Web-based businesses are increasingly the subject of antitrust concerns. Plaintiffs in the United States have sued eBay for tying its online payments service to its transaction service. Multiple jurisdictions in the European Community have claimed that Apple has violated the competition laws by...

This article is about a type of business that connects distinct groups of customers on a "multi-sided platform." Such businesses have been around for millennia. But their economic importance has increased with the Internet revolution. Many significant web-based businesses such as eBay, Facebook,...

This paper is one of the major economic studies I submitted to the FCC in opposition to the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable. After reviewing and rebutting some of the economic theories and evidence put forth by Comcast in support of the merger the paper presents an antitrust...

The web economy has grown rapidly in the last decade. Online businesses have several key features that are important for understanding the pro-competitive and anti-competitive strategies they may engage in. The two-sided markets literature helps elucidate many of these strategies. It also...

Market power on each side of a multisided platform, whether in the form of increasing prices or decreasing quality, is constrained by the risk of losing sales on the other sides. That tends to weaken market power on each side and encourages platforms to keep prices lower and quality higher than...

Most online businesses try to get the attention of people and then sell advertisers access to that attention. The scarcity of attention — there’s only 24 hours in a day and much of that is spoken for — results in intense competition for people’s time and incentives to develop creative...

There has been a surge of recent antitrust cases involving Internet-based industries around the world, including in Latin America. These types of industries present special challenges for authorities, as their analysis requires an understanding of the fast-paced, innovative, and multi-sided...

Online advertising accounts for almost 9 percent of all advertising in the United States. This share is expected to increase as more media is consumed over the internet and as more advertisers shift spending to online technologies. The expansion of internet-based advertising is transforming the...

U.S. v. Microsoft was mainly about the "browser war" between Microsoft and Netscape. From late 1995 to June 2000, when the court issued its final judgment, Microsoft's Web browser (IE) went from being the choice of less than 10 percent of Web users to about 70 percent, while Netscape Navigator...