This morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the most anticipated cases of the year for the future of regulating tech platforms. While much of the debate will focus on whether the platforms are best analogized to publishers, there is another important argument that the Supreme Court will confront: whether platforms are “common carriers.”

For decades now, we have been in an era of geographic divergence, with “superstar” cities and certain regions capturing growth, while others fall behind. Dominant explanations for this phenomenon focus largely on inexorable economic forces, such as globalization or the benefits of concentrating talent. Yet these explanations leave out a critical factor: the effects of specific regulatory choices on economic geography. From the Progressive and New Deal Eras through roughly the 1970s, the United States had a system of structural regulation in transportation, energy, communications, and banking that was designed to disperse economic activity. Deregulation naturally had the opposite effect: it concentrated economic activity and growth.

This week at the blog, we're sharing a few of our favorite posts from Notice & Comment's recent symposium on Networks, Platforms, and Utilities, a new casebook by Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand. First up: the authors explain why it's time to revive the field of "regulated industries" and to recover the idea that public interest demands a substantial measure of public control over society’s infrastructural resources.