Category: Miscellaneous

A Nobel for Competition Law. :)

tirole-portrait   Well, to be precise, it’s a Nobel for the Economics of Competition Law. And there can be no doubt that the man who’s picture you see above deserves it hands down !!   Jean Tirole is the official winner of the 2014 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2014 “for his analysis of market power and regulation”.   His work is extensive and if I start off, this is going to become a fairly long post, so I managed to find a fairly decent summary for our readers to get to know him and his work better.

UPDATE: Also find an Article by Prerna Katiyar titled “Jean Tirole: Why the Economics Nobel prize winner’s research is important for India”  recently published on 19th October, 2014.

The Speed Limit Debate

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As the Network Neutrality debate rages in the U.S. over the Comcast – Time Warner Merger, here are two interesting pieces on the flak which Comcast is receiving. It goes without saying, Comcast isn’t happy and it seems to have started losing it’s cool over the issue.

 

The first is an article on how Network Neutrality is already being subverted through the indirect route of the broadband network. This is not surprising, as the potential for this abuse was already pointed out some time ago by Susan P. Crawford in the Yale Law and Policy Review.

 

The second is a novel solution (and one which I really liked) by BitTorrent, Inc. CEO Eric Klinker on reaching a middle ground on the Network neutrality debate and torrent websites: pay the torrent websites to slow down rather than the websites paying the network provider for equal treatment at par with other websites.  Interestingly, BitTorrent, according to the post, “has voluntarily remained in a “slow lane” of sorts for several years because of the uTorrent Transport Protocol (uTP), which reduces the speed of data transmissions when they might harm other applications. BitTorrent and its users don’t get paid for relying on this protocol, of course, but Klinker suggested they should.”

Latest Network Neutrality Update.

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The top news is of course, September 10 (Wednesday), which will see it headlined as “Internet Slowdown Day”, a symbolic protest in favour of Network Neutrality. The protest will involve websites posting symbolic “loading” icons on their sites to demonstrate what could happen to them if the F.C.C. comes through with it’s plan to sanction Internet “fast lanes” that would completely kill off Network Neutrality. And make no mistake, the concept is gaining ground. A number of major websites have committed their participation to the event, including major porn websites. 😉

 

In other news, Tim Wu is entering politics !! (Or atleast trying to.)

 

 

A Snacker

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An upcoming post on the recent Reference Case No. 01/2012, . M/s Puja Enterprises et al., has been slightly delayed, so here is a snacker till this Friday, by which I hope the post will be ready for upload.

1. Volume 5 of Fair Play is out. For the uninitiated, Fair Play is the Quaterly Newsletter of the C.C.I.

2. Typical of the workings of a Ministry, the Draft National Competition Policy has now been referred to a Committee of Secretaries for “further consideration”. [Press Release]

Competition World (By Norton Rose)

I recently came across a Newsletter/Bulletin published by Norton Rose in May 2013 titled “Competition World: A Global Survey of recent Competition and Antitrust Law Developments with Practice Relevance.” I haven’t had the chance to read the full document, but a quick glance made it out to be an excellent summary on all the key competition law developments around the world. Though the Bulletin primarily focuses on the E.U., it also notes developments in Africa, Asia, America and Australia.

P.S.: For the record, this is not a sponsored post.

A Layman’s Guide to Indian Competition Law

I found a nice presentation by Shri Vinod Dhall, Former Chairman of the CCI while “competition surfing” the net as I like to call it. Its simple and easy to understand and should help any individual other than a lawyer to easily understand the provisions of the Act.

The presentation can be found here