Marketplace of Ideas

The following is a transcript of Tom Ginsburg's keynote address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference—Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas.

The following is the second part to the transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s keynote at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and...

The following is a transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson's Keynote Address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference. A transcript of Ferguson's accompanying interview with University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, and the subsequent audience Q&A, will be published next week.

The concentration of news media has spurred concerns about their ability to protect the marketplace of ideas integral to the functioning of democracy. Based on new research, Marcel Garz and Mart Ots discuss why media consolidation may not lead to lower journalistic quality but still affects society through a decline in local news and original content.

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.

Luigi Zingales invites guest contributors to the Washington Post’s op-ed pages to boycott the opinion section in response to the recent decision by the...

Brooke Fox writes about ProMarket as a digital space where intellectual debate can take place without the influence of special interests. Who should control the...

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

Media pluralism is a core democratic value in Europe. Upholding it requires that media concentration is scrutinized beyond its impact on competition in the traditional economic formulation. By addressing the challenges posed by dominant media players and fostering a diverse information ecosystem, Europe aims to uphold media plurality as a democratic value and ensure that citizens can engage in informed decision-making. From this angle, the European approach to protecting media pluralism might offer an interesting comparative  perspective for the United States debate, write Maciej Bernatt and Marta Sznajder.

Ula Furgal and Magali Eben review the United Kingdom’s efforts to address the lopsided balance of power between traditional news media and digital platforms,...