The Digital Economy

In new research, Dante Donati and Hortense Fong find that the brief TikTok outage in January benefited Meta as advertisers turned to its platforms to reach users. Small businesses, less able to switch, lost out.

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...

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

Utsav Gandhi relates recent developments in the American government’s ban on TikTok and shows how the case maps over broader debates about conflicts between...

Steven C. Salop argues that as part of any remedy outcome from the Google Search case, Google cannot be permitted to enter agreements with...

New research from Christopher Stewart, John Kepler, and Charles McClure shows that thousands of large mergers and acquisitions bypass antitrust review because current regulatory thresholds ignore intangible assets like intellectual property and customer data. These unreported deals, particularly in tech and pharma sectors, show signs of being more anticompetitive - with higher premiums paid, increased market power for acquirers, and evidence of "killer acquisitions" in pharmaceuticals.

Ecosystem analysis has been a popular but ill-defined concept in antitrust to identify digital products and services that operate across multiple markets. In new research, Konstantinos Stylianou and Bruno Carballa-Smichowski provide a schematic for defining ecosystems to help courts and regulators pursue more sophisticated investigations and interventions into increasingly complicated markets.

Some American policymakers have sought to adopt and adapt aspects and principles of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act in an effort to regulate Big Tech giants. In new research, Giovanna Massarotto writes that the principle ideologies driving American and European antitrust, and the broader political economy, renders the DMA and its principles too foreign for American adoption.

In a new report from the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Alissa Cooper, Jasper van den Boom, and Zander Arnao examine how to make remedies most effective in the Google Search antitrust case. They argue that restoring competition in online search requires a comprehensive package of remedies that takes into account the multiple levers by which Google Search built, maintains, and could rebuild its monopoly.

Richard R. John recounts how in the twentieth century the once-mighty Bell System, whose descendants include today’s Verizon and AT&T, waged a powerful decades-long public relations campaign, including the funding of history books and research centers, to persuade the public that its success rested in technological imperatives and economic incentives rather than a favorable regulatory landscape. Though the Bell PR campaign failed to stop three highly effective antitrust suits, it succeeded in establishing a story about management, competition, and innovation that many Americans—including several of today’s Big Tech critics—have uncritically repeated.