Brian Albrecht on Duties to Deal
ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht was cited by Forbes in a piece about the decision in the Google adtech antitrust case. You can read the full piece here.
Brian Albrecht is an applied economic theorist in competition and information. Albrecht is also Chief Economist at the International Center for Law & Economics, earned his PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota in 2020, and was Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University.
He homed in on something that those in the ad industry who are not attorneys but just ad geeks might never have thought about: The judge’s opinion in the last search case that “the Sherman Act Imposes No Liability on Google for Its Refusal to Brand Feature Parity to Microsoft Ads on SA360” and that “businesses are free to choose the parties with whom they will deal, as well as the prices, terms, and conditions of that dealing”—in other words, it is a settled principle (from a case known as Trinko) that firms have “no duty to deal with” a rival. Some in the ad industry might have overlooked that particular affirmation of existing case law and predict, erroneously perhaps, that Google or Alphabet should be “dealing with its rivals” and open data and more to the entire industry, to the supposedly harmed rivals.