The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) pledged at its recent Mexico City meeting to establish an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT). This team of 24 experts is responsible for developing and proposing protections for trademark holders. Such protections are needed...

Tragedy of the anti-commons occurs when property rules fail to enable efficient social coordination. In radio spectrum, rights issued to airwave users have traditionally been severely truncated, leaving gains from trade unexploited. The social losses that Ronald Coase (1959) asserted, appealing...

The Internet has devalued content to the point where it is often offered at no charge — newspapers, for instance — or widely misappropriated, as with music and movies. Either way, many people expect much of their content to be free. Why is this, how did it happen, and, focusing on music and...

The advent of telegraphy shifted news gathering from the public postal system to a private network dominated by telegraph companies and wire services, a nearly simultaneous revolution in journalism's technology and political economy. Postal news gathering had been open to all newspapers with few...

Since the beginning of the year 2009 the German press publishers have lobbied for their own neighbouring right which should cover even short snippets of online press articles. The new right should basically protect the press publishers' investments in the online environment. Currently there is...

More intensive copyright enforcement reduces piracy, raises prices, and lowers consumer surplus. We show that these results do not hold regarding the extent rather than intensity of enforcement. When enforcement is targeted at high-value buyers such as corporate and government users, the...

Despite the rapidly growing volume and economic importance of data in the digital economy, the legal framework for data ownership, access and trade remains incompletely defined in the EU and elsewhere. De facto data ownership dominates and often leads to fragmentation or anti-commons problems in...

We analyse survey data to investigate the main barriers to European cross-border e-commerce. We investigate the determinants of selling online, as well as the frequency and determinants of cross-border e-commerce, and the role of barriers. Large firms, which are part of a group, are more likely...

This paper describes the different forces that shape the market structure of four different 'online platform ecosystems' and the competition between them. The paper focuses on the following categories of platforms, which represent a wide scope of online activities: (i) e-commerce marketplaces;...

The aim of this paper is to explain evidence of unfair practices by online platforms towards business users, particularly SME's. First, using survey data, we show that sellers operating with four different categories of platforms multi-home (marketplaces, app stores, social networks and online...