big tech

Karina Montoya reflects on the end of the remedies phase of the Department of Justice’s case against Google for monopolizing the online search market. She argues that Google’s warnings against divestiture of its browser, Chrome, fall short and that a breakup will benefit the security of the internet, innovation, and users.

Georgios Petropoulos, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne review what the Meta antitrust case reveals about its merger and acquisition strategy and what lessons...

Joseph Price writes that how the court in the Meta antitrust case determines the relevant product market may have implications for merger activity among television broadcasters, who have similarly argued that the regulators and courts use outdated market definitions to block consolidation.

Herbert Hovenkamp writes that the court presiding over the Google Ad Tech case gave the government an important win. However, by relying on the per se tying rule instead of rule of reason, the court perpetuated a flawed court precedent that can preclude serious market analysis for competitive harms.

The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta for monopolizing personal social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp serves as a warning of allowing Big Tech companies to acquire nascent competitors in the artificial intelligence market through quasi-mergers that dodge government scrutiny. Based on new research, Alexandros Kazimirov argues that antitrust agencies can look at a combination of circumstantial evidence, including market product proximity, price premiums and product discontinuation, to help adjust their approach to keep AI markets contestable, rather than trying to restore contestability ten years from now.

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.

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...

Mark MacCarthy writes that the case law supports Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson’s charge that collaboration by social media companies on content moderation practices would be anticompetitive collusion. However, the author argues that open and transparent cooperation might actually benefit a troubled internet, and Congress should consider carving out a content-neutral antitrust exemption for platforms in the way it has in the past for broadcast networks.

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