In an interview Tuesday with Reuters, Teresa Ribera, the second-most powerful official in the European Commission, made it clear that the EU is digging in its heels against demands by the White House for fairer treatment of American companies facing colossal fines.

The Senate Judiciary Committee soon will hold confirmation hearings for Gail Slater for assistant attorney general, antitrust division. Slater’s antitrust understanding is broad and deep; she previously worked in the Trump 45 administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the private sector. She already has support from several senators and Attorney General Pam Bondi; she ought to be confirmed easily. 

A lot of commentary about the lifting of the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams has unfavorably compared the protest resignations of DOJ prosecutors to Robert Bork’s actions during Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973.

J.D. Vance did his audience a favor by delivering a blunt message bluntly. At the AI summit meeting in Paris of European and Asian leaders, the vice president told Europeans to back off regulating artificial intelligence before it can be developed and properly understood.

Is DeepSeek the result of American AI being too consolidated? Lina Khan makes the case in today’s New York Times that the Chinese AI upstart’s disruption of America’s largest firms is a “canary in the coal mine.” DeepSeek is telling us that our businesses are plagued by the sluggish, bureaucratic, inertial habits of American big tech “monopolies.”

Ever since Apple opened its App Store on its iPhones in 2008 it has sought to control and curate its offerings. Apple stoutly maintains its curation creates a better user experience. Customers seem to agree, voting with their dollars to give Apple the largest market share in the global smartphone market (while still facing stiff competition from Samsung and others).

What a difference a trading day makes.

On Friday, Wall Street went to bed confident that the United States had a commanding lead in artificial intelligence. After all, Nvidia makes the world-leading chips on which to create cutting-edge AI, while the U.S. government has forbidden the export of such chips to America’s near-peer competitor, China.

Alvaro Bedoya, one of Biden’s remaining progressives on the Federal Trade Commission, argued recently in The New York Times that the agency should expand enforcement of the often ignored Robinson-Patman Act to protect small retailers and especially small, independent grocers.

It has come to light, thanks to The Information, that the Federal Trade Commission under Chain Lina Khan reached out to Temu to bolster that agency’s antitrust case against Amazon. This was asking the injurer to inflict more injuries on the injured.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent recent column advising Speaker Mike Johnson to sidestep the budget trap that ensnares House Republicans in never-ending self-recrimination, resulting in hair-pulling, self-immolation and the destruction of one speaker after another.