In the first of three interrelated articles, transportation consultant Hubert Horan discusses Uber’s “uncompetitive economics.” There is no real innovation in the company’s business model, he argues. Its market share is the product of predatory pricing and gigantic subsidies, not of higher productivity.
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What seems to be a big reward to innovation ultimately reduces the incentive to innovate, argues a new Stigler Center working paper by Krishna Kamepalli, Raghuram Rajan, and Luigi Zingales. Their analysis of Google and Facebook’s acquisitions shows that “It is dangerous to apply twentieth-century economic intuitions to twenty-first-century economic problems.”
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The corruption exposed by Israeli antimonopolists has been a key driver of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current political woes.
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For companies that sell on Amazon’s platform, “winning the Buy Box”—the area on the right-hand side of the page that says “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now”—is everything. While Amazon says it’s a neutral arbiter, there is ample evidence that the company has rigged its algorithm to deliver outcomes that further its own interests at the expense of sellers and consumers.
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In attempting to address legitimate privacy concerns, Google could be trying to monopolize surveillance.
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The issues around technology, data, and privacy are complicated, but solving them is less tricky that many companies would have Congress believe.
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Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean
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Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony this week illustrated just how much Facebook’s top brass still underestimate the public anger against the company. Congress, however, is still too focused on publicly berating Facebook instead of actually regulating it.
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Antitrust regulators should stop mergers where a firm owning the means of transmission acquires a provider of content. The people that own the pipes shouldn’t also own the water. As the Supreme Court stated in 1945, “Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not.”
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A new report claims Google has been using its Google News Initiative to stage a “media takeover” and reveals the increasing influence of the company on newsrooms.
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The signals of unrest in Chile mounted for years amid corruption scandals, rising inequality, and new monopolies. The fare increase on public transport that sparked the protests was only the final straw.
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Why did Washington respond to the 2008 financial crisis by pushing even more wealth and power into the hands of the same people that caused it? The answer is partly rooted in the legacy of the angry young Democrats who entered Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal and unwittingly loosened the chains of concentrated corporate power.
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