Blog
President Joe Biden wants to have your online cake and eat it too. His 2023 State of the Union address included numerous announcements of controls on industries and types of citizens. Each deserves to be critiqued, because a government-run economy becomes a failed economy. But I will limit my comments here to his plans for [...]
Smith’s insight that an economy’s purpose is to serve consumers seems self-evident—but not to today’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In three antitrust cases and a change in policy direction, the agency seems to be losing interest in consumers’ preferences. In the cases, the FTC appears to be decreasing its reliance on consumers’ choices in its [...]
On February 1, AEI’s Mark Jamison moderated a discussion between former chairmen of the Federal Trade Commission, AEI’s Timothy J. Muris and Deborah Platt Majoras, on how the Biden administration has returned to the neo-Brandeisian tradition of antitrust policy. Watch this full event below or at AEI.
Social media content moderation has stirred controversies for a number of years. “Fake news” on social media has been decried as a threat to democracy. Politicians pressured social media companies in the run-up to the 2020 election, and cries of misinformation have been frequent in the policy debate over COVID-19. Concerns with political bias by [...]
It’s hard to see who benefits from the European Commission’s (EC) latest attack on Meta. Certainly not consumers. In mid-December 2022, the EC informed Meta of the commission’s “preliminary view that the company breached EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in the markets for online classified ads.” If the EC finds Meta guilty, Meta can [...]