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1 month ago | 
capitalismmagazine.com | Jonathan Barnett
Contrary to some activists’ and academics’ claims, weak IP rights can suppress innovation and competition. Scholars and commentators in academia, advocacy organizations, and think tanks widely advocate weakening and, in some cases, even abolishing intellectual property (IP) rights. These arguments rely on a simple narrative in which IP owners exploit a monopoly entitlement that inflates prices for consumers and blocks entry by competitors.
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2 months ago | 
yahoo.com | Jonathan Barnett
Launch of the DeepSeek chatbot has delivered a wake-up call for U.S. policymakers. While the “breakthrough” now appears to have been overstated (total expenditures have been estimated in excess of $1 billion, rather than $6 million as originally claimed, and DeepSeek may have had greater access to advanced chips than previously believed), even skeptics recognize that DeepSeek achieved cost-efficiencies that incumbents must now match.
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2 months ago | 
yahoo.com | Jonathan Barnett
In baseball, it’s three strikes and you’re out. By that standard, antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission should have stepped off the playing field a while ago. In tallying up the losses, it’s hard to know where to start.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
truthonthemarket.com | Daniel Gilman |Eric Fruits |Jonathan Barnett
In South Korea, I have unique combined experience as a court judge and as an antitrust specialist at a major law firm, conducting numerous research projects that connect theory and practice. I have a particular interest in competition law, consumer law, and economic regulation related to the digital economy.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
truthonthemarket.com | Daniel Gilman |Eric Fruits |Alden Abbott |Jonathan Barnett
The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) late last month filed its much-anticipated initial proposed final judgment in the Google Search antitrust case. The proposal—to use a bit of baseball parlance—swung for the fences. Maybe they’ll get a hit, or maybe even a home run. Or not. Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani hit a whopping 54 home runs in 2024, but he struck out three times as often. Back to the case. Readers of this space are no doubt aware that Judge Amit P.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
truthonthemarket.com | Eric Fruits |Alden Abbott |Jonathan Barnett
Recent headlines about the U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) antitrust case targeting Google Search echo a familiar policy script. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Thomas Lenard and Scott Wallsten warn that forcing Google to share its technology could undermine innovation—a lesson they say we should have learned from telecommunications policy decades ago. In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act with grand ambitions to inject competition into local telephone markets.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
truthonthemarket.com | Alden Abbott |Jonathan Barnett |Dirk Auer
As the incoming Trump administration contemplates ways to promote U.S. economic growth and innovation, it may wish to consider two possible new global competition-policy initiatives. These actions, if successful, could help protect American (and foreign) firms from foreign government impediments to effective competition. Antitrust Around the World following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
truthonthemarket.com | Jonathan Barnett |Alden Abbott |Dirk Auer |Eric Fruits
The United States is the birthplace of antitrust, starting with the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. During the late 19th and early 20th century, cartels were common in Europe, while U.S. antitrust enforcers unraveled them. Only after World War II did European countries incrementally adopt competition law in various forms. Since that time, competition laws have been adopted virtually around the world.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
news.bloomberglaw.com | Jonathan Barnett
Regulators’ confident predictions of antitrust harms in the artificial intelligence marketplace are hard to reconcile with a competitive, fluid ecosystem that doesn’t yet provide reasonable grounds for antitrust intervention. But there are grounds to take action now to preserve intellectual property protections for content and data assets being used in building the AI ecosystem.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
academic.oup.com | Jonathan Barnett
For almost two decades, U.S. courts, legislators, and antitrust regulators have consistently taken actions to reduce the strength of intellectual property rights in technology and creative markets. This policy trajectory has reflected the influence of an “accidental alliance” of two core constituencies that have common commitments to relaxed enforcement (or, in some cases, abolition) of intellectual property rights.
