The legislative session has ended and Governor Newsom is expected to sign into law S.B. 4 and A.B. 14. These bills stand as the final pieces of the state’s new broadband infrastructure program. With a now-estimated $7.5 billion assembled between… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Competition’
No, Tech Monopolies Don’t Serve National Security
In what appears to be a “throw spaghetti on the wall approach” to stopping antitrust reform targeting Big Tech, a few Members of Congress and a range of former military and intelligence officials wrote a letter asserting that these companies… Read More ›
Starve the Beast: Monopoly Power and Political Corruption
Docket of the Living Dead In 2017, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai – a former Verizon lawyer appointed by Donald Trump – announced his intention to dismantle the Commission’s hard-won 2015 Network Neutrality regulation. The 2015 order owed its… Read More ›
Facebook’s Secret War on Switching Costs
When the FTC filed its amended antitrust complaint against Facebook in mid-August, we read it with interest. FTC Chair Lina Khan rose to fame with a seminal analysis of the monopolistic tactics of Amazon, another Big Tech giant, when she… Read More ›
When It Comes to Antitrust, It’s All Connected
A knife was stuck in antitrust in the 1980s and it bled out for the next 40 years. By the 1990s, the orthodox view of antitrust went like this: horizontal monopolies are bad, but vertical monopolies are efficient. In other… Read More ›
Party Like It’s 1979: The OG Antitrust Is Back, Baby!
President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond. To a casual… Read More ›
A New Bill Would Protect Indie Video Game Developers and App Developers
Congress’s recent efforts on antitrust and competition in the tech space have been focused on today’s biggest tech companies, not on setting policy for the sector as a whole. Although Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (and perhaps Microsoft) are the… Read More ›
Utilities Governed Like Empires
Believe the hype After decades of hype, it’s only natural for your eyes to skate over corporate mission-statements without stopping to take note of them, but when it comes to ending your relationship with them, tech giants’ stated goals take… Read More ›
EFF at 30: Freeing the Internet, with Net Neutrality Pioneer Gigi Sohn
To commemorate the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 30th anniversary, we present EFF30 Fireside Chats. This limited series of livestreamed conversations looks back at some of the biggest issues in internet history and their effects on the modern web. To celebrate 30 years… Read More ›
Victory! Californians Can Now Choose Their Broadband Destiny
Years ago, we noted that despite being one of the world’s largest economies, the state of California had no broadband plan for universal, affordable, high-speed access. It is clear that access that meets our needs requires fiber optic infrastructure, yet… Read More ›