The "killer acquisition" hypothesis dominates debate on technology mergers, asking whether large firms buy startups to eliminate them. But the more revealing question is what acquirers keep. I report the findings of a new working paper that applies survival analysis to 364 GAFAM acquisitions between 2014 and 2024, tracking how long each target maintained an...Read More
In innovation-driven markets, a market share records who is ahead; it does not reveal how hard that firm must work to remain ahead. A dominance assessment should therefore examine the incumbent’s innovation effort and the innovative capabilities of its challengers before treating persistent leadership as evidence of insulation from competition.Read More
The abuse of economic dependence has attracted renewed attention, largely as a result of the growing policy focus on fairness in digital markets. Rules originally designed to address bargaining-power imbalances in traditional commercial relationships are increasingly being recast as instruments of digital-market enforcement. Their scope and antitrust character, however, remain uncertain. This uncertainty reflects a...Read More
This paper assesses the European Commission’s draft Merger Guidelines against the treatment of efficiencies, the failing firm defence, and the counterfactual in the 2004 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2008 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines. My central claim is that the draft guidelines represent a welcome but incomplete correction. They rightly recognise that merger control can no...Read More
I consider legal decisions resulting in the end of the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality regulation. There is evidence that net neutrality regulation has diminished incentives to invest in internet access and increased transaction costs in the market for access. As a result, net neutrality regulation may have constrained e-commerce. I conclude that ending net...Read More
There were a number of significant decisions from April through June 2026, including: (1) the Eastern District of California’s preliminary injunction in In re Nexstar-Tegna Merger Litigation, requiring hold-separate relief notwithstanding prior DOJ and FCC approval of the acquisition and raising important questions about state parens patriae standing and the scope of injunctive relief; (2)...Read More
Digital and technology markets are often analyzed as if innovation moves along a smooth path. We describe an alternative view: innovation unfolds on rugged technological landscapes, where firms learn from prior successes and failures and choose between expanding the frontier and innovating within existing niches. This distinction helps explain why innovation may stall without exclusion,...Read More
This edition of the Latin Antitrust Chronicles provides an overview of the main developments that took place in late 2025 and early 2026 across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The developments in Argentina and Mexico, on the one hand, focus on changes implemented in the respective antitrust regimes, whereas the updates from Brazil, on the other...Read More
There were a number of decisions from January through March 2026, including: (1) the Ninth Circuit’s decision in AliveCor v. Apple, holding that Apple’s alleged refusal to continue sharing certain data with third-party app developers was properly classified as a refusal to deal (as opposed to predatory product design); (2) the FTC’s win in FTC...Read More
Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 is the most ambitious economic transformation program in the world today, yet it is widely misunderstood in the West. This article introduces a new analytical framework to explain how digital technologies are upgrading the operating system of Saudi capitalism, shifting the economy from rent distribution to value creation through deeper, more...Read More
This issue presents recent developments in EU competition law enforcement in digital markets. It examines the growing phenomenon of parallel investigations by the Commission and national competition authorities – illustrated by the WhatsApp and Amazon Buy Box cases – and the challenges of enforcement allocation within the European Competition Network. The analysis also explores the...Read More
Many parts of the legal system pursue “fair” distributions of wealth or economic status. Antitrust law does not. The antitrust statutes target practices that reduce output or threaten monopoly (measured through prices, output, quality, or innovation) not distributive outcomes.Read More
Market power can be assessed in antitrust cases by two methods often described as “alternatives”. For unilateral conduct, however, they are inconsistent. Courts insist on market shares well above 50%, which entails that only one firm can be a monopolist. Direct measures by examining price-cost margins, however, can sometimes produce two or more “monopolists” in...Read More
US antitrust law has traditionally paid little attention to global competitiveness and industrial policy objectives. This reflects a commitment to enabling the free play of competitive forces to determine market outcomes and an aversion to protectionist policies that may favor inefficient “national champions.” These assumptions are challenged in a global marketplace where China has pursued...Read More
