The 65-Year-Old Law That Still Shapes How You Watch Sports
Earlier this month, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr asked a pointed question: what happens to local broadcasting if live sports keep migrating to streaming platforms? In a public notice, the FCC seeks comment on sports-broadcasting practices and market developments. The agency focuses on the growing shift of live sports from national broadcast networks ... The 65-Year-Old Law That Still Shapes How You Watch Sports
When a Blue Checkmark Becomes a €120 Million Problem
The European Commission’s first major enforcement action under the Digital Services Act (DSA) offers an early glimpse of how the European Union intends to regulate large digital platforms—and how far that approach may diverge from the U.S. model. The DSA is an EU regulation governing how online intermediary services operate, including social-media platforms, online marketplaces, ... When a Blue Checkmark Becomes a €120 Million Problem
COMESA, WhatsApp Business, and Antitrust in Search of a Theory
Meta’s decision to limit third-party AI access to WhatsApp Business has quickly drawn antitrust scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions. The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Competition and Consumer Commission (CCCC) is the latest authority to open an investigation. But before the case can answer whether Meta’s conduct harms competition, a more basic question ... COMESA, WhatsApp Business, and Antitrust in Search of a Theory
Putting the Bite Back in Patents
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Feb. 27 joint statement of interest in Collision Communications v. Samsung signals a possible shift back toward the first Trump administration’s “New Madison Approach” to patent policy. That framework—largely abandoned during the Biden administration—treated patents as property rights and defended the central ... Putting the Bite Back in Patents
COPPA, Age Verification, and the FTC’s Enforcement End Run
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a new plan to “protect children online.” It starts by relaxing enforcement of the very privacy law designed to protect them. In a new enforcement policy statement on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the FTC signals that it will decline to pursue enforcement actions against companies that ... COPPA, Age Verification, and the FTC’s Enforcement End Run
Your State Government Has a Friend Request Pending
A bevy of states are racing to mandate “digital choice” in social media. The new bills promise easy data portability and forced interoperability among platforms—letting users carry their accounts, contacts, and content across services through open protocols. Utah enacted the first such law in 2025, and legislatures in Virginia, South Dakota, New York, California, and ... Your State Government Has a Friend Request Pending
Half a Swipe, Whole Lot of Mess: Platform Economics and the Interchange Fee Cases
Interchange-fee regulation now anchors at least three federal appellate cases. Courts will get them wrong unless they recognize a threshold fact: payment-card networks are multisided platforms. Interchange fees are the amounts card-issuing banks withhold from a transaction before paying merchant-acquiring banks. On a $100 purchase with a 2% interchange fee, the issuing bank keeps $2 ... Half a Swipe, Whole Lot of Mess: Platform Economics and the Interchange Fee Cases
Borrowed Prices: Pharmaceuticals and the American Tab
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has proposed two sweeping Innovation Center models—the Global Benchmark for Efficient Drug Pricing Model (GLOBE) and the Guarding U.S. Medicare Against Rising Drug Costs Model (GUARD)—that would tie Medicare drug payments to prices set by foreign governments. Framed as pragmatic cost-containment tools, the models would import foreign ... Borrowed Prices: Pharmaceuticals and the American Tab
Regulating the Tool or the Trouble? A Survey of State AI Bills
Debates about federal preemption in artificial-intelligence (AI) policy often pose a stark choice: Congress adopts a national framework and states lose the ability to police harmful conduct, or states retain broad authority and businesses face a 50-state compliance patchwork that chills innovation. Our review of state AI bills suggests the debate is aimed at the ... Regulating the Tool or the Trouble? A Survey of State AI Bills
From Discount to Discrimination: The Strange Economics of Anti-Competitive Antitrust
Antitrust has always been a strange regulatory enterprise. Businesses are largely free to engage in various commercial practices involving price, output, product design, distribution, research, and innovation—until they’re not. Outside the paradigmatic examples of explicit agreements among competitors to fix price and output, many business practices live in a gray zone. Whether a particular pricing ... From Discount to Discrimination: The Strange Economics of Anti-Competitive Antitrust
POPA and the Fight Over the Permission-Slip Internet
The fight over how to protect children online under the First Amendment has intensified in the opening weeks of the year. Two product-liability trials recently began asking whether social-media services such as Instagram and YouTube qualify as unsafe products for minors because of allegedly defective design features. At the same time, federal and state lawmakers ... POPA and the Fight Over the Permission-Slip Internet
The End of Free-Range Tariffs: Discipline Comes to Trade Policy
The Supreme Court just clipped one presidential tariff tool. It didn’t disarm U.S. trade policy. Properly used, the decision could push tariffs toward a more disciplined role: countering foreign market distortions and bargaining them away. The Court’s Feb. 20 ruling striking down President Donald Trump’s tariff-setting authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) ... The End of Free-Range Tariffs: Discipline Comes to Trade Policy
