Antitrust Laws and Competition Issues
What’s Twitter’s Future? The Former Head of Trust And Safety Weighs In
Regulators have significant tools at their disposal to enforce their will on Twitter and on Mr. Musk. Penalties for noncompliance with Europe’s Digital Services Act could total as much as 6 percent of the company’s annual revenue. In the United States, the F.T.C. has shown an increasing willingness to exact significant fines for noncompliance with […]
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Why the Penguin Random House Merger Is Also About Amazon
Amazon isn’t on trial in a big books lawsuit. But its power is. The U.S. government is suing to stop the book publisher Penguin Random House from buying a competitor, Simon & Schuster. The government says that the merger, which will shrink the number of large American publishers of mass-market books from five to four, […]
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F.T.C. Chair Lina Khan Upends Antitrust Standards by Suing Meta
WASHINGTON — Early in her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan declared that she would rein in the power of the largest technology companies in a dramatically new way. “We’re trying to be forward looking, anticipating problems and taking fast action,’’ Ms. Khan said in an interview last month. She promised […]
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F.T.C. Sues to Block Meta’s Virtual Reality Deal as It Confronts Big Tech
WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed for an injunction to block Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, from buying a virtual reality company called Within, potentially limiting the company’s push into the so-called metaverse and signaling a shift in how the agency is approaching tech deals. The antitrust lawsuit is the […]
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Jay Carney, Amazon’s Top Policy Executive, Will Join Airbnb
SEATTLE — Jay Carney, who was press secretary for President Barack Obama, is leaving the top policy and public communications job at Amazon to join Airbnb. Airbnb said in a blog post on Friday that Mr. Carney would become its global head of policy and communications. Mr. Carney, a former journalist at Time magazine, joined […]
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Amazon C.E.O. Andy Jassy Breaks From the Bezos Way
When Jeff Bezos was chief executive of Amazon, he took an arms-length stance toward the company’s affairs in Washington. He rarely lobbied lawmakers. He testified only once before Congress, under the threat of subpoena. Andy Jassy, Mr. Bezos’ successor, is trying a different approach. Since becoming Amazon’s chief executive last July, Mr. Jassy, 54, has […]
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Shareholder Advisory Firm Backs Spirit-Frontier Merger
The influential shareholder advisory service Institutional Shareholder Services is now advising Spirit Airlines’ investors to vote in favor of a proposed merger with Frontier Airlines over a rival offer from JetBlue Airways, after Frontier increased its offer. The recommendation, which was delivered on Friday, is a reversal for ISS, which had previously advised Spirit shareholders […]
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Lina Khan, a Big Tech Critic, Tries Answering Her Own Detractors
I think we’ve seen time and time again that when you have a company that has captured control over a key artery of commerce, that control can be used unlawfully. That was partly what animated the passage of the antitrust laws where Congress recognized that the dominance of the railroads and their control over key […]
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What Texas Gains by Investigating Twitter’s Fake Accounts
When Elon Musk said on Twitter last month that he planned to vote Republican and predicted that Democrats would mount a “dirty tricks campaign against me,” he received a warm response from Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas. “Believe me when I say, ‘I understand,’” Mr. Paxton tweeted on May 24, the same day […]
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