Tootfinder

A post from the archive 📫:
Monopoly
#musings #law

John Deere Must Face FTC Lawsuit Over Its Tractor Repair Monopoly, Judge Rules https://www.404media.co/john-deere-must-face-ftc-lawsuit-over-its-tractor-repair-monopoly-judge-rules/

And from the [not] #freemarket annals: 
"And of course, patients don't get to merge to monopoly (that's what governments are for, and we know how Blue Cross feels about single payer care). Workers don't get to merge to monopoly either (that's what unions are for, and no one hates a union more than a health care monopolist)."
PS: CEO says "authorization never sa…

https://mastodon.social/@noybeu/114693494985013191

Computer scientist Greg Nelson and I presented "Following AI's Footsteps from School to Society" at the 2025 UMaine Faculty Institute https://mycampus.maine.edu/web/uc-faculty-portal/faculty-institute-2025 including the IMPACT RISK framew…

I like books. I buy them as physical as well as eBooks formats.
I don't always make a direct contribution to the author/s when I buy them used, or borrow them from the library.
But I will explicitly not support (with my wallet) of Amazon's Monopoly on the book industry.
So I will encourage everyone to also boycott that monopoly.

Fucking hashtag spammers. Trying to seem like some official ”Republic of France ” account even.
And what does ”privatisation” and ”multinationals” have to do with this? Trenitalia is fully owned by the Italian state. Probably some fanatic leftist loonie longing for past state monopoly times posting this?

Competition Complexity in Multi-Item Auctions: Beyond VCG and Regularity
Hedyeh Beyhaghi, Linda Cai, Yiding Feng, Yingkai Li, S. Matthew Weinberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09291 …

Competition Complexity in Multi-Item Auctions: Beyond VCG and Regularity
We quantify the value of the monopoly's bargaining power in terms of competition complexity--that is, the number of additional bidders the monopoly must attract in simple auctions to match the expected revenue of the optimal mechanisms (c.f., Bulow and Klemperer, 1996, Eden et al., 2017)--within the setting of multi-item auctions. We show that for simple auctions that sell items separately, the competition complexity is $Θ(\frac{n}α)$ in an environment with $n$ original bidders under the slig…

US v. Google: during closing arguments, a judge queried both sides on ideas to limit Google's monopoly in search and said he expects to issue a ruling in August (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/google-search-ai-antitrust-trial-57ec6fd…

Pornhub is making bullshit claims regarding the privacy issues of the French gov age verification requirements. There are very real and significant problems with the French gov approach, but Pornhub's approach is significantly worse.
Pornhub wants to put the burden of age verification and enforcement on user devices. They even name the actors that should have to bear that burden: Google, Apple and Microsoft.
First off, this creates an artificial monopoly: three American compa…

A Tale of Two Monopolies
Yi-Chun Chen, Zhengqing Gui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06763 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06763

A Tale of Two Monopolies
We apply marginal analysis à la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize the revenue-maximizing selling mechanism for a multiproduct monopoly. Specifically, we derive the revenue change due to a price perturbation on any subset of bundles holding the prices of other bundles fixed. In an optimal mechanism, total revenue must not increase with any small price change for bundles with positive demand, nor with a small price decrease for bundles with zero demand. For any symmetric two-dimensional t…

If you want to break up Google, don't force them to sell an indirect-revenue product like Chrome. Force them to break up their advertising monopoly. Make them sell Android or YouTube. Fine them enough money to set up an endowment that can fund Mozilla or Servo or Ladybird to actually compete with Chrome and its family.