Lynne Kiesling You probably received the same apologetic email from Reed Hastings of Netflix that I did on Monday, stating the impending decision to split Netflix’s streaming business and its DVD subscription business. Foresightful or bad business decision, PR nightmare, or all of the above? The best analysis of its likely drivers and impacts is …
Lynne Kiesling In the always-smart-and-interesting City AM paper from London, Anthony Evans makes an important argument that has been overlooked in financial regulation debates: risk of failure is what creates system resilience, and regulation creates brittle monocultures. He writes in the context of last week’s Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) recommendations for creating regulatory divisions …
Resiliency Comes from More Risk of Bank Failure, Not Less Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As an addendum to my earlier post on the DOJ’s challenge of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, Peter Suderman at Reason has an informative post (with good links@) making essentially the same point as mine. The more the merrier!
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday’s announcement that the US DOJ would challenge the merger of AT&T’s wireless business with T-Mobile’s was surprising, and their approach to the merger seems to be more conventional and rooted in old HHI-market share and price effect metrics. Their analysis suggests that due to the substantial overlap in the existing separate AT&T …
Quality, Broadband, and Spectrum: What the Doj’s At&t/T-Mobile Lawsuit Misses Read More »
Lynne Kiesling A few weeks ago I was thrilled to speak at the inaugural Summer Institute on Sustainability and Energy, organized by the University of Illinois-Chicago in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago. The students were from diverse fields and between them and the other …
Lynne Kiesling Appliance and consumer electronics manufacturers are starting to incorporate digital technology with energy-related applications into their products … but as with most new technologies, the first commercial stage of the innovation cycle takes the form of “because we can” product differentiation rather than use-specific innovation. Take the example that Technology Review highlighted this …
Lynne Kiesling In late July I spoke at Cato University, which was great; I met so many interesting and thoughtful people, and learned a lot from my fellow participants and speakers. I’m also happy that Cato has made the presentation notes and recordings of the presentations available on their website, so you can see and …
Lynne Kiesling Penn Jillette, the taller and more vocal half of the magic performance duo Penn & Teller, has written a lovely and thoughtful essay as a companion to his appearance last night on Piers Morgan’s CNN show. It defies excerpting, so I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety. His …
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday Google announced its purchase of Motorola Mobility, the device manufacturing half of the former Motorola. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a front page full of stories about this move, including “Bid Comes Amid Tougher Scrutiny” (You know how to read this even though it’s subscriber-only, right? Do a search at a news …
Google, Motorola, and the Effects of Vertical Integration Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Thanks to Tim Haab for pointing us to this excellent observation from Bjorn Lomborg about innovation, regulation, and environmental quality: Real reductions in carbon emissions will occur only when better technology makes it worthwhile for individuals and businesses to change their behavior. CFLs and other advances can take us part of the way, …
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