The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
TECHNOLOGY
Microsoft announces it will release its newest operating system, Windows Vista, on January 30th.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. on how European regulators have caused difficulties for Microsoft—for no consumer benefit.
“Antitrust actions against successful businesses, such as the European Union’s antitrust penalties against Microsoft, threaten to disrupt innovation and economic growth by substituting political management for market processes, by protecting competitors rather than competition. Americans are increasingly less confident that ‘competition policy’ and antitrust regulations yield any real advantages to consumers or producers—but that they offer many opportunities for firms to use government to cripple innovation or their competitors.”
FREE TRADE
Latin American free trade agreements come under threat from union-backed labor and environmental provisions.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Scholar Fran Smith on the problems posed by labor and environmental mandates in trade agreements.
“A largely overlooked environmental side agreement was an important building block in environmentalist’s push to more closely link economic agreements with environmental provisions.”
ENERGY
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources holds a hearing on oil and gas royalty management.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis, Jr. on why excessive taxation of oil industry profits is a bad idea.
“Are proponents confused, or is consumer protection a rhetorical cover for other agendas? More precisely, are “windfall profits” a real problem or a pretext for energy suppression, anti-capitalism, and political demagoguery?”