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Showing 9 of 274 Results in Monopolization
TOTM I’ve recently finished reading Jonathan Baker’s Preserving a Political Bargain: The Political Economy of the Non-Interventionist Challenge to Monopolization Enforcement, forthcoming in the Antitrust Law . . .
I’ve recently finished reading Jonathan Baker’s Preserving a Political Bargain: The Political Economy of the Non-Interventionist Challenge to Monopolization Enforcement, forthcoming in the Antitrust Law Journal.
Baker’s central thesis in Preserving a Political Bargain builds on earlier work concerning competition policy as an implicit political bargain that was reached during the 1940s between the more extreme positions of laissez-faire on the one hand and regulation on the other. The new piece tries to explain what Baker describes as the “non-interventionist” critique of monopolization enforcement within this framework.
Read the full piece here.
TOTM The Amazon vs. Macmillan controversy has been beaten to a pulp in the blogosphere. See Megan McArdle, John Scalzi, Joshua Gans, Virginia Postrel, Lynne Kiesling, . . .
The Amazon vs. Macmillan controversy has been beaten to a pulp in the blogosphere. See Megan McArdle, John Scalzi, Joshua Gans, Virginia Postrel, Lynne Kiesling, Lynne Kielsing and Lynne Kiesling, among others. Pulp or no (get it? It’s a book/e-book pun), I haven’t seen anyone hit squarely on what I think is the crux of the issue: control rights.
Presentations & Interviews Last June, Christine Varney, then a lawyer in private practice, now President Obama's nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, warned that Google, not Microsoft, is the monopolist of the future.
Last June, Christine Varney, then a lawyer in private practice, now President Obama’s nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, warned that Google, not Microsoft, is the monopolist of the future.
“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem — potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.” Concerns of this nature ultimately led Tom Barnett, the last Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, to threaten a Sherman Act monopolization lawsuit if Google went through with plans to buy Yahoo.
Google, on the other hand, contends that the concerns are completely misplaced. “The nature of the Internet is just a fundamentally different world from the sale of packaged software or the bundling of software with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers),” according to Kent Walker, Google’s General Counsel. “The standard line we have is that competition is just one click away.
Panelists:
http://icle.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IsGoogleMonopolizingSomething-12-7-09.mp3
TOTM As I indicated in my prior blog entry, U.S. competition policy vis-à-vis single firm conduct (“SFC”) is best viewed not in isolation, but, rather, in the . . .
As I indicated in my prior blog entry, U.S. competition policy vis-à-vis single firm conduct (“SFC”) is best viewed not in isolation, but, rather, in the context of other jurisdictions’ SFC enforcement philosophies, and efforts to promote greater SFC policy convergence worldwide. Given the proliferation of competition law regimes, firms that do business in multiple jurisdictions either may have to: (1) tailor their business plans (marketing and distributional arrangements, joint ventures, pricing policies, etc.) nation-by-nation to satisfy differences in national competition laws (an approach rife with transactions costs); or (2) adopt a single set of policies that meets the competition law requirements of the “most restrictive” jurisdiction (an approach that could yield selection of a “less than optimally efficient” business plan). A further complication is caused by transactions whose effects spill across jurisdictional boundaries; a transaction that found favor in one jurisdiction may not find favor in other jurisdictions. To add to the policy complexity, as private rights of action proliferate around the globe, difficult jurisdictional questions and conflict of law issues may be posed in the future; the greater the divergence among antitrust regimes, the higher will be the costs imposed on businesses associated with (ideally) avoiding and (if necessary) ironing out such complications. Thus, even though there may be good policy justifications (associated with differences among nations in procedure, private enforcement, and other local factors) for some continued differentiation among national competition regimes – reasons that David Evans (see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1342797) and others have ably expounded upon – there is a sound basis for efforts (rooted in business efficiency and transactions cost avoidance) to promote gradual convergence and thereby avoid the greatest burdens arising from multinational disharmony in this field.
TOTM Dimming the Court’s Brooke Group Bright Line Administrable Rule? As noted in my earlier post, the Supreme Court’s Brooke Group rule is held out as the primary example of an . . .
Dimming the Court’s Brooke Group Bright Line Administrable Rule?
As noted in my earlier post, the Supreme Court’s Brooke Group rule is held out as the primary example of an administrable bright line rule aimed at controlling the costs of type I error. In practice, the Brooke Group above cost rule is not as bright as one might wish. The Achilles heel of the Brooke Group cost based rule is the failure to clarify what the relevant cost is.
TOTM One interesting aspect of the DOJ Report on Section 2 is the scant, episodic treatment of IP issues. The Report rejects the presumption of market power for . . .
One interesting aspect of the DOJ Report on Section 2 is the scant, episodic treatment of IP issues. The Report rejects the presumption of market power for patent ties (p. 81); has a very brief discussion of refusal to license patented parts in which it properly rejects the reasoning of the Ninth Circuit’s Kodak decision and aligns itself with the Federal Circuit’s Xerox decision (p. 121-122). The Walker Process case, which held that an infringement action based on an improperly acquired and unenforceable patent could violate §2, is cited in a footnote, and only for the proposition that market power is required in a §2 case (p. 25 n. 53). Finally, the Report contains a brief discussion of the presence of intellectual property in measuring incremental cost for purposes of analyzing predatory pricing (p. 63).
TOTM Bundled discounts have been one of the hottest monopolization topics of the last decade. Much of the trouble began with the Third Circuit’s en banc . . .
Bundled discounts have been one of the hottest monopolization topics of the last decade. Much of the trouble began with the Third Circuit’s en banc decision in LePage’s v. 3M, which reversed an earlier 2-1 panel decision which in turn had overturned a plaintiff’s jury verdict largely based on 3M’s bundled discounts. After the Solicitor General’s amicus curiae brief asked the Supreme Court to deny cert on the grounds that there wasn’t sufficient scholarship on bundled discounts, there was a flurry of legal and economic scholarship, the overwhelming majority of which was highly critical of LePage’s.
TOTM The market power section of the Department’s Single Firm Conduct report is one of the strongest sections of the report. It provides an exceptionally clear discussion of . . .
The market power section of the Department’s Single Firm Conduct report is one of the strongest sections of the report. It provides an exceptionally clear discussion of the market power element under Section 2. It recognizes, in particular, that a violation of Section 2 requires more than mere market power, but rather a finding of substantial and durable market power – “an extreme degree of market power” as the Fifth Circuit expressed it in Beauville v. Federated Dep’t Stores.
TOTM As evidenced by this on-line symposium, the handling of cases under the rubrics “monopolization,” “single firm conduct”, or “abuse of dominance” continues to be debated . . .
As evidenced by this on-line symposium, the handling of cases under the rubrics “monopolization,” “single firm conduct”, or “abuse of dominance” continues to be debated by the competition policy community. This debate, as evidenced by the Antitrust Division’s Sept. 2008 single firm conduct report and the FTC responses, is not restricted within the U.S. The European Union has published “Guidance Papers” on standards for exclusionary conduct under Article 82, and the Canadian Competition Bureau recently issued draft guidelines for prosecuting conduct under the abuse of dominance provisions of Sec. 79 of its Competition Act.
