Despite rumors, slogans, and “new” conventional wisdom to the contrary (See, e.g. here, here and the Obama campaign promise to “reinvigorate merger enforcement), it is apparently not the case that the current DOJ is not interested in enforcing the antitrust laws. Perhaps it never was. This interesting interview (HT: Danny Sokol) suggests that the DOJ pressured Google and Yahoo to abandon their deal with a threat to file in federal court to enjoin the transaction.

Read the full piece here.

Being a “glass is half-full” type of guy, I figured there was no way the D.C. Circuit’s decision on Whole Foods’ petition for rehearing en banc could turn out poorly: Either the court would grant the motion and correct the panel’s mistakes, or the court would deny the motion, setting up an attractive opportunity for the Supreme Court, which hasn’t decided a significant merger case since 1974 and badly needs to update its doctrine (see, e.g., Brown Shoe, upon which the D.C. Circuit heavily relied in Whole Foods).

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As noted, the FTC has exercised its right under 15 USC 56(a)(3) to petition for a writ of certiorari to review the judgment of the D.C. Circuit in its FTC v. Rambus. The FTC press release is here. The petition is here. The questions presented, as framed by the Commission are…

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Yesterday I started a new TOTM feature on why price discrimination is good in light of the bad rap that the practice gets in public policy circles and with the public generally. Lest one believe that the examples of regulatory scrutiny of price discrimination in antitrust and regulated industries are special cases, a reader points me to this perfectly timed column from NY Times “Ethicist” Randy Cohen arguing that price discrimination is unethical.

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Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is a comprehensive, informative, and challenging meditation on the rise of the “networked information economy” and its implications for society, politics, and culture. Benkler, the Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Harvard Law School, is a leading authority on the law, economics, and politics of networks, innovation, intellectual property, and the Internet, and he puts his wide knowledge and deep understanding to good use. He argues that the digital revolution is more revolutionary than has been recognized, even by its most passionate defenders. The new information and communications technologies do not simply make the old ways of doing things more efficient, but also support fundamentally new ways of doing things. In particular, the past few years have seen the rise of social production, a radically decentralized, distributed mode of interaction that Benkler calls “commons-based peer production.”

Read the full piece here.

Price discrimination involves a firm taking advantage of different elasticities of demand for the same goods by charging different prices relative to marginal cost. Price discrimination is ubiquitous in our economy but remains a four letter word in policy and regulation circles. We observe price discrimination in all sorts of product markets, from small and large firms, and in marketing strategies from brick and mortar to Web 2.0. Its economic definition is relatively straightforward and it is a concept, unlike the complex models and explanations for some business practices in the modern economics literature, that is intuitive for everyday consumers. Airlines charge reduced fares for children or require Saturday stayovers in order to exclude business purchasers. We see this type of price discrimination every day in grocery stores, gas stations, movie theaters, online retail websites, and bookstores. It also exists in markets with which every day consumers might be less familiar, e.g. the tying of ink and printers.

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The press release is here.  The petition is here.  The questions presented, as framed by the Commission are:

1. Whether deceptive conduct that significantly contributes to a defendant’s acquisition of monopoly power violates Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

2. Whether deceptive conduct that distorts the competitive process in a market, with the effect of avoiding the imposition of pricing constraints that would otherwise exist because of that process, is anticompetitive under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

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I had the pleasure last week of participating in a bailout panel at William & Mary Law School. The William & Mary Federalist Society, which hosted the event, asked each panelist to address three topics: what led to the current situation, how the bailout plan will (or won’t) fix things, and suggestions for implementing a bailout plan. I’ve already blogged a bit about the first two topics — here I speculate on one of the causes of the mess (Fannie/Freddie); here I discuss the original (“buy troubled assets”) versus revised (“inject capital directly into financial institutions”) bailout plans. I thought I’d take a few moments to blog about the third topic — suggestions for implementing the bailout plan.

Read the full piece here. 

My colleague Tom Hazlett strikes again in Barron’s on Google’s transformation from its initial reluctance to advertise and its desire to stick to the non-profit sector to an unrelenting market driven approach to its discovery that search-term clicks were … well … profitable.

Read the full piece here.