust settlement professionalized collegiate sports by requiring colleges and universities to compensate student athletes. The case has changed the economics of college sports, pushing schools to spend big to pay for top athletes to field teams that compete for championships. New research from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that although the new model has narrowed success to the top programs, the ability for schools to pay for success has now been mostly priced in, writes Diana L. Moss.

In new research, Yoan Hermstrüwer and David Imhof analyze how AI can help antitrust authorities predict cartels by assessing international bidding data in countries with similar legal and market structures.

India is working on legislating new competition rules to govern artificial intelligence and other tech markets. But recommendations from a recent report by the Competition Commission of India suggest it might revert to old competition standards that will likely prove ineffectual in governing the new AI market, writes Abhineet Nayyar.

China’s new safe harbor rules for vertical dealing, including practices like resale price maintenance hitherto presumed generally anticompetitive, are less accommodating than they may seem, writes Yin Hu.

Antitrust agencies were right to suspect that Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would have harmed consumers, content creators, and rival streaming platforms. They needed the consumer welfare standard to show how, writes Sean D. Reyes.

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.

In a new volume chapter, Shai Agmon and Samuel Bagg argue that academic and policy references to “competition” often fail to distinguish between competition’s many forms. Their disaggregation of competition into two complementary processes—parallel and friction competition—helps to clarify the neo-Brandeisian approach to competition policy and its advantages over the traditional consumer welfare approach.

In new research, Alejandro Herrera-Caicedo, Jessica Jeffers, and Elena Prager find that firms that share a C-suite executive or board director are much more...

Antitrust authorities increasingly assess mergers through the lens of innovation, particularly in research-intensive sectors such as pharmaceuticals. In new research, Carmine Ornaghi and Lorenzo Cassi show how mergers disrupt human capital and reduce innovation in what they call manslaughter acquisitions.