OpenMarket: Antitrust and Competition

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We have been saying for a while that ridesharing platforms like Lyft are different from traditional transportation firms, not just in the technology they use, but in the basic economics of the manner in which they...

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This weekend AT&T and Time Warner announced a merger deal and it didn't take long for critics on the left to begin making concerned statements about media consolidation. The ...

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Facebook is lobbying the White House for the government’s blessing to offer its “Free Basics” service in the United States, according to a story reported by the Washington Post’s Brian Fung last...

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Yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission was slated to vote on a modified version of a proposal it unveiled back in February to rewrite the rules governing cable set-top boxes. Minutes before the agency was...

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Yesterday, CEI, The Rutherford Institute, and two CEI employees (VP of Strategy Iain Murray and yours truly) filed our opening brief against the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) body scanner regulation, which was...

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Last Friday, Hillary Clinton announced a new plan to “respond to unjustified price hikes” on certain pharmaceutical drugs. This comes after weeks of public debate over the rising price of the EpiPen, a...

At CEI’s 2016 annual dinner—A Night in Casablanca!—in DC, I caught up with three interesting gentlemen for a dose of common sense economics.

Up first is Dr. Bruce Yandle, dean emeritus of Clemson University’s College of Business and Behavioral Science and winner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2016 Julian L. Simon Memorial Award, boldly carrying on Simon’s legacy celebrating free people as the "ultimate resource." Yandle describes the current macroeconomic scene, defined by slow growth sliding into global currency and trade...

Net neutrality proponents have seen their lines splinter over the issue of “zero rating,” the practice of not counting data used to access certain sites and content against a user’s data cap. While consumers have flocked to carriers, such as T-Mobile, which offer such services, many net neutrality fundamentalists point out that zero rating is a violation of the principle that all data be treated the same all the time. This mantra has been successful in getting zero-rated applications, such as Facebook’s Free Basics, outlawed in some countries (like Chile and India).

In the...

When you hear about “crony capitalism,” what comes to mind? The Export-Import Bank? The ethanol mandate? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Tax credits and loan guarantees for “green energy”? These are all prime examples of government intervention enriching narrow yet politically savvy corporate interests at the expense of taxpayers and consumers. But many other pernicious forms of crony capitalism slide under the radar. A case in point: the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) vetting of media and telecom mergers, a highly politicized process that empowers a few unelected bureaucrats to shape the future of entire markets.

Almost a year ago, the cable company Charter made a deal to purchase another cable company, Bright House Networks. Then, after the FCC decided to block another cable deal—Comcast’s attempted acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC)—Charter announced that it...

The folks at Food & Water Watch are pissed. And I don’t mean “pissed” as in drunk; they are mad as hell about the proposed merger between two big breweries and demanding the Department of Justice step in and block the deal. Despite the fact that big breweries have been merging and acquiring bits and pieces of each other for decades, F&WW believes that allowing Anheuser-Bush InBev to acquire SABMiller would bring about an end to this golden age of beer we’re currently enjoying. My advice to them is to crack open a beer and take a deep breath.

After months of negotiation, Anheuser-Busch InBev (purveyor of Budweiser, Stella, and now Corona) announced it had reached an agreement to acquire...