The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) recently denied a U.S. freight railroad permission to use autonomous track inspection technology, a loss for those promoting greater use of automation to enhance rail safety and lower costs in the supply chain.
Publications
April 4, 2022
The Senate’s main antitrust bills—the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act—emulate a stalled House package and the EU’s deeply flawed Digital Markets Act. They err on many fronts, and the main arguments for them are at odds with reality.
April 4, 2022
Venture capitalists know what it feels like when a company is firing on all cylinders. But it’s been a while since the whole country had that feeling of dynamism—so why not focus on companies that help the cause by supporting the national interest, solving critical problems, and doing fundamentally new things?
April 1, 2022
Anticorporate Neo-Brandeisians have a big stake in painting a dystopian picture of rampant monopolists—killing small businesses, jacking up prices, and crushing wages—all in their attempts to achieve a wholesale restructuring of U.S. antitrust law and practice. But these claims to date have largely been hortatory.
April 1, 2022
America’s lack of global manufacturing competitiveness in this technology is not just a matter of comparative advantage, but is rather evidence of a risky overdependence that has come to shock U.S. supply chains.
April 1, 2022
“Defending Digital” Series, No. 4: Claims that Big Tech is making too much money off of “our data” are wrong in two fundamental ways: The data about most individuals isn’t worth very much—and when consumers use a business service, the resulting data isn’t “theirs.”
March 31, 2022
The Biden administration and its “Neo-Brandeisian” supporters in Congress are seeking to break up large tech companies, but national-security-minded advisers warn it would strengthen America’s biggest adversary, China. They're right, just as an earlier generation of national security advisers was right to warn the Eisenhower administration against breaking up AT&T.
March 31, 2022
Accepting Epic’s arguments and preventing Apple from continuing to operate its closed mobile ecosystem would eliminate a signature attractive feature of Apple’s products, to the detriment of consumer welfare, competition, and innovation.
March 30, 2022
While the new Federal IT Dashboard looks nice and delivers partly on the “premier user-centric site” self-designation through a clean and navigable user interface, the website fails to present the underlying data in a way that most users can interpret and ultimately falls short as a tool that different stakeholders can leverage to explore federal IT investments and initiatives.
March 29, 2022
ITIF’s Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy offers six-month resident fellowships for graduate students and invites inquiries from antitrust professionals wishing to become nonresident affiliates of the program.