monopoly

As DC-based nationally syndicated radio host Chris Plante rightly notes: “Were it not for double standards – the Left would have no standards at all.”

Most of what we have learned in the five months since the election indicates that the Trump Administration is not going to be Google’s antitrust advocate and protector like the Obama Administration effectively was from 2013-2016.

I was huddled in a Connecticut legislative hearing room on a chilly spring morning three years ago, awaiting my chance to testify about a proposal to over-regulate e-cigarettes.

Like with all huge new government power grabs, there are a few very predictable post-grab outcomes. Let’s look at a few through the prisms of relatively new grab Net Neutrality – and ObamaCare, a more vintage grab thus doing even more predicted damage.

As more evidence comes to light exposing Google’s much increased search and Android dominance in the U.S. since the FTC closed its search and Android antitrust probes in January 2013, it only becomes clearer that the FCC’s AllVid proposed rulemaking to “Unlock the [set-top] Box” is obviously anticompetitive overall, not pro-competitive as the FCC naively claims.

The Sunday Telegraph reports that the EU is poised to fine Google an EU record ~€3b for “web search monopoly abuse” and that “Google will be banned from continuing to manipulate search results to favour itself and harm rivals.”

Few outside of Alphabet-Google understand the immense market, economic, and technological power of an unaccountable monopoly over the underlying software that controls most all mobile devices in the world. Fortunately EU antitrust enforcers are some of the few who understand it.

In just eight years, Bitcoin and the idea of “virtual currency” have gained acceptance and use both online and in the physical world. Spread by word of mouth and other “viral” means, decentralized virtual currencies have gone from a mere thought experiment to a tangible economic reality.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Heartland Vice President of External Relations James Taylor sits down with Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News H. Sterling Burnett. James joins Burnett to discuss the proposed solar amendment in Florida.

A new kind of business model connecting customers and providers is cutting out inefficient middlemen and reducing costs. Unfortunately, some governments are trying to undercut these new services at the request of the old-economy companies that are displacing them with their greater efficiency.

The collateral damage is beginning to pile up from the FCC’s February decision to trigger Title II telephone utility regulation of the Internet. Long called the “nuclear” option, the FCC preemptively triggered Title II Internet regulation ostensibly to prevent potential new net neutrality problems, which the FCC admits it can’t yet identify.

In Today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, we listen in as Senior Fellow James M. Taylor speaks with Marita Noon, host of America’s Voice for Energy. Taylor and Noon discuss solar energy in the United States. Noon and Taylor have both recently focused some of their work on the topic of solar power.

How obscene is it for a Florida jury to award $23.6 billion to the widow of a man who died of lung cancer in 1996? She sued R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company by asserting that her husband had been “fooled” into starting the smoke at age 13. Apparently he had never heard cigarettes referred to as “coffin nails”, a slang term that has been around since the last century. And how come all those patches, chewing gum, and other means to stop smoking had no effect, if used by her late husband?