Julie Carlson

The recent concerns antitrust enforcers have raised about private equity—that it creates market power, facilitates unfair methods of competition, and undermines the competitive viability of acquired firms—are largely unfounded.

Competition authorities in the United Kingdom fear Microsoft will keep Call of Duty off Sony PlayStations if it acquires the game’s publisher. But that’s not what happened when it bought the developer of Minecraft, and there’s no reason to believe this time will be different.

The Biden-Harris Economic Blueprint, released on September 9, perpetuates long-dispelled myths about industrial concentration.

Amazon has combined three things that business strategists said could not be done—low costs, high quality, and customization. “Amazoning” health care that way would be a good thing.

The FTC filed a complaint in federal district court seeking to block Meta’s acquisition of the virtual reality start-up, Within Unlimited. The complaint is seriously flawed, but if successful, its challenge to the acquisition could deliver a serious blow to the nascent VR app market.

Antitrust populists are crusading against the market advantages of large brick and mortar retailers, such as Walmart, and large online retailers like Amazon. But those advantages largely flow to consumers—particularly low-income ones.

Lina Khan has championed a more aggressive, populist approach to antitrust enforcement, which would have posed real risks to innovation and economic growth. Yet, at her one-year anniversary as chair, the antitrust revival she promised appears to have fizzled.

By withdrawing the 2019 statement in its entirety, SEP-holders have only the guidance provided by the FTC’s prior enforcement actions—which is to say they have no guidance at all.

Not only is more aggressive antitrust enforcement likely to be ineffective at combatting inflation, some economists have argued that it may even make inflation worse.

The OAMA threatens the vibrancy of the app ecosystem. The Senate should not attempt to fix an app ecosystem that is not broken.

A recent Treasury report on labor market competition provided a misleading narrative about labor market concentration and its effect on workers. Labor market power is largely due to labor market frictions, not concentration. Firms are not profiting at the expense of workers.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, ignores Amazon’s own interest in preserving the vitality of its third-party seller ecosystem.

Join Duke University, Hudson Institute, and ITIF for a daylong roundtable featuring experts in the innovation ecosystem, from academia to the think tank community, as they explore these and other questions.

Watch the latest installment of the Dynamic Antitrust series, where Julie Carlson moderates a panel with antitrust and inflation experts to get their views on the relationship between corporate concentration and inflation.

Please join ITIF for the latest in a series of discussions on “dynamic antitrust.” In this installment, Julie Carlson will sit down with former chief economists from the DOJ and FTC to discuss their views on the planned revisions to the guidelines.

Join ITIF for a discussion on the accuracy of the narrative put forward and whether or not market concentration has, indeed, increased with ITIF's Julie Carlson & Robert D. Atkinson, Nicholas Trachter of the Federal Reserve of Richmond, & former DOJ official, Gregory Werden.

Join ITIF for the twelfth in a series of discussions on “dynamic antitrust,” in which Aurelien Portuese, ITIF’s director of antitrust and innovation policy, sits down with leading scholars and antitrust enforcers in Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere to discuss the path forward in making antitrust a foundation for innovation. Join us to discuss the interaction between antitrust and innovation with Professor Thomas Lambert and ITIF's Julie Carlson.