Microhoo Scrutiny, Terrorism Insurance and Cooling Global Temperatures

1. TECHNOLOGY 

Microsoft and Yahoo face
antitrust scrutiny for their recently announced 10-year search agreement.

CEI Expert Available
to Comment: Regulatory Studies Fellow Ryan Young on why the trustbusters
should lay off the
Microhoo deal: 

“Google is the top dog in search right now, and by a wide
margin. Their nearly 80% market share is more than three times Yahoo and Bing’s
combined. Preventing Google’s rivals from mounting a more effective challenge
means less competition, not more. Yet that is exactly what Justice and Sen.
[Herb] Kohl might decide to do. Throwing another irony into the fire, Google is
facing antitrust scrutiny of its own.”

2. BUSINESS

The White House proposes scaling back a federal terrorism
insurance program.

CEI Expert Available
to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli
Lehrer on how we can have privately-funded insurance
against terrorism: 

“For example, a company that owns a
building in Manhattan might take on $50 million
of risk for a Minneapolis-based company in return for the Minneapolis
company taking on $10 million in Manhattan
risk. Some sort of formal exchange, very likely, would have to exist to match
participants’ risks. However it works out in practice, the idea has enormous
potential benefits. Neither insurers nor insurance purchasers would have to
divert any capital to buy expensive insurance policies against the unlikely
possibility of terrorist attack but, simply by expanding the size of the groups
they joined, could reduce their liabilities. Taxpayers would owe nothing.”

3. ENVIRONMENT

Cooling temperatures around the world confound predictions
of global warming.

CEI Expert Available
to Comment: Senior Fellow Marlo
Lewis on the flaws in the recent
temperature record: 

“The world has warmed overall
during the past 130 years, as evidenced by melting glaciers, longer
growing seasons, and both proxy and instrumental data. However, the main
era of ‘anthropogenic’ global warming supposedly began in the mid-1970s, and
ongoing research by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts leaves no doubt
that in recent decades, the U.S. surface temperature record –
reputed to be the best in the world – is unreliable and riddled with false
warming biases.”

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