How the US can solve the global vaccine shortfall We need to rapidly expand vaccine manufacturing around the world — are IP suspensions the best way to do it?
The Tradeoff Between Openness and Trust in Digital Marketplaces On Wednesday, the Arizona House of Representatives passed [https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/3/22309284/arizona-app-store-bill-2005-apple-30-percent-cut-bypass-legislation] a bill that would require Google and Apple to allow Arizona-based app developers to choose their own alternate payment systems — and thus avoid the 15 to 30% commissions the app stores typically charge.
10 Questions About Trump, Big Tech, and Free Speech Twitter permanently banned Trump. Facebook suspended his account for at least two weeks. Apple and Google pulled the Parler app from their app stores. Amazon booted Parler off AWS. Stripe stopped processing payments for the Trump campaign’s website. These decisions, among others, have sparked a renewed debate over the
Cracks in the Great Stagnation For the last 60 years, we’ve seen consistently low productivity growth rates in the US and across the Western world. Meanwhile, recent scientific discoveries seem to be less fundamental [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/] to our understanding of the world than previous breakthroughs have
The EU’s Antitrust Case Against Amazon Is Begging the Question On Tuesday, the European Commission announced [https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_2077] that it had finished its preliminary investigation of Amazon. It found that the company violated EU antitrust laws by using non-public business data from independent sellers to develop its own competing products (known
Roundup 10/9 Below are a few excepts from essays/podcasts/threads we've done recently: 1) Alec had a detailed thread on the new House Judiciary report on competition in digital markets: > 🚨 House Judiciary Committee report on tech and antitrust is out! Thread with some of my initial reactions as I go through
Why a “Glass-Steagall for the Internet” Makes No Sense On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee will release [https://judiciary.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=3367] its long-awaited report on Big Tech and antitrust. While the full extent of the report’s recommendations remain to be seen, Chairman David Cicilline has been dropping not-so-subtle hints that one of the
Taking One Billion Americans Seriously Matthew Yglesias has written an important new book [https://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827] to remind us of the timeless truth that Having More People Is Good. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this synthesis of immigration, pro-natalism, and urbanism, is the national greatness mantle that it’s
Epic Games' Antitrust Case Against Apple Is a Dead End Epic Games, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, recently sued [https://www.polygon.com/2020/8/17/21372119/fortnite-apple-google-sued-epic-games-lawsuit] both Google and Apple in civil court for antitrust violations. Fortnite had been removed from both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store after Epic added its own
Innovation Policy Untangling innovation from industrial policy Welcome to Agglomerations! This is a blog (if you turn on email notification, *poof* it’s a newsletter too) by Alec Stapp and me where we’ll be writing about a broad set of technology and innovation policy issues, with a particular eye on the impacts and importance of agglomeration
