Publications: Robert D. Atkinson

One of the few godsends in this pandemic has been the fact that we can take care of a lot of our personal business online—from ordering food to meeting with health-care providers. But if the eye-doctor lobby gets its way in Congress, many Americans will be forced to make otherwise unnecessary trips to an optometrist’s office whenever they need to refill their contact lens prescriptions. This is just the latest skirmish in a decades-long rearguard action that optometrists have been fighting to protect their lucrative industry from disruption. Lawmakers should see through the effort and side with consumers.

ITIF submitted comments with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recommending changes to the Internet Use Survey to collect more useful data on household Internet use for researchers and policymakers.

In a response for the European Commission’s public consultation on its “white paper on levelling the playing field as regards foreign subsidies,” ITIF agreed there is a need for new legal instruments to address distortions of the internal market arising from subsidies granted by non-EU authorities.

The scholarly evidence finds that public R&D “crowds in” private R&D—with increases in public R&D on average leading to greater, not less, business R&D.