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Very interesting, and I largely agree re: antitrust and competition policies in the EU. But the Draghi report also expressed concern about the sheer volume and complexity of other EU regulations (especially tech regulations). I'm curious where you land on those critiques?

So happy I stumbled on to this newsletter! I continue to be impressed by how much insightful content is available on Substack.

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Good post! There is also a theoretical question: if a merger does indeed create efficiency gains, e.g., by sharing access to the companies' infrastructure, what prevents these companies to seize upon these gains via contractual arrangements? There's Coase's theory of the firm which tells us that the efficient firm size is reached when internal transaction costs begin to exceed market transaction costs. That's a useful framework, because it points us to where the problem lies: market transaction costs are too high. Said differently, firms wishing to grow to pursue efficiency gains is indicative of the malfunctioning of markets. They cannot exploit the efficiency gains from within the market. Your post offers good diagnosis on what's wrong, and we need more fingers pointing at what's clogging markets and a better understanding as to why this makes us all poorer (whither zero-sum thinking!). I very much enjoyed your posts on the AI act and the costs of failure in that regard because I learnt something about what are the issues. Finally, an afterthought:

One key impediment to efficient contracting (unrelated to regulation) that theorists are quick to point out are asymmetric information in bilateral bargaining. Formally correct. But: Here I would object to this argument: if two firms cannot exploit efficiency gains due to information frictions, how would they know that there are efficiency gains to begin with?

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Thanks for reading and commenting, Christopher! I imagine people would point another obstacle of course- antitrust/anti-collusion rules may prevent some of those coasian bargains. On the other hand, there is a lot that is done through contract-from infrastructure sharing to code (route) sharing by airlines.

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Good post, but I have some questions and a comment. Why do European telecoms networks spend less on capex? And is this not a growing problem? The French, in particular, are complaining and want Big Tech to help foot the bill of increasing data traffic. See https://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/fair-share-initiative-regulation-eu-telecoms-internet-traffic-network-infrastructure

The argument that policy is a reaction to a particular traumatic event in history is not necessarily a good one. For the same reason, Germany has underinvested in its armed forces and over-relied on trade to prevent future conflicts?

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