Is the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis responsible for the rise of populism in the US and Europe?; the real Google censorship scandal is its re-entry into China; Europe’s new controversial copyright law could change the Internet; and can Facebook unbreak democracy?
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Sen. Mark Warner’s proposals to regulate social media platforms are by far the most ambitious to come from Congress. We gathered three experts to discuss their pros and cons.
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In a wide-ranging interview with ProMarket, media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan explains why Facebook has become “too big to manage” and why he believes the only solution to its bigness is a global political movement aimed at breaking it up.
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Scott Pruitt resigns from the EPA; a new report finds that digital platforms are not fully complying with the EU’s new privacy rules; Google, meanwhile, has a new privacy scandal; a month after its acquisition of Time Warner was approved, AT&T is already raising prices for its streaming TV customers; and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s new career draws criticism.
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SCOTUS Forum. In the first of a roundtable of op-eds on the Supreme Court’s Amex decision of June 25, Chris Sagers harks back to William Howard Taft’s warning that entertaining defenses of patently anticompetitive behavior would be to “set sail on a sea of doubt.” The Amex decision, writes Sagers, shows Taft was right.
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AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner continues to make waves; a New York federal judge says the entire Consumer of Financial Protection Bureau needs to be eliminated; the Koch Brothers are enlisting sophisticated data tool to fight against public transit; and which private contractors stand to benefit from the administration’s immigration policies?
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A new study by researchers at the University of Warwick investigates the relationship between Donald Trump’s tweets and anti-Muslim hate crime—with sobering results for social media optimists.
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The opening panel of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference discussed the source of digital platforms’ power and what, if anything, can be done to address the numerous challenges their ability to shape opinions and outcomes present.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.
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George Mason University faces controversy over its relationship with donors; the former CEO of Volkswagen is charged in relation to the company’s diesel emissions cheating scandal; and are Google and Facebook already trying to undermine Europe’s new privacy rules?
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The Committee on Internet Platforms Regulation, proposed Zingales would be comprised of academics and experts on the industry.
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It is not every day that economists can identify a market where consumers are significantly better off after large price increases. Nonetheless, a new working paper by Ellison and Ellison proposes and substantiates a model of the online market for used books that—thanks to improved buyer-seller matches made possible by new search technologies—finds exactly that.
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