Bill Baer argues that the United States’ history with promoting national champions through industrial policy shows how protection and the diminution of competition often backfires on the favored companies and the state. He writes that industrial policy must complement competition policy.
Elizabeth Popp Berman writes that the history of the antimonopoly movement and industrial policy in the United States shows that antitrust and industrial policy, currently considered by many to be in conflict, can complement each other in pursuit of shared goals.
Three antitrust experts review the trends and cases that defined European antitrust and competition in 2024.
Apple’s unfair trading conditions and the Digital Markets Act
Alessia...
The ongoing debates about the EU’s competition policy have predominantly focused on Western Europe, overlooking the dynamic growth and unique challenges of Central and Eastern Europe, writes Maciej Bernatt and Kati Cseres. This oversight risks deepening economic disparities and undermining the EU’s goals of unity, democracy, and innovation-driven growth.
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.
Despite fundamental changes in the real economy, and strides in the regulation of privacy, data, and digital markets, antitrust practice and discourse in Europe are still conducted in “safe spaces” where the antitrust community resists change and remains attached to neoliberal approaches and efficiency goals. But the Trump Administration will not just signify a wholesale return to pre-NeoBrandeisian times (as many in Europe hope): indeed Europeans hiding in their “safe spaces” may well be surprised, writes Cristina Caffarra.
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.
In Europe, many regulatory authorities are debating whether to loosen regulations on tech companies so that they can catch up with their counterparts in the United States and close Europe’s innovation gap. Based on her recent article, Anu Bradford shows that this choice is a false one. She argues that rather than stringent regulation, the gap in tech innovation between the U.S. and EU can be explained by differences in their scaling opportunities, capital markets, bankruptcy laws, immigration policy, and flexibility of their labor markets.