Opinion

Last week, Google complied with the European Commission ruling that hit it with a 2.42 billion euro ($2.85 billion) fine and ordered it to share real estate on its search pages with rival comparison shopping services. From a customer’s point of view, nothing has changed. The historic EU decision punished Google for abusing its search dominance to push its own …

In grade school, a teacher made kids who got in trouble go to the blackboard and write multiple times: “I will not …. ” It was my introduction to chalk. Here’s a repeat reference to a lesson taught two decades ago by a Republican pollster, the late Bob Teeter: The party that owns health care is a loser. Today, it’s …

As it heads into a major leadership transition, China is attempting a strange breed of corporate reform. Rather than privatizing state-owned enterprises outright, the government is testing whether selling minority stakes to private investors may improve their performance. Meanwhile, state companies are busy revising their governing laws to give the Communist Party more control over management. The goals of these …

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy stuck stubbornly to his script on Sunday night while the rest of the world watched an entirely different movie unfold in Catalonia. “There was no referendum. What we have seen was a mere dramatization,” Rajoy insisted. He sounded a little like a Kremlin spokesperson brushing aside a separatist uprising in, say, Chechnya. Nothing to see …

The relationship between the Democratic Party and big business this year has all the makings of a good romantic comedy. Based on their histories and values, these two couldn’t be more different. And yet, the fates seem to be drawing them together. All that’s missing is one party walking in, drenched from the rain, exclaiming, “You had me at ‘$15 …

Economists are famously bad at predicting growth. A new technique might help them get a little better. When assessing a country’s potential to prosper, economists typically look at aggregate measures such as education, investment or national debt. This hasn’t worked particularly well: China’s economy, for example, has kept growing at a fast pace even though they’ve been predicting a slowdown …

Annoyed by Congress’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration is redoubling its efforts to undermine the law. The latest act of sabotage: Top federal health officials have been told not to help states sign up Americans for insurance policies as part of this fall’s open enrollment period. Reducing the number of people who buy policies will …

Those cheering the looming departure of Wolfgang Schaeuble from the German Ministry of Finance should not do much. His successor may not be as ornery, but southern Europeans—and above all Greeks—shouldn’t expect any better treatment. Schaeuble has held a wide range of positions since he was first elected to the German parliament in 1972; he’s been interior minister, chief of …

This past week, I gave a lecture to a Georgetown University graduate seminar. The instructor’s challenge to me was to talk about technology as integral to energy security. Here is the argument I laid out for these students. In wind and solar energy—which only significantly depend on hydrocarbons during manufacturing and transport—technology is a relatively simple lens on energy. For …

When discussing Japan’s debt, most people get caught up in the issue of fiscal solvency. As everyone by now knows, Japan has a very high level of debt versus gross domestic product: This attention-grabbing number—about twice the level of the US—often gets people asking whether Japan will default. Some believe a default is likely when the country runs out of …