David Fischer (Antitrust Review) beat me to the punch announcing the FTC’s release of its staff report from the Bureau of Competition and Office of Policy & Planning on the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which immunizes private actors urging government action from antitrust enforcement. The full text of the report is available here. This should prove to be an important document.

Read the full piece here.

Fred Tung highlights Wal-Mart’s new strategy of selling a month’s supply of 300 different generics for $4, noting that Target will match Wal-Mart’s prices but Walgreens and CVS will not. Isn’t competition grand? Well, not everyone is convinced that low prices for consumers is a good thing.

Read the full piece here. 

Hanno Kaiser at Antitrust Review discusses the implications of Google’s acquisition of YouTube for the net neutrality debate. Hanno opines that the deal may increase the likelihood of a neutrality result even without legislation. While Google’s public pro-neutrality stance is well known, GMU’s Tom Hazlett (my office neighbor and fellow UCLA Economics alum) has a great column in the Financial Times highlighting the difference between Google’s “public policy” stance on net neutrality and its business model. Here’s Hazlett on Google’s now well-known position on net neutrality legislation…

Read the full piece here. 

WSJ Law Blog offers a follow up (and the complaint!) to Keith’s post (also check out the discussion in the comments) on the antitrust suit filed by an independent coffee shop owner against Starbucks concerning the use of exclusive leases with landowners. After reviewing the complaint, I agree with Lauren Albert, the antitrust lawyer quoted in Lattman’s story who concludes that: “The facts here don’t really seem to allege a violation of antitrust law.” Indeed, they do not.

Read the full piece here.

The AEI and Brookings have released a volume entitled “Antitrust Policy and Vertical Restraints.”  You can check out the contents here, and it is available for purchase here.

Read the full piece here.

Matt Bodie’s “Canons” project continues over at Prawfs, and antitrust is up to bat.  I took a stab at a reading list which I believe meet’s Matt’s criteria: articles that are essential to doing antitrust scholarship.  My long, but embarrassingly underinclusive list, is below the fold.  In particular, I have left out a good deal of more technical economics scholarship (though some appears on the list): the literature on merger simulation, post-Chicago models on specific vertical practices, nothing on immunities or exemptions, federalism, etc.

Read the full piece here.

I called it last week. Today’s NYT reports that Princeton has accepted Harvard’s invitation to join it in eliminating early admissions. In addition, the presidents of eleven elite liberal arts colleges (including Swarthmore, Williams, Barnard, and Amherst) have met to discuss, among other things, collectively eliminating their early admission programs and reducing merit-based aid.

Read the full piece here. 

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on standards for single firm conduct in the United States and the EU at the George Mason Antitrust Symposium, which focused on antitrust issues in the global marketplace (and I might add, was put together quite nicely by the GMU Law Review folks). The materials from many of the presentations are available at the GMU website.

Read the full piece here.

Harvard College is cutting its early admissions program. According to the New York Times, which is pleased with this move, Harvard’s purported reasons for cutting the program are as follows…

Read the full piece here.