FACTS An officer in Midvale, Utah was doing some paperwork in his patrol car when he was approached by man, later identified as Nitokalisi Fonua (hereinafter, “Nick”). Nick “looked suspicious,” mainly because he was “jittery, looking around and appeared to be very nervous.” Nick’s suspicion rating jumped dramatically when, for no apparent reason, he informed the officer he had stolen a white GMC Blazer, which he had parked nearby. Naturally, the officer asked Nick if he would show him the Blazer, and Nick said sure. When they located the Blazer, the officer walked over and looked inside. The first thing he saw was a sawed-off shotgun on the back seat. Then he noticed some markings on the shotgun, “markings that looked gang-related.” Nick told the officer that the key to the Blazer was inside his motel room at the Days Inn. Also in the room, he said, were his “cousins,” meaning “people he knows from the streets.” The officer asked Nick “if we could obtain the keys to the vehicle so we could turn those back over to the owner.” Nick said the keys “were in the room somewhere” and that he “didn’t care” if the officer went in and retrieved them. Nick also gave the officer his key to the room. When backup arrived at the motel, officers knocked on the door which was opened by a man named Vake. There were two other occupants: a woman and Kimoana, the defendant. By this time, the officers were aware that Kimoana—not Nick—had rented the room. The first thing the officers saw as the door opened was the woman pointing “an unidentified black object” at the wall. Concerned for their safety, they ordered the occupants to “show their hands.” Then they pat searched them. Finding no weapons (the “unidentified black object” was a television remote control), they holstered their guns. Although the officers already had Nick’s consent to search the room, they sought and obtained consent from Vake. During the search, they found a “long-barreled revolver” under a mattress. As the result, Kimoana was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

United States V. _____

Liberals claim that globalization has led to fragmentation and decentralized networks of power relations. This does not explain how states increasingly “weaponize interdependence” by leveraging glo...

Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion

Following a host of high-profile scandals, the political influence of platform companies (the global corporations that that operate online ‘platforms’ such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and many ...

What is platform governance

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona University of California, Davis, Davis, California Correspondence Satish Nambisan, Nancy and Joseph Keithley Professor of Technology Management, The Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106-7235. Email: satish.nambisan@case.edu Research Summary: In recent decades, two emergent phenomena have jointly transformed the nature and pursuit of entrepreneurship across industries and sectors: open innovation and platformization. Open innovation involves a shift toward more open and distributed models of innovation, while platformization refers to the increasing importance of digital platforms as a venue for value creation and capture. Together, open innovation and platforms have created numerous opportunities for entrepreneurs and their firms—from serving as inputs for innovation for established firms to participating as complementors on existing platforms. While these entrepreneurial opportunities (and conditions) have manifested themselves in rich and varied ways, our understanding of these new forms of entrepreneurship has lagged behind. In this essay, and in this special issue, our objective is to bring a sharper focus on the important research issues and questions that frame open innovation, platforms, and entrepreneurship. Managerial Summary: Digital platforms and open innovation environments have unleashed numerous promising opportunities for entrepreneurs, in industries ranging from consumer software, entertainment, and home appliances to auto, health, and energy. To pursue those opportunities, however, entrepreneurs will need to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that facilitate and constrain them. In this essay, we identify and discuss several of these factors and the associated challenges and highlight the need for additional research. We also consider some of the broader contextual factors, including regulatory policies, digitization, and globalization that shape the emerging opportunities.

On open innovation, platforms, and entrepreneurship

With the recent wave of progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has come a growing awareness of the large-scale impacts of AI systems, and recognition that existing regulations and norms in industry and academia are insufficient to ensure responsible AI development. In order for AI developers to earn trust from system users, customers, civil society, governments, and other stakeholders that they are building AI responsibly, they will need to make verifiable claims to which they can be held accountable. Those outside of a given organization also need effective means of scrutinizing such claims. This report suggests various steps that different stakeholders can take to improve the verifiability of claims made about AI systems and their associated development processes, with a focus on providing evidence about the safety, security, fairness, and privacy protection of AI systems. We analyze ten mechanisms for this purpose--spanning institutions, software, and hardware--and make recommendations aimed at implementing, exploring, or improving those mechanisms.

Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims

Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.This Note maps out facets of Amazon’s dominance. Doing so enables us to make sense of its business strategy, illuminates anticompetitive aspects of Amazon’s structure and conduct, and underscores deficiencies in current doctrine. The Note closes by considering two potential regimes for addressing Amazon’s power: restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties.

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox

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The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate

One unexplored theme in the debate around economic inequality is the role of monopoly and oligopoly power. Despite the relative lack of attention to this topic, there is sound reason to believe that pervasive market power in the economy has contributed to extreme economic disparity in the United States today. Given the general affluence of shareholders and executives relative to consumers — as well as the power dynamics within large companies — we can expect market power to have significant regressive distributional effects. Case studies of anticompetitive practices and uncompetitive market structures in several key industries illustrate how large firms have come to dominate the U.S. economy and how they harness their dominance to effect an upwards wealth transfer. Additionally, monopolistic and oligopolistic companies translate their economic power into political influence, often successfully pushing for laws and regulation that further entrench their position, enhance their clout, and transfer wealth upwards. The prevalence of market power in the economy today is the result of an intellectual and political revolution in the 1980s that dramatically reoriented and narrowed the goals of antitrust law. Importantly, this counterrevolution can be reversed. We present a vision of antitrust that accords with what Congress intended in enacting “this comprehensive charter of economic liberty” and offer specific policy prescriptions.

Market Power and Inequality: The Antitrust Counterrevolution and its Discontents

A handful of digital platforms mediate a growing share of online commerce and communications. By structuring access to markets, these firms function as gatekeepers for billions of dollars in economic activity. One feature dominant digital platforms share is that they have integrated across business lines such that they both operate a platform and market their own goods and services on it. This structure places dominant platforms in direct competition with some of the businesses that depend on them, creating a conflict of interest that platforms can exploit to further entrench their dominance, thwart competition, and stifle innovation.

This Article argues that the potential hazards of integration by dominant tech platforms invite recovering structural separations. Structural separations have been a mainstay element of American economic regulation. Traditionally applied to critical networks and essential infrastructure, structural separations prohibited entry in certain markets and prevented dominant intermediaries from directly competing with the businesses reliant on their services. In recent decades, structural separations have been largely abandoned. At the same time that lawmakers have weakened or eliminated sector-specific regulatory regimes, judicial interpretation of antitrust law has drastically narrowed the forms of vertical conduct and structures that register as anticompetitive. And when antitrust enforcers have targeted these forms of conduct and structures, they have applied remedies that generally (1) fail to target the underlying source of the problem and (2) overwhelm the institutional capacities of the actors assigned to oversee them. Neglecting structural remedies results in both substantive harms and institutional misalignments—effects that are especially pronounced in digital platform markets.

This Article seeks to give structural separations a seat back at the table. Tracing the history of separations reveals that they have been motivated by a host of functional goals, ranging from fair competition and system resiliency to media diversity and administrability. Recalling this broader set of concerns brings into focus the range of factors at stake when dealing with dominant intermediaries and invites consideration of the degree to which separations in platform markets would also respond to a diverse set of problems.

Lina Khan

Papers

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox

The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate

Market Power and Inequality: The Antitrust Counterrevolution and its Discontents

The Separation of Platforms and Commerce