The Open Market Blog

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 07/31/2008

Last night I attended a preview of the new film Swing Vote, which is being released tomorrow. It revolves around one man, Bud Johnson…

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/31/2008

Number of farms in the U.S. — about 2.1 million. Cost of the 2008 farm bill — $300 billion over…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/31/2008

Last month, Google slightly improved the relevancy of the ads it displays when you search for something. In addition to taking your last…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/31/2008

I reported here earlier on public safety agencies holding up spectrum owed to Sprint-Nextel. I also reported on repeated demands for even…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/30/2008

Bush signed into law an enormously costly mortgage bailout today, turning a deaf ear to financial experts who warned about the bill’s dangers and…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/30/2008

In addition to massive federal probes of the deal, the nonexclusive Google-Yahoo ad pact is facing scrutiny from states as well. The California…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 07/30/2008

I love California, but the fruits and nuts truly have taken control.  The city of Los Angeles has initiated a moratorium on fast food restaurants–but…

• By: Fran Smith
• 07/29/2008

Today, as Ryan Young noted in his post, negotiations collapsed in the ninth day of talks to resuscitate the World Trade Organization’s…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/29/2008

Rather than trying to fight individual violators of copyright, the MPAA is creating a website with links to legitimate movie sources, like local movie…

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/29/2008

Disagreements over farm subsidies have caused the current round of WTO negotiations to collapse.  Developing countries are upset that subsidized farmers from rich countries…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/29/2008

Ars has a good discussion of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s recent switch in policy towards software patents. Before, the USPTO would issue…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/29/2008

Last year, AT&T submitted to the FCC a petition for forbearance from some old reporting requirements that were designed back in the days of…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/29/2008

I reported last Thursday that the FCC was set to approve the long-ignored XM-Sirius merger. Yesterday, it finally came through… but hampered by…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/29/2008

A year and 90 days ago, Qwest gave the FCC a request for forbearance from complying with some outdated price controls. The FCC had a…

• By: Fran Smith
• 07/28/2008

With a lot of attention focused on the unintended consequences of ethanol policy in raising the costs of food, here’s another example of those…

• By: Fran Smith
• 07/28/2008

A just-released working paper from the World Bank, “A Note on Rising Food Prices,” points out that the increased production of biofuels has…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/28/2008

Politicians rail against “Washington” as if they were outsiders, but sometimes, Washington is their true home, and they only go to their “home” state when it…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/28/2008

The White House capitulated on the mortgage bailout bill, which now will become law, thanks to the “gullible” Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, who got Bush to…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 07/28/2008

Remember stories about the horrors of the American medical system?  Operations performed on the wrong leg and such?  Guess what:  it’s also a problem in…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 07/26/2008

The Law of the Sea Treaty just won’t go away.  Ronald Reagan attempted to kill it a quarter century ago.  But it’s still with us. …

• By: Doug Bandow
• 07/26/2008

Do you like Peking Duck?  Well, don’t count on getting it in Europe.  Restaurants are being shut down for failing to meet European Union rules,…

• By: John Berlau
• 07/26/2008

The new book America’s Health Care Crisis Solved has been praised as providing a detailed, free-market solution for healthcare’s future. This it does, but…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 07/26/2008

No one ever wants to get cancer, but if you do get it, America is the place to get treated.  As Sen. Ted Kennedy doubtless…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 07/25/2008

David Evans, who spent six years working for the Australian government on climate change issues, started out a believer in global warming but finds the case…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/25/2008

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court struck down the latest version of the Child Online Protection Act, an internet censorship bill. AmLaw Daily…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/25/2008

Even the Washington Post admits that the housing bill that would bail out Fannie Mae is “structurally unsound” and would cost enormous sums that cannot…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/24/2008

Courtney and I have been working for weeks on creating libertarian versions of the popular hilariously-captioned kitty pictures known as “lolcats.” Bureaucrash…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/24/2008

We have previously discussed how government often mandates online privacy violations through data retention mandates and tracking requirements. Now, Congress has tucked…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/24/2008

CNET News reports: A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/24/2008

An enormously costly mortgage bailout bill passed the House 272-to-152, with strong support from liberal lawmakers.  It will soon pass the Senate by an…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/24/2008

An interesting little tidbit: A small town in Minnesota is trying to borrow $25 million in bonds to install a fiber-optic network. But now…

• By: John Berlau
• 07/24/2008

Of all the unintended consequences of the housing bill that passed the House yesterday — of which there will likely be many — one of…

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/23/2008

On Thursday, the federal minimum wage will increase to $6.55 per hour. Next July it is scheduled to go up to $7.25 per hour. CNN…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/23/2008

The White House is now backing away from its threat to veto the pork-filled bills that would bail out government-backed mortgage giants…

• By: Fran Smith
• 07/23/2008

As the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round negotiations continue, India has raised the immigration issue with the U.S. and the EU. This is…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 07/23/2008

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a truly ridiculous letter by Mary Beth Maxwell, who heads the far-Left pro-organized labor group American Rights at…

• By: William Yeatman
• 07/23/2008

Public transportation is often wearisome. Today, for example, I missed my metro train from Northern Virginia to Washington,…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/23/2008

A $25 billion bailout of government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae is now planned.  But Fannie Mae has such political power that its crooked managers will…

• By: John Berlau
• 07/23/2008

While pretty steep, $25 billion of our tax dollars isn’t the only thing many Americans could lose in the just-unveiled GSE bailout bill likely…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/22/2008

“The proposed government rescue of the nation’s two mortgage finance giants will appear on the federal budget as a $25 billion cost to taxpayers, the independent…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/22/2008

My colleague Ryan Radia has an excellent post at TLF about Comcast’s decision to resist New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s attempts to…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/22/2008

Ars reports that the movie industry has gathered together a task force to create standards for making 3D movies available in the home. Now…

• By: Ryan Young
• 07/22/2008

The U.S. government transfers about $17 billion from taxpayers to farmers in an average year. Every man, woman, and child in the country gives more…

• By: Alex Harris
• 07/22/2008

Cord Blomquist has an interesting post at TLF about the Google-Viacom lawsuit. He points out that forcing YouTube to take down infringing…

• By: Hans Bader
• 07/22/2008

A stealth assault is being mounted on the Constitution’s state-action doctrine in a case pending before the Supreme Court, Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee. The Supreme…