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Full-Text Articles in Economics
Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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This essay reviews David J. Teece's book, Competing Through Innovation: Technological Strategies and Antitrust Policies (2013).
Technological Determinism And Its Discontents, Christopher S. Yoo
Technological Determinism And Its Discontents, Christopher S. Yoo
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This book review takes a critical review of the claim advanced by Susan Crawford in Captive Audience that the merger between Comcast and NBC Universal would harm consumers and that policymakers should instead promote common carriage regulation and subsidize municipal symmetrical gigabit fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). First it evaluates the extent to which next-generation digital subscriber lines (DSL) and wireless broadband technologies can serve as effective substitutes for cable modem service, identifying FCC data showing that the market has become increasingly competitive and likely to continue to do so. Furthermore, the market is not structured in a way that would permit the …
The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo
The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo
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One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line with the rest of the world. For the one-year period following July 31, 1918, the exigencies of World War I led the federal government to take over the U.S. telephone system. A close examination of this episode sheds new light into a number of current policy issues. The history confirms …
Antitrust And The 'Filed Rate' Doctrine: Deregulation And State Action, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And The 'Filed Rate' Doctrine: Deregulation And State Action, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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In its Keogh decision the Supreme Court held that although the Interstate Commerce Act did not exempt railroads from antitrust liability, a private plaintiff may not recover treble damages based on an allegedly monopolistic tariff rate filed with a federal agency. Keogh very likely grew out of Justice Brandeis's own zeal for regulation and his concern for the protection of small business — in this case, mainly shippers whom he felt were protected from discrimination by filed rates. The Supreme Court's Square D decision later conceded that Keogh may have been “unwise as a matter of policy,” but reaffirmed it …
Competition In Information Technologies: Standards-Essential Patents, Non-Practicing Entities And Frand Bidding, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Competition In Information Technologies: Standards-Essential Patents, Non-Practicing Entities And Frand Bidding, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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Standard Setting is omnipresent in networked information technologies. Virtually every cellular phone, computer, digital camera or similar device contains technologies governed by a collaboratively developed standard. If these technologies are to perform competitively, the processes by which standards are developed and implemented must be competitive. In this case attaining competitive results requires a mixture of antitrust and non-antitrust legal tools.
FRAND refers to a firm’s ex ante commitment to make its technology available at a “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory royalty.” The FRAND commitment results from bidding to have one’s own technology selected as a standard. Typically the FRAND commitment is …
Mandating Access To Telecom And The Internet: The Hidden Side Of Trinko, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
Mandating Access To Telecom And The Internet: The Hidden Side Of Trinko, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo
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Antitrust has long played a major role in telecommunications policy, demonstrated most dramatically by the equal access mandate imposed during the breakup of AT&T. In this Article we explore the extent to which antitrust can continue to serve as a source of access mandates following the Supreme Court's 2004 Trinko decision. Although Trinko sharply criticized access remedies and antitrust courts' ability to enforce them, it is not yet clear whether future courts will interpret the opinion as barring all antitrust access claims. Even more importantly, the opinion contains language hinting at possible bases for differentiating among different types of access, …
Architectural Censorship And The Fcc, Christopher S. Yoo
Architectural Censorship And The Fcc, Christopher S. Yoo
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Most First Amendment analyses of U.S. media policy have focused predominantly on “behavioral” regulation, which either prohibits the transmission of disfavored content (such as indecent programming) or mandates the dissemination of preferred content (such as children’s educational programming and political speech). In so doing, commentators have largely overlooked how program content is also affected by “structural” regulation, which focuses primarily on increasing the economic competitiveness of media industries. In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo employs economic analysis to demonstrate how structural regulation can constitute a form of “architectural censorship” that has the unintended consequence of reducing the quantity, quality, and …