Does banning a good or service substantially reduce its consumption? Or does it mainly drive the market underground or to substitute products?

Research on banning minors from adult websites suggests the latter. The researchers looked at 

individual-level browsing data from approximately 550,000 US desktop and mobile internet users between 2022 and 2024. … [The] findings reveal that age-verification laws reduced overall time spent on adult websites, but these effects were muted by users circumventing blocks and switching to noncompliant websites.

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Antitrust policy presents a challenge for both libertarians and policymakers. On the one hand, competitive markets are good, which might suggest policy should limit firm mergers. On the other hand, mergers can have beneficial effects (such as economies of scale and scope or disciplining unproductive firms), so broad opposition to mergers is likely counterproductive. 

New research on bank consolidation offers evidence on this tradeoff. Contrary to the belief 

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There has been a recent resurgence in fears about AI. A range of voices, from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon to former engineers and leaders of various AI labs, have been calling for a pause in AI development. Many of these calls are accompanied by science fiction-esque doomsday scenarios about the worst that could happen. Yet a rush to regulate out of fear could have longer-term negative consequences than the risk it claims to address.

The last week has focused a lot on the potential risks of AI, distracting from the ways this broad-purpose technology is already transforming our lives in ways we don’t think about or see. We no longer think of autocomplete or text-to-speech as AI, even though they are. We often don’t see the remarkable medical research that is being powered by AI until it directly impacts us or a loved one. AI is opening new doors for entrepreneurship and creating fresh opportunities in skilled trades. Any conversation about how to govern this technology should consider two truths: yes, the risks could be real and worth taking seriously, but so are the benefits already showing up in people’s lives and livelihoods.

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Many innovators find the growing uncertainty, frequent changes, and secret frameworks in the AI regulatory space as barriers to investment in the research, development, and deployment of new technology. At the same time, there’s broad recognition that laws such as the EU AI Act risk being out of date by their effective date, representing a different constraint on the AI ecosystem. The frustrating reality is that there’s no “right” way to govern AI. Existing laws, including consumer protection statutes, already address many of the most common harms associated with AI. Yet frontier issues and edge cases will require new paradigms and regulatory certainty to allow innovators to fully pursue possibilities while resolving the public’s and policymakers’ concerns about legitimate risks, such as cybersecurity threats.

New governance efforts should be tailored to address cases where clear market failures underpinning broader AI adoption and ongoing AI research occur or where the lack of regulatory certainty prevents important development of the technology. Three examples of such failures include: Inadequate information about model capabilities and values is hindering the ability of consumers to make knowledgeable decisions; insufficient supply of independent AI auditors threatens to prevent the timely and thorough investigation of company practices; and ineffective initiatives to increase the talent pipeline of AI experts may hinder the nation’s long-term tech ambitions.

This week marks the release of the Consumer Financial Protection Accountability and Reform Act of 2026, H.R. 10184. Discussions of measures to restructure the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are sharply polarized, mainly along political lines. On the Republican side, proponents of reform call out the bureau’s overreach. Defenders of the status quo, mostly on the Democratic side, remind us that the bureau was intended to protect consumers and insist that only the bureau can do so.

But many policymakers share the same concerns about the CFPB. And a close look at those concerns reveals a bipartisan case for reform. Many of the changes proposed by measures like the CFPB Reform Act of 2026 should be welcomed across party lines.

The standard argument for occupational licensing is that it keeps out low-quality providers. Existing evidence, however, does not support this claim; moreover, 

licensing erects barriers that can restrict labor supply and worker mobility, with potentially far-reaching implications for wages, employment opportunities, and economic efficiency.

Indeed, new research suggests that

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Last week, Williams—a natural gas company—hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a power plant called Socrates South that just began operating in New Albany, Ohio. Notably, this natural gas plant is fully disconnected from the public power grid, supplying the data centers of a Meta affiliate, Sidecat, without affecting anyone else’s electricity. 

Speed to Power

The New Albany site is part of a growing trend of data centers acquiring electric service more rapidly than traditional timelines of six, eight, or even ten years. The Socrates South plant came online in just 17 months, with the first filings made with the Ohio Power Siting Board in March of 2025. 

This is a big victory for the local community, the developer Williams, and their customer Sidecat, but also the Ohio lawmakers behind the legislation that made it possible: last year’s HB 15. That bill provided the regulatory certainty that a fully off-grid generation plant could avoid the long queue for grid connection and bring “speed to power” to customers who don’t want to wait. It’s aligned with a framework we’ve been advocating, called consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), which creates space for new, privately financed electric utilities to supply non-residential customers, such as data centers, without interconnecting with the existing grid.

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