This was originally posted on the Yale School of Management’s Yale Insights blog.  The first antitrust laws and enforcement efforts in the United States were taken in response to the emergence of sprawling industrial conglomerations—the “trusts” in “antitrust”—that amassed inordinate power over the growing American economy. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, for instance, controlled as […]

Communications networks and other platforms are valuable in large part because of their users. One effect of this is that networks that already have the most users tend to grow even larger. Left unchecked, this can cause significant competition problems and leave individual private companies in charge of vital communications infrastructure. Even if antitrust law […]

The last few days have highlighted the complete inadequacy of our political advertising rules in an era when even the President of the United States has no hesitation in blasting the world with unproven conspiracy theories about political rivals using both traditional broadcast media and social media. We cannot ignore the urgency of this for […]

I have written about app stores at length before but it is worth reiterating a few points given the recent news about Apple removing access to the Hkmap.live app (which helps people track police activity) and Google removing access to The Revolution of Our Times (a protest game).  First, Apple’s (and Google’s) explanations don’t pass […]

Both Mozilla and Google are rolling out some version of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in their respective web browsers, Firefox and Chrome. Internet service providers and others are up in arms. This post will try to explain why at least two of the criticisms–on privacy and competition grounds–don’t make a lot of sense. The technical arguments, on […]

As you may have heard, the long-awaited decision in Mozilla v. FCC came out yesterday. First the bad news: The Federal Communications Commission won on the main issue, which is broadband reclassification. But there’s good news, too, in that the Court completely rejected the FCC’s attempts to prevent states from passing their own net neutrality […]

The Universal Service Fund (USF) is a vital program administered through the Federal Communications Commission intended to ensure that U.S. residents, educational institutions, and healthcare facilities have access to affordable communication services, including broadband. In May, the FCC proposed capping the total amount it would expend for USF programs and combining two USF programs – the E-Rate and Rural Telehealth programs. This is a bad idea, as […]

The laws around broadcasting and the retransmission of broadcast signals by cable and satellite companies are built up around a set of assumptions. One of the most basic is that individual broadcasters broadcast their signal to a specific geographic market where people can pick it up for free over the air, and pay TV providers […]

This is the fourth blog post in a series about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. You can view the full series here. Section 230 plays an important role in allowing sites with user-generated content to operate in general–since it shields them from most liability for third-party speech–while giving them the ability to moderate […]

This policy paper was originally published by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where Gene Kimmelman is a Senior Fellow. It is now clear that antitrust enforcers are in full gear, from Europe to the United States and beyond, identifying actual or possible violations of law by companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon […]