Stigler Center 2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference

The following is the second part to the transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s keynote at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and...

A new ProMarket survey of scholars reveals that while most view federal funding cuts under the Trump administration as a major threat to academic freedom, nearly half also see ideological bias within universities as a serious issue. The survey also found that many disagree with Columbia’s approach of capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands, and would prefer to see universities defend themselves in court or through collective action.

Andrey Mir writes that antitrust scholarship and enforcement seeking to break up platform monopolies overlook the benefits that these platforms provide because they are monopolies. He says the community must keep this in mind as it seeks to alleviate harms that any monopoly incurs to the economy.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson delivered a keynote address at the Stigler Center's 2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference, which focused on how economic concentration impacts the marketplace of ideas.

ProMarket's home institution, the Stigler Center, is repromulgating its disclosure policy ahead of its 2025 Antitrust and Competition Policy Conference this Thursday and Friday. You can register to attend the livestream of the conference here.

Michelle Meagher writes that to preserve its contributions to the marketplace of ideas about antitrust, the Neo-Brandeisian movement must build out an infrastructure that archives its ideas and makes them accessible to the public. It must also continue to make its case for its core contributions to this marketplace, including on bigness and per se rules.

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...

Media pluralism is a core democratic value in Europe. Upholding it requires that media concentration is scrutinized beyond its impact on competition in the traditional economic formulation. By addressing the challenges posed by dominant media players and fostering a diverse information ecosystem, Europe aims to uphold media plurality as a democratic value and ensure that citizens can engage in informed decision-making. From this angle, the European approach to protecting media pluralism might offer an interesting comparative  perspective for the United States debate, write Maciej Bernatt and Marta Sznajder.

Ula Furgal and Magali Eben review the United Kingdom’s efforts to address the lopsided balance of power between traditional news media and digital platforms,...