On Monday, I was up early and first heard about the Las Vegas shooting on the radio in the car. It was still dark, and the winding road thick with fog, lending an eerie mood to the sound of Scott Simon’s voice on NPR reporting what little was known about this latest incident in what is now an epidemic of ...

Suppose you invent something.  A box that makes bitter vegetables taste like candy so kids will eat them. You call it KandyKale.  Then, along comes an imposter, who steals your tech and infringes your intellectual property, and then sets up a bunch of websites that hijack the customers looking for your product in order to sell them the KandeeKale knock-off, ...

Last week, after antitrust scholar Barry Lynn praised the European Commission’s decision to fine Google for anti-competitive practices, his Open Markets program at the Google-backed New America Foundation was terminated.  Robert Levine offers a nuanced perspective on the relevance of Google-scale money in policy think tanks, suggesting that what isn’t said may be at least as significant as what is ...

“What should govern the behavior of huge multinationals like Google: the law Google makes for itself, or the laws that people make?” asks Andrew Orlowski.  Indeed.  For anyone interested in whether or not the tech giants are simply going to be allowed to operate above the law, the Equustek case is one to watch.  As reported, Google was ordered by ...

Image by nicholashan This week, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has been funding academic research papers worldwide and, unsurprisingly, the conclusions in these papers tend to support Google’s policy interests.  This is familiar territory of course. Most obviously, we remember that Big Tobacco funded all manner of “research” that produced alternative facts about the health hazards of smoking. This ...

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