big tech

Jasper van den Boom provides a synopsis of his new book, Regulating Competition in the Digital Network Industry, which comes out at Cambridge University Press in December. The book can be pre-ordered here.

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.

Nick Jacobson compares European and American enforcement to opening up the app store on Apple mobile phones, why European consumers and businesses are at an advantage, and if this advantage indicates that it is time for the United States to adopt legislation akin to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.

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.

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.

Reed Showalter argues that the suggestion that antitrust can be ringfenced from democracy or the democratic process is erroneous. Antitrust is fundamentally a body...

Erik Hovenkamp and A. Douglas Melamed discuss what Judge Amit Mehta got right and wrong in his remedy decision in the Google Search antitrust case.

Herbert Hovenkamp reviews Epic Games’ lawsuits against Apple and Google for restraining users’ ability to access Epic’s offerings through third-party app stores. A comparison of the two ecosystems sheds light on what remedies would improve benefits to consumers and how the Department of Justice’s own lawsuit against Apple may fare.