Antitrust, School Choice, and Poker

Antitrust

The Department of Justice yesterday filed a lawsuit seeking to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile.

Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia released a statement.

“The Department of Justice’s lawsuit amounts to a subversion of the evolution of free enterprise and economic progress. Federal regulators and their arbitrary “merger guidelines” are woefully ill-equipped to judge the merits of proposed business deals, particularly in dynamic modern markets such as the wireless sector. To be sure, no business deal is ever guaranteed to benefit consumers or the economy. But market participants, including upstream suppliers, customers, potential entrants, and capital markets, stand ready to check detrimental concentration in telecommunications if it arises.”

School Choice

In Indiana, families are taking advantage of the Choice Scholarship program.

Policy Fellow Luke Pelican comments.

“The program is welcome news for many parents concerned about the education their children are currently receiving in public schools. Yet opposition to the program is strong, and the Indiana teachers’ unions are working to thwart the program. They claim it violates the Indiana constitution by using taxpayer dollars to subsidize religious education, and runs afoul of the state’s obligation to provide ‘tuition-free system of common schools.'”

Poker

D.C. is moving forward with it’s online poker pilot program.

Policy Analyst Michelle Minton comments.

“The planned system in D.C. has a lot of problems from a free market standpoint. For one, a monopoly system of government run poker room eliminates competition and the benefits that come from that. In the pre-UIGEA, pre-Black Friday era of online poker, players would quickly realize if a poker website had unfair odds, shady practices, or something as simple as bad customer service and they could and did move on to other poker rooms on the Internet. There would not be such an option for D.C. online gamblers.”