Report: Amazon’s Monopoly
Amazon is destroying competition and market diversity, leaving us with fewer choices, less innovation, and diminished opportunities. … Read More
Report: Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip on the Economy Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities
Amazon has extended its tentacles across our economy. In this report, we pull back the curtain on the company, and find that it’s at the center of increasing inequality and diminishing opportunity, and that it’s concentrating power in ways that endanger competition, community life, and democracy. We also examine how public policy should address Amazon’s high costs.… Read More
Report: Inclusive Financing for Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Energy efficiency and renewables represent the most promising pathway to lower energy costs for individual consumers and utilities. But limited access hinders progress. Utilities can knock down major barriers to energy efficiency and renewables by allowing customers to make site-specific investments and recovering utility costs through an opt-in tariff. … Read More
Report: Sparking Grid Savings Starts at Home
New technology, particularly in the hands of electric customers, is creating an unprecedented opportunity to tap the many other sources of controllable electricity demand in homes and businesses. Utilities, like Xcel Energy in Minnesota, should harness these lower-cost ways to meet rising peak energy demand.… Read More
Report: North Carolina Connectivity – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
North Carolina’s digital divide between urban and rural communities is increasing dangerously in a time when high quality Internet access is more important than ever. Rural and urban areas of North Carolina are essentially living in different realities, based on … Read More
Report: Is Bigger Best in Renewable Energy?
Conventional wisdom suggests the biggest wind and solar power plants will be cheapest, but where they deliver power, and who will own them, matters more.… Read More
Report: Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business
Small businesses have been in steep decline. In this report, we argue that anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations is largely to blame and present three reasons to bring a commitment to fair markets for small businesses back into antitrust policy. The report won an award for antitrust scholarship in 2017. … Read More
The Secrets Behind Partnerships to Improve Internet Access
A growing number of US cities have broken up monopoly control of the Internet marketplace locally. They’re promoting entrepreneurship, and giving residents and businesses real choice in how they connect and reach new audiences. They’ve brought a new wrinkle to an … Read More
Minnesota’s Broadband Grant Program: Getting the Rules Right
Minneapolis, MN —In its first two years of implementation, the Minnesota Border-to-Border program distributed $30 million to 31 rural Minnesota communities. But the state has not put enough money into the program and needs to put more focus on getting investment … Read More