Successful tech companies are being punished—for being successful.

Last week, Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed designating Microsoft as having strategic market status, which would give the government regulator enormous powers to regulate Microsoft and impose specific conduct requirements on product design. A consultation process has begun, with a decision on whether Microsoft will be given strategic market status expected in February 2027.

If the CMA decides to designate Microsoft as having strategic market status, it could intervene in product bundling (how Microsoft packages Teams, Word, Excel, and Copilot together), interoperability (whether Microsoft should make it easier for competing software and AI developers to integrate with its products), cloud licensing (whether Microsoft's licensing arrangements disadvantage rival cloud providers), and customer switching (whether businesses face unreasonable barriers to leaving Microsoft's ecosystem) in the United Kingdom.

Bizarrely, the CMA's fundamental gripe with Microsoft is that it has made its software so interconnected, convenient, and commercially attractive to buy together that competitors struggle to persuade businesses to use anything else. For example, the CMA says that Microsoft offers customers "technology that is useful, secure, easy to deploy and manage, and available at an attractive overall price." According to its own customer research, Microsoft is seen as "relatively good value for money," and its bundles are "seen as more cost-effective than buying and managing separate licences." Because commercial bundling "makes customers less likely to adopt products from alternative providers," the CMA thinks it must intervene.

Microsoft is not the first tech giant to feel the CMA's wrath for creating products people like. In 2025, the CMA decided Google had strategic market status in general search and search advertising, giving the regulator the power to impose legally binding requirements on how the company operates. Since then, the CMA has ordered Google to use government-mandated standards for ranking organic search results, provide competitors with tools to access users' search data, and give publishers greater control over how their content is used in AI-powered search. (These requirements were imposed without finding that Google had violated competition law.)

"Products working well together at an attractive price used to be called a selling point," but is now "attracting intervention pushed by an overzealous regulator," Matthew Lesh, public policy fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based free market think tank, tells Reason. Lesh is the co-author of Digital Overload, a 2023 report that warns against giving the CMA "extensive, discretionary powers" amounting to the regulator "telling some of the most successful and popular platforms on the planet how to run their businesses."

Lesh argues that including Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot, in the designation is "particularly outrageous." Last year, when Google was designated as having strategic market status, the CMA excluded Gemini because the "AI assistant sector is relatively small, nascent, and highly dynamic." Lesh argues that, with Google, the CMA acknowledged "uncertainty about the market's development," but now "proposes sweeping Microsoft's workplace AI into a designation requiring an assessment looking at least five years ahead."

"Five years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. Anyone confident about who will lead workplace AI in 2031 should be running a hedge fund, not a regulator," he tells Reason.

While European countries have taken a far more interventionist approach to technology, the United States has, at least comparatively, celebrated competition and innovation. But American lawmakers are increasingly flirting with importing similar restrictions on Big Tech.

In June, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would allow federal and state antitrust enforcers to challenge certain practices by dominant online platforms, including favoring their own products and disadvantaging competitors. Jack Nicastro described the bill in Reason as an "atrocious importation of European-style competition policy," arguing that it would undermine innovation and choice. The following month, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) introduced the AI AGENT Act, which would impose new requirements on major online platforms to accommodate competing AI agents.

These proposals are intended to address similar concerns to those of the CMA in Britain. The idea is that established companies outperforming their competitors is somehow evidence of "market failure," undermining the very innovations that made them successful.

Technological progress has always been driven by entrepreneurs and the companies they've built competing to win over consumers. Britain seems to have forgotten this. If the United States wants to remain a world leader in tech, it should avoid the British approach like the plague.

The post Britain Wants To Punish Microsoft for Being Too Successful appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Two hundred years ago, the invention of Braille allowed blind people to read and write. By the 1930s, recorded sound made "talking books" possible. Developments in text-to-speech technology in the 1980s made reading more accessible and widespread. Then came personal computers, screen readers, smartphones, cameras, GPS, voice assistants, and myriad other technological advancements that gave blind people more independence.

Now a pair of sunglasses can read your mail, describe the person in front of you, tell you what is on a restaurant menu, and help you find your way home. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is using artificial intelligence to turn glasses into a hands-free companion. For any person, this technology is impressive. For the approximately 700,000 Americans who are blind, it is potentially life-changing.

In June, Meta announced that every single blind veteran in the United States could receive its AI glasses free of charge. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.), approximately 130,000 American veterans are legally blind, and over 1 million veterans have vision impairment that makes performing daily activities difficult. Don Overton, a blind veteran and former executive director of the Blinded Veterans Association, told Meta that he had "lost [his] independence" after losing his eyesight in a bunker explosion. "The moment I put on my Ray-Ban Meta glasses," he said, "I got my independence back."

The V.A. has a history of failing to fully support blind veterans. In 2022, the V.A.'s Office of Inspector General found that claims processors were instructed to contact visually impaired veterans by telephone, but 87 percent of claims showed no evidence of these calls ever happening. A 2022 investigation by the Senate's Special Committee on Aging found that "roughly 90 percent" of V.A. websites were not compliant with federal accessibility requirements. "We feel we've been abandoned by the agency that is tasked with providing our care and services for us," Overton told The Washington Post in 2022.

Meta's AI glasses have come under fire due to their privacy risks. The company was sued in March after Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten reportedly found that Meta's contractors in Kenya were accessing videos by users of their AI glasses. "We see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies," one worker noted.

Users should be aware of those risks. Still, for blind veterans, companies such as Meta have stepped up to fill a gap that the government has failed to address.

The post Meta Is Gifting AI Glasses to Blind Veterans: 'I Got My Independence Back' appeared first on Reason Magazine.

If you loved the cowboy machismo of Yellowstone, you'll love its continuation, Paramount's Dutton Ranch. The show follows fan-favorite Yellowstone characters Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler, a married couple who leave Montana behind for what they hope will be a quiet ranch in Texas. What they find is anything but quiet.

The pair encounter the Jacksons, the most powerful family in Rio Paloma, and watch as family matriarch Beulah Jackson uses her clan's money to cultivate political influence by financing campaigns for local officials. In one episode, Jackson reminds the newly elected Sheriff Handy Wade what she expects in return for her donation. "The election contribution I gave you was not" a "small thing," she says. In another episode, one of the Jacksons sits in the sheriff's chair, and when asked to leave, responds, "Don't forget who paid for it."

Dutton Ranch reminds us that corporatism happens not just in Washington, but in every layer of government—county buildings, zoning boards, mayors' offices, and, of course, sheriff's departments.

The post Review: The Political Cronyism of the Dutton Universe appeared first on Reason Magazine.

With Social Security barreling toward insolvency, the government is increasing benefits in January.

On Wednesday, the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that retirees will receive a 3.6 percent increase in Social Security benefits next year. The raise, which was unveiled shortly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported consumer prices rose 3.7 percent year over year in September, will amount to an increase of $75 per month for the average beneficiary. It also represents a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that will be 0.8 percentage points higher than last year's, which was 2.8 percent, and 0.9 percentage points higher than what was projected by the Social Security Trustees, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

"Social Security will implement this cost-of-living adjustment for 76 million Americans, giving them greater financial stability," said SSA Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano in a press release. "Under President Donald J. Trump, Social Security is delivering better, faster, higher-quality service for the American people."

But the announcement comes as Social Security faces a looming funding cliff.

The program has been spending considerably more than it receives for years, thanks in large part to the U.S. demographic problem: Birth rates have collapsed, life expectancy has risen, and there are fewer working-age people paying taxes to fund retirees. In 2025, the program collected $1.45 trillion in revenue and spent $1.61 trillion, leaving a $160 billion shortfall. Trust fund reserves covered the gap, but they are rapidly dwindling. In June, Social Security's Trustees projected that, without legislative changes, incoming revenue would cover only 78 percent of scheduled retirement and survivor benefits by late 2032—a 22 percent shortfall. Combined retirement and disability funds are expected to run out by 2034. There are a handful of fixes, including raising the retirement age, reducing benefits, raising the cap on earnings, means-testing the program, privatizing it, or getting rid of it altogether.

While many lawmakers have acknowledged reality, Congress remains divided on how to address the issue. In August, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) blocked a proposal from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.) to establish a congressional process to consider reforms, arguing that it would slash retiree benefits and help billionaires "avoid paying their fair share."

"People are objecting to doing their job," Cassidy complained in September. "Congress needs to fix Social Security this year."

What makes Wednesday's increase even more unjustified is the fact that older Americans are already among the wealthiest age groups in the country. According to the Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Consumer Finances released last week, households headed by someone aged 75 or older had a median net worth of $504,900 in 2025, compared with just $33,000 for households headed by someone under 35. Despite their relative wealth compared to working-age people, retirees are getting a COLA increase that is greater than the average worker, whose wages have risen by 3 percent in the last year.

For the very wealthiest beneficiaries, the 2027 COLA will constitute an enormous increase. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the highest-earning couples who retired this year will receive a combined increase of $3,600, meaning that their combined benefits would exceed $100,000 next year. However, without congressional action, Social Security recipients could expect a 22 percent cut that, in 2032, would wipe out the previous nine years' COLAs all at once.

Despite years of warnings about Social Security's deteriorating finances, Congress has yet to enact reforms to avert the looming shortfall. For now, beneficiaries can look forward to larger checks in January, even as the program moves closer to the day when it can no longer pay the benefits it has promised.

The post Social Security Is Running Out of Money. Benefits Are Rising 3.6% Next Year Anyway. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Starting next week, Pennsylvania will begin enforcing a law prohibiting the sale of e-cigarettes that have not been explicitly approved by the state. Supporters argue that it will protect public health, but it seems likely to do the opposite by preventing many former smokers from accessing the products that helped them quit.

Under the law, known as ACT 57, there are currently just six manufacturers of electronic nicotine delivery systems on the approved list that can be sold in the Keystone State, meaning many popular vaping products will be forcibly removed from shelves on October 19. Retailers who violate this law will face fines of $500 for each unapproved product. A second violation within a year will result in a civil penalty of between $750 and $1,000 per day per product, and a suspension of the dealer's license for at least 14 days. A shop's third violation within a year would result in a civil penalty of $1,000 to $1,500 per day per product, and the revocation of its license.

Politicians are touting this law as the latest way to protect the public, and of course, they claim it will especially protect children. "This law is about keeping harmful products out of the hands of both children and adults who may not realize what they are consuming," said Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday.

"I applaud the legislature for their bipartisan support of Act 57 to provide this important public health safety measure to the Commonwealth."

However, not all Pennsylvania residents are enthusiastic about the law's enforcement.

"This will be largely catastrophic," Chris Hughes, the former owner of Fat Cat Vapor Shop in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, tells Reason. Hughes predicts that the restrictions will encourage consumers to purchase vaping products across state lines, creating an illicit market. "Some people that are enterprising will drive across the border to Ohio [or] West Virginia, and bring a lot of products back and sell them to other people," he says.

Hughes is right to assume that the law will create an illicit market for vaping. In June, JAMA Network Open published a report on Alabama, Oklahoma, and Louisiana—three other states with constraints similar to Pennsylvania—finding that the restrictions were not associated with lasting reductions in e-cigarette nicotine sales. By the end of April 2025, products not listed in the states' approved directories accounted for 92.1 percent of measured e-cigarette nicotine sales in Alabama, 53.6 percent in Oklahoma, and 52.3 percent in Louisiana.

For people living further from the border, Hughes says that "a lot of them will return to smoking." "Half of those people will die prematurely from smoking.…It's a tragedy, really."

Indeed, evidence shows vaping to be one of the most effective tools to quit smoking. A 2024 study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2021–2022 alone, approximately 1.2 million American adults used e-cigarettes to help them quit smoking for at least six months, representing slightly more than 40 percent of all adults who successfully quit during that period. Meanwhile, a 2026 review from Cochrane, a global health nonprofit, found that smokers are more likely to quit when using e-cigarettes than with nicotine replacement therapy: 8 percent to 10 percent of smokers using e-cigarettes may successfully quit, compared with just 6 percent using nicotine-replacement therapy.

The impending restrictions have Pennsylvania vapers stockpiling products. Hughes says he has delayed paying his property taxes to make sure he has "two to three years' worth of e-liquid and coils while this shakes out." He also spoke to an employee at a vape shop recently who told him about a customer spending $500 on e-liquid after learning about the impending ban.

For vape shop owners across Pennsylvania, the new law will make business even more difficult. Hughes was forced to close down Fat Cat Vapor Shop in Williamsport after Pennsylvania introduced a 40 percent wholesale tax on vaping products in 2016. "The whole goal of my opening the business was to help get adult smokers off of cigarettes and transition them to something that I knew for a fact was much less harmful," he says. Hughes estimates that his shop helped approximately 8,000 adults quit smoking during its three years in business.

Now, he fears other independent vape shops will suffer the same fate as his own. "Most, if not all of them, will be bankrupted," Hughes warns. "It almost takes my breath away. I'm not even sure what to say."

Pennsylvania lawmakers may intend to protect public health, but their new law risks pushing adults away from healthier lifestyle choices. As is often the case, the government restricting the choices adults are allowed to make for themselves is likely to have deadly consequences.

The post Will Pennsylvania's Vape Ban Create More Cigarette Smokers? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

This week, editors Peter Suderman,  Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie are joined by reporter Reem Ibrahim to discuss Vice President J.D. Vance's bizarre definition of socialism. They examine whether Vance genuinely believes what he's saying or is attempting to redefine socialism to avoid acknowledging the Trump administration's own big-government policies.

Next, the panel discusses America's growing $2 trillion deficit, the rising cost of Social Security and Medicare, and the generational divide between older Americans receiving government benefits and younger workers paying for them. The editors also examine youth protests in France, where students are demanding improvements to public schools despite the country's already extensive government spending. They then discuss allegations that U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle offered political access in exchange for help paying off personal credit card debt and what the controversy reveals about government corruption. Finally, a listener asks about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's plan to publicly broadcast an execution and whether turning capital punishment into a spectacle could encourage extremism.

0:00—Vance rebrands socialism.

08:48—Largest budget deficit ever

25:50—Youth protests in France

38:15—Listener question on public executions

46:25—Guilfoyle's corruption scandal

56:20—Weekly cultural recommendations

Upcoming Reason Events

The World Premiere of Escaping Venezuela, October 13

Mentioned in the podcast:

"J.D. Vance Accidentally Comes Out as a Socialist," by Billy Binion

"Trump Has Been Trampling Free Speech for More Than 40 Years—and It Keeps Getting Worse," by Jacob Sullum

"Protesters in France and Spain Are Angry at Government Failure—and Demanding More Government," by Reem Ibrahim

"The Great British Exodus: Taxes, Housing Costs, and Terrible Healthcare Are Driving Young Brits Away," by Reem Ibrahim

"The Federal Government Just Posted the Largest Annual Budget Deficit Since COVID," by Eric Boehm

"Livestreaming an Execution," by Liz Wolfe

"Kimberly Guilfoyle's Grift Is at Least as Offensive as Hunter Biden's," by Robby Soave

The post J.D. Vance Is Playing Dumb About Socialism appeared first on Reason Magazine.