Issues

Antitrust and Intellectual Property: A Brief Introduction

This chapter explores the conflict between antitrust law and intellectual property (IP) rights. Antitrust law aims at limiting monopoly power, while IP rights tend to establish limited monopolies in ideas, but IP rights rarely confer the ability to raise prices without losing customers.

Patent Assertion Entities and Competition Policy

Firms that own and license patents but do not produce anything are known as patent assertion entities (PAE), or patent trolls. PAE can harm competition and innovation. This book collects studies of PAEs and competition policy from the United States, China, Korea, and Europe.

Blind Spot: The Attention Economy and the Law

Firms like Google and Facebook rely on consumer attention, a limited resource. Consumer protection laws and antitrust law assume that harm must be monetary, and do not effectively control problems that arise from unwanted intrusions on our attention.

Antitrust Provides a More Reasonable Regulatory Framework than Net Neutrality

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed network neutrality rules on Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The rules depressed investment and harmed consumers. In 2017, the FCC started a proceeding to end net neutrality regulation.

Platform Ecosystems: How Developers Invert the Firm

This paper describes why firms like Apple, Microsoft, and Google choose to orchestrate the creation of products by outside developers rather than to create product internally. Firms that produce digital products like software benefit most from this strategy, because of knowledge spillovers.

Law, Social Welfare, and Net Neutrality

Net neutrality rules bar broadband carriers from charging different prices to different Internet users, but this would mean that ordinary consumers are paying more for Internet service so that firms like Netflix can pay less.

FRAND in India

Some patents must be licensed on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. In India, both the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and the courts have decided FRAND disputes. The CCI’s decisions lack detail and adopt different rules than the courts.

Reflecting on the 1996 Act

The 1996 Telecommunications Act was intended to open communications markets to competition. Legislators did not foresee the role that the Internet and wireless service would play in increasing competition; instead, they emphasized the importance of local telephone networks.

The Death of Antitrust Safe Harbors: Causes and Consequences

In the 1980s and 1990s, antitrust courts ruled that some business behavior would be presumed legal under antitrust case law and merger guidelines, creating “safe harbors.” In the twenty-first century, most of those safe harbors have disappeared.

Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy

Many businesses are “pipelines” that channel goods or services to consumers. Today, pipelines face competition from a new business model, the platform. Platforms provide opportunities for consumers and producers to interact, just as Uber connects drivers and passengers.