monopoly

With a Biden presidency looming, charter schools are once again under attack

The Leftist leadership isn’t smart – so much as they are cunning

After the collapse of communism in the 1990s, there was confidence that democracy had won and the market economy had shown its superiority to government planning.

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.”

The competitive facts of: this transaction, the marketplace around it, and the DOJ’s vertical precedents and non-precedents, are this transaction’s best friend.

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.

When government “helps” run something – that something is terrible. The bigger a hand government has in running it – the more terrible it is. If it is exclusively government-run – the terrible-ness is ingrained and inherent. And the longer government runs the show – the worse the terrible-ness becomes.

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.

Google’s puppeteering of FCC-sponsored piracy in the FCC AllVid set-top box proposal is not the first time Google has anticompetitively used piracy promotion to gain an anticompetitive market advantage for YouTube’s monopsony power — i.e. its market power from being the only repository in the world where one can access a copy of most every video created whether it is legal or pirated, and where Google often promotes pirated videos near the top of its search results.

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.

The age-old analogy describing a good salesman is “He can sell ice to Eskimos.” Let us now contemplate the opposite. What if someone has repeatedly screwed up so terribly – they could damage the sale of the hottest of commodities to a full panoply of desperate buyers? How could anyone hamstring a water auction – in the desert?

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.