DOJ’s Proposed Antitrust Remedies Against Google Are a Bridge Too Far
ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne is mentioned in this Competitive Enterprise Institute article on the DOJ’s proposed antitrust remedies against Google. Read the full article here.
Applying the “but-for” causation standard used in Rambus Inc. v. FTC, plaintiffs must demonstrate that were it not for the disputed business conduct, the plaintiffs would not have suffered anticompetitive harm. This means of determining causation, however, was not applied in this case, and the “reasonably appear capable of” standard was used instead. As Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics, effectively stated, this standard is applied when exclusionary conduct allegedly stymies the emergence of a nascent competitive threat—as in the Microsoft case where it was unclear whether Netscape could have developed into a rival in the operating-system marketplace. However, with respect to United States v. Google, developed rivals that offer substitute search engine products (such as Bing) already exist. Adopting such a permissive standard regarding antitrust oversight of business dealings risks substantially increasing the government’s power to restrain business.