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I recall peeping through the curtains at my house. I wanted to ensure “the coast was clear” of neighbors, before darting into my car to go to the store. My heart would beat faster as I approached the checkout counter. I feared the clerk would ask me “how’re you doing?” How do you even respond to “How’re you doing”? Am I actually expected to describe my day? Perplexed, I once asked an American friend who said — you say “Hi”, or you can say whatever you’re thinking. I understood this explanation about 5 years after my therapy for Social Anxiety. But I’m getting ahead of my story One night, like many nights before, I lay in bed, wide awake. I was re-living mortifying moments from the past evening, over and over. I went downstairs and googled “embarrassment at dinner”. A trail of links lead to the discovery that I had a “condition” called “Social Anxiety Disorder”: SAD. I had been shy all my life and never realized that it was a “disorder”. I had assumed it was my personality & I was

The Power of Tech Companies Over the past two decades, Tech Companies have disrupted several industries and devastated existing monopolies. This is quite an accomplishment. Antitrust regulation itself has been unable to achieve this over the past 132 years. Economic theory actually recognizes this. Some antitrust scholars have argued along with economist Joseph A. Schumpeter that when a monopoly position follows from or is accompanied by technological innovation, all Sherman Act bets should be off, in part because temporary monopoly is a natural concomitant of innovation and also because the “creative destruction” associated with innovation inexorably threatens existing monopolies and forces them to behave competitively:1 We’ve seen it happen before us: Amazon — Disrupting the Retail Giants. Netflix — The Media Companies. Airbnb — The hotel industry, Uber — The Taxi Companies & so many others. Tech Companies connect Service Providers with Consumers more efficiently & scalably t

Good vs Bad Antitrust Antitrust by  Nick Youngson  CC  BY-SA 3.0 Antitrust’s aim is to encourage competition in order to improve consumer products & services. The “self-preferencing rule”, included in the EU’s  Digital Markets Act ’s and the American Innovation and Online Choice Act, will become law in 2023. The rule creates competition at an individual service level, but impedes it at a vertically integrated level, where user convenience & time are the more important consideration. To walk through how this happens, consider which option you prefer for a phone plan? Options compared side by side apples to apples — pros & cons, prices & reviews, one-click purchase, contract terms & clauses all upfront, and a standard option to back out, in case you change your mind. Scattered provider sites, which means a hunt for 3rd party reviews, the need to drill deep into middlemen & provider sites, read all the small print, watch out for hidden clauses, make sure you’re not