Tech

Should the European Union Require Tech Firms to Adopt a Common Charger?

According to a new European Commission directive expected to be approved in the next few months, tech firms will have to use...

Taming Big Tech: What Can We Expect From Germany’s New Antitrust Tool?

Targeted at Big Tech, Germany’s new antitrust tool for dealing with large digital platforms rebalances the power between the competition watchdog and...

Zoom, Netflix, Slack: Amazon Is Behind All the Services We Use to Work From Home (and That’s a Problem)

The new normal for millions of people represents a near-total dependence on Amazon’s cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and places a substantial portion...

"You Can Put the Monopoly Tiger in a Cage but You Cannot Transform a Tiger Into a Vegan"

In an extensive interview with the Swiss news website TheMarket.ch, Luigi Zingales discusses ways to deal with Big Tech and the impact of the...

Twitter Refused to Promote the New Capitalisn’t Episode: This Is a Problem for Free Speech (and for American Health Care)

Twitter banned political ads from its platform but has full discretion in deciding what constitutes a "political ad." The Stigler Center tried to promote...

The Qualcomm Case: Why Protecting American Tech Monopolies Is a Big Favor to China

The FTC sued the company that monopolized the market of components for cell phones with its aggressive patent policy. However, in the technological race...

A Tale of Hubris and Excess: How Uber Fooled Portland Regulators

In an excerpt from his new book "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber," New York Times reporter Mike Isaac reveals the details of Uber's...

Monopolization in the Name of Privacy: Google Is Slowly But Steadily Closing Its Advertising Ecosystem

In attempting to address legitimate privacy concerns, Google could be trying to monopolize surveillance.       As Big Tech’s leviathan wraps its tentacles around online markets,...

How the Adtech Market Incentivizes Profit-Driven Disinformation

If we want to solve the disinformation crisis, we need to fix the perverse incentives created by the online advertising market through structural and...

The Road to Digital Serfdom? The Visible Hand of Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance capitalism is not the capitalism of old, writes Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff in her new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.     Surveillance capitalism departs...

LATEST NEWS

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.

We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry

Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.

Debating the Draft Merger Guidelines: Transcript

On September 7, the Stigler Center hosted a webinar to discuss the draft merger guidelines. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of the event.

Holding Up the News

Meta has silenced news organizations’ social media accounts in response to Canada’s Online News Act, a law not yet in effect. Josh Braun describes the reasoning behind such legislation, its potential flaws, and how Meta, particularly Facebook, has turned the Canadian wildfire crisis into a regulatory pressure campaign.