Good intentions make for lousy competition law when they are stapled to bad economics. That is the trouble with the new fashion in digital regulation: It treats integration as suspicion, product design as coercion, and innovation as something firms may
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The European Commission’s Search-Data Trust Fall
The European Commission is trying to pull off a difficult trick: force Google to share search-query data with rivals while insisting the shared data is no longer personal data at all.
That is the central tension in the Commission’s April
‘Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory,’ by Armen Alchian
One of the most persistent criticisms of law & economics is that it rests on unrealistic assumptions. Economic models often assume firms maximize profits, investors respond rationally to incentives, and market participants systematically adjust their behavior in predictable ways. Critics
In Space, No One Can See Your HHI
Two rocket companies walk into an antitrust review. They leave as a de facto monopoly. And somehow, the punchline may be that this was good for consumers, taxpayers, and maybe even competition.
A little context. In 2006, Boeing and Lockheed
The Case of the Vanishing Competitor
Spirit Airlines was supposed to be the competitor antitrust law saved. Instead, it may become the cautionary tale antitrust law cannot quite avoid.
The carrier’s disappearance has transformed the JetBlue-Spirit merger litigation from an ordinary postmortem into a test case
The AI Jobs Panic Comes to Sacramento
California has seen the future of work, and Sacramento’s first instinct is to convene 14 task forces about it.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-6-26 today, setting California’s workforce agencies in motion on directives involving research reviews, revisions to
Antitrust at the Agencies: National Nanny Hangover Edition
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) rulemaking machinery is humming again. Is it being tuned for optimal performance—or revved for another trip into the ditch?
Most of the current action has to do with consumer protection. That’s par for the course,
Don’t Freeze the AI Race at the Starting Line
Regulators keep warning that AI markets are about to be captured by Big Tech. The awkward fact is that AI markets keep refusing to cooperate. Several years into the generative-AI boom, the sector still looks less like a coronation than
The Future of News and Its Frenemies
The local news business has spent the past two decades being “saved” by people who mostly seem to want it embalmed. Every new shift in how Americans consume information—websites, social feeds, newsletters, podcasts, short-form video, artificial-intelligence summaries—gets treated less like
Robin Hood Carries a Credit Card
The “reverse Robin Hood” hypothesis is back, wearing a fresh econometric hat and carrying a very large number. The claim is familiar: credit card rewards programs let affluent cardholders pick the pockets of poorer consumers who pay with cash or