Brazil's Fair Digital Competition Bill Offers an Alternative to Regulating Big Tech - ProMarket

Beatriz Kira argues that Brazil's proposed digital competition bill shows how the Global South can strengthen regulation of Big Tech platforms without forfeiting competitiveness. Brazil's efforts build on global models yet chart their own course and belie the false dichotomy between encouraging national business development and protecting competition and its benefits.

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The New Geoeconomics of Hard Power Requires New Tools. Will Europe Update? - ProMarket

Europe is acutely aware it has fallen behind competitively, but it is struggling to find a way to recover lost ground. Cristina Caffarra writes that Europe did not find any inspiration in the American anti-monopoly movement, which underpinned the whole-of-government approach of the Biden administration. It is also faltering in developing a response to the vigorous array of tools deployed by the Trump administration to assert power at home and on the world stage. It does not need to be this way, as Europe has tremendous assets and capabilities. But it needs investment and leadership, boldness and experimentation in vision and policy design. Policymakers are beginning to see the urgency, but there is still too much narrow defensive posture by regulators sticking to their patch.

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How the Pursuit of Bigness, Geopolitical Hegemony, and Crony Capitalism Are Threatening Antitrust’s Rule of Law - ProMarket

Eleanor M. Fox and Harry First warn that global strategies and political pressures are undercutting the neutral, rule-of-law competition system.

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Europe Needs First A Consolidated Internal Market. Business Consolidation May Follow - ProMarket

Xavier Vives argues that to create firms that can compete on the international level, the European Union does not need to ease its merger regime or encourage market power. Rather, encouraging European market integration will allow firms to draw in investment and scale up their operations.

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The Political Instrumentalization of Competition and Antitrust Enforcement - ProMarket

Ariel Ezrachi warns about the rising trend of political instrumentalization of antitrust and competition enforcement and its consequences.

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A Pro-Market Framework for Driving Decarbonization: Part II - ProMarket

Corporate decarbonization policy has stagnated under ideological divisions. Arguing that anthropogenic emissions are driven by customer preferences and that such preferences can shift with improved information, Karthik Ramanna advocates for a new approach: an economy-wide system of reliable and comparable accounts of the embedded emissions in products to allow customers (and investors) to make more-informed decisions aligned with underlying preferences. In part II of his two-part series (read part I here), Ramanna explores the principles of an accounting methodology to provide better greenhouse gas emissions data to business customers and consumers and the reasons why, based on historical precedent, such a system is readily adoptable and likely to prove effective.

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A Pro-Market Framework for Driving Decarbonization: Part I - ProMarket

Corporate decarbonization policy has stagnated under ideological divisions. Arguing that anthropogenic emissions are driven by customer preferences and that such preferences can shift with improved information, Karthik Ramanna advocates for a new approach: an economy-wide system of reliable and comparable accounts of the embedded emissions in products to allow customers (and investors) to make better-informed decisions aligned with underlying preferences. In the first of two articles, Ramanna discusses why top-down regulatory approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have failed to generate decarbonization at meaningful scales and the virtues of a pro-market approach to incentivizing and enabling greener corporate and consumer behavior.

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Resisting the Politicization of Antitrust and Regulation - ProMarket

Diana L. Moss reviews the increasing politicization of antitrust and regulation in the United States and what avenues are available to resist the corruption of due process and usurpation of the rule of law.

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Fair and Efficient Data-Sharing From Google Requires a More Advanced Regulatory Approach - ProMarket

Drawing on her working paper, Giovanna Massarotto discusses three algorithmic approaches to how Google can fairly and efficiently share its data with rivals per the requirements of a court's mandated remedy for illegally monopolizing the online search market.

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Market Power Shifts Tariff Costs to Suppliers - ProMarket

Many studies have assumed that United States tariff costs are passed onto consumers. In new research, Vanessa Alviarez, Michele Fioretti, Ken Kikkawa, and Monica Morlacco argue that buyer-seller relationship dynamics allow dominant U.S. importers to instead force higher costs onto exporters.

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How the Law Protects and Promotes Corporate Misconduct - ProMarket

Corporate crimes like fraud continue unabated in the United States. Jennifer Taub defines a chief reason as “accountability theater,” or the propensity of government prosecutors to pursue out-of-court civil settlements rather than criminal trials that, though they might lose them, would publicize the extent of corporate misconduct and better deter future abuse.

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A Voluntary AI Rating System Can Balance Innovation and Consumer Protection - ProMarket

States are beginning to impose idiosyncratic rules on artificial intelligence chatbots and other offerings in response to harms to consumers. Rather than create a fragmented regulatory system that will discourage AI innovation and growth, the AI industry, with the help of the federal government, should encourage a ratings system to improve transparency and protection for [...]

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The Challenge of Accountability Under US Business Law - ProMarket

Elizabeth Pollman reviews barriers for holding corporations and their fiduciaries accountable under corporate and securities law.

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Will GenAI Break Google’s Dominance in Search? - ProMarket

Judge Amit Mehta shaped his remedies in the Google Search case on the assumption that startups developing generative artificial intelligence models can restore competition in internet search. Mihir Kshirsagar analyzes the barriers to entry these startups face—scale, distribution, defaults, data and integration advantages, and content access—to show how Big Tech is still in control of the future of the search industry.

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"Conservative" Antitrust: Something Possibly Kind of New Under the Sun, Maybe - ProMarket

Chris Sagers suggests that something significant could be happening in antitrust, though it probably remains academic for now, and it is hidden behind political messaging that in recent times has gotten most of the attention. He argues that the populist or politicizing talk of antitrust leaders during both the present administration and the last one has grown more detached from real-world administration. But he argues that there may be real change going on behind the scenes, as expressed in positions among some conservatives and Republican office-holders. He argues that the libertarian orthodoxy of the Chicago School no longer defines "conservative" antitrust, and that the range of plausible disagreement may genuinely be changing.

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The New Conservative Antitrust Is Not Here To Last - ProMarket

Gus Hurwitz explores the tenets of conservative antitrust under the second Trump administration and why it is unlikely to establish a lasting influence.

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New Right vs. Conservative Antitrust - ProMarket

Thomas A. Lambert argues that the conservative antitrust program articulated by the antitrust enforcers of the Second Trump administration hardly resembles the conservative antitrust of previous decades. Its divergences will likely end up harming consumers.

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Barriers to Entry as Another Source of Top Income Inequality - ProMarket

A new book, The Power of Creative Destruction, explores how lobbying contributes to the increase in the top 1 percent’s share of income.

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The New “Conservative” Merger Policy Is Not Antitrust. It’s Anti-Speech - ProMarket

Rebecca Haw Allensworth writes that the hallmark of the new conservative antitrust is not economic populism but silencing speech that the Trump administration ideologically opposes.

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Will Trump’s Drug-Pricing Order Reduce Prices for Americans? - ProMarket

President Donald Trump has, across two administrations, sought to lower drug prices for Americans, most recently with executive order “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.” Margherita Colangelo explains why his order is unlikely to accomplish its goal.

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The Political Economy of Distrust in Science - ProMarket

Skewed incentives and the distribution of resources toward corporations have undermined the integrity of scientific research and contributed to the public's distrust in expertise. Matt Lucky explores the political economy of scientific research and potential reforms to bring scientific research closer to its ideals. Various scholars and commentators have lamented the crisis of public trust [...]

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There Is Only Democratic Antitrust - ProMarket

Reed Showalter argues that the suggestion that antitrust can be ringfenced from democracy or the democratic process is erroneous. Antitrust is fundamentally a body of law designed to meet citizens' basic needs, sustain the marketplace of ideas, and protect democracy and the rule of law. This article is the final contribution to a symposium that [...]

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How can Economic Regulation Be Made More Democratic? - ProMarket

Yunsieg P. Kim argues that economic regulation, including antitrust, can only be democratic if it is the choice of well-informed citizens. This article is part of a symposium that explores the relationship between democracy and antitrust. In theory, Congress passes laws, the antitrust agencies implement them through rules and policies, and the courts assure these [...]

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Economic Concentration and Its Dual Threats to Democracy - ProMarket

Erik Peinert explores the paradoxical relationship between economic concentration and democracy, where economic concentration compromises the democratic process and democratic backsliding also gains momentum by taking advantage of concentrated market actors, whose political power is now impotent, to capture civil society.

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Plumbers, Populists, and the Role of Public Opinion in Antitrust - ProMarket

Sean Sullivan discusses the role public opinion should play in setting antitrust policy and what should be left to the expert economists.

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