IN THE NEWS

In his article, “Experts Question Effectiveness of Antitrust Approaches in Digital Economy,” Joel Stashenko of the New York Law Journal quoted Maurice Stucke’s comments at a recent forum sponsored by the antitrust law section of the New York State Bar Association.

The panel included Ethan Litwin and Alec Burnside of Dechert, Jason Furman, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under the Obama administration, and Columbia law professor Tim Wu.

The article is available here.

In his article “Trump’s CEO meetings raise concerns among ethics lawyers,” Josh Boak quotes Maurice Stucke:

Part of the challenge is not knowing what was precisely said at the meetings.

“We don’t know really what they were discussing, what Trump’s response was to that and to what extent that will influence the antitrust review,” said Maurice Stucke, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s antitrust division who teaches at the University of Tennessee College of Law.

The article is available here.

Steve Lohr in his article “Data Could Be the Next Tech Hot Button for Regulators” quotes Maurice Stucke:

“Maurice Stucke, a former Justice Department antitrust official and a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, who also spoke at the gathering, said one danger was that consumers might be afforded less privacy than they would choose in a more competitive market.

The competition concerns echo those that gradually emerged in the 1990s about software and Microsoft. The worry is that as the big internet companies attract more users and advertisers, and gather more data, a powerful ‘network effect’ effectively prevents users and advertisers from moving away from a dominant digital platform, like Google in search or Facebook in consumer social networks.”

The article is available here.

In its “Big Read” article, “Policing the digital cartels:
Price-setting algorithms mean regulators must now tackle collusion among machines,” the Financial Times extensively quotes Maurice Stucke and his research with Ariel Ezrachi in their recent book Virtual Competition.

The article is available here.

The UK Times Higher Edication magazine selected Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke’s new book, Virtual Competition, as book of the week.

Julia Powles writes:

“Unravelling the competition (or, to our American friends, antitrust) dimensions of the data-driven economy demands someone of the fearless but measured tenacity of Holmes or, indeed, Vestager. It requires penetrating a wall of rhetoric and myth, and a deep familiarity with competition policy’s objectives and limitations.

This is the task that two of the world’s leading competition law scholars, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, have set themselves in Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy. This highly readable and authoritative account sets out the ways that platforms have replaced the invisible hand with a digitised one – a hand that is human-engineered, subject to corporate control and manipulation, and prone to charges of unlawfulness, on three fronts in particular. First, collusion. Second, behavioural discrimination. And third, asymmetric ‘frenemy’ dynamics, such as that between Uber and the super-platforms Google and Apple, which distort competition through extraction and capture.”

She also favorably reviews Allen Grunes and Maurice Stucke’s “brilliantly executed” new book, Big Data and Competition Policy” (2016):

“Co-authored by Stucke, this time with the distinguished US anti-trust practitioner Allen Grunes, it contains a detailed analysis of merger and antitrust cases and lucidly explores the interplay between privacy and competition in a way that neatly sets up the analysis, and fills some of the gaps, in Virtual Competition.”

The review is available here.

In its article, “Cartelli digitali: dimmi chi sei e ti farò il prezzo più alto” about algorithm-fuelled collusion, the Italian newspaper relies on the research by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke in their new book, Virtual Competition.

The article is available here.