Protecting Competition in New and Emerging Technologies

NextGen Competition | Jan 30, 2025

• Last February, NextGen Competition led a coalition letter supporting the Federal Trade Commission’s 6(b) inquiry into Big Tech’s growing influence over the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI. We worried that the concentration of AI development within a small group of powerful corporations posed significant risks to consumer rights, data privacy, and the ethical development of AI.

NextGen Competition | Dec 19, 2024

• President Obama famously said, “Elections have consequences,” and this November’s national elections are no exception. The outcome wasn’t what any of us had hoped for, and we’re already seeing Big Tech move quickly to insulate itself by building bridges with President-elect Trump. We hope the anti-Big Tech rhetoric from the campaign trail doesn’t fizzle out.

Common Dreams | Dec 18, 2024

• You know you’re making an impact when you’re challenging the status quo and ruffling feathers on both sides of the aisle. Regardless of Trump's arrival, she should stay at the FTC as long as she possibly can.

NextGen Competition | Nov 04, 2024

• As the air is heavy with election anxiety and pundits and pollsters speculate on tomorrow’s outcome, we at NextGen are thinking about 2025 and beyond. Namely, will the next administration continue the current one’s antitrust crusade? How will the ongoing cases of the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice versus Big Tech shake out? 🤔

NextGen Competition | Oct 15, 2024

• For decades, Microsoft’s relentless pursuit of vendor lock-in has stifled IT diversification in both the public and private sectors, while allowing dangerous cybersecurity vulnerabilities to persist unchecked. In September, the House Homeland Security Committee had a critical opportunity to address this issue during its hearing on July’s devastating outage, which brought airlines, government agencies, and businesses across the globe to a standstill. Unfortunately, they missed the mark.

The Well News | Sep 24, 2024

• Make no mistake, the impact of July’s massive global CrowdStrike outage was the result of a software monopoly that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global economy.

NextGen Competition | Sep 12, 2024

• We extend our sincere thanks and tip our hats to the organizations that came together to co-author and co-sign a letter to the FTC supporting the Commission’s inquiry into Amazon’s “reverse acqui-hire” of Adept AI Labs Inc.

NextGen Competition | Jul 31, 2024

• Welcome to this month's edition of Top Hat and Thimble. In our ongoing quest to dissect and critique the consolidation of power across industries, we again turn our gaze to the tech giants and draw an ironic parallel with the "too big to fail" phenomenon of the 2008 financial crisis.

The Dispatch | Jul 22, 2024

• But some also blame the concentration of the technology industry into a handful of companies and suggest that, if there were more viable alternatives to Microsoft or CrowdStrike, the faulty update’s effects would not have been as far-reaching. “Today’s massive global Microsoft outage is the result of a software monopoly that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global economy,” George Rakis, executive director of NextGen Competition—an organization that opposes market consolidation in the tech industry—said in a statement. “For decades, Microsoft’s pursuit of a vendor lock-in strategy has prevented the public and private sectors from diversifying their IT capabilities.”