The proposed merger has been making lots of waves in the press as of late, including a Congressional hearing (Antitrust Review has links to all the hearing testimony) but not much serious grappling with the antitrust issues. I even read today that John Ashcroft has chimed in. Of course, it is very difficult to do much serious analysis about likely competitive effects without more information than is available publicly.

Read the full piece here. 

Federal Trade Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour has sent the U.S. Supreme Court justices an “open letter” regarding the pending Leegin case. [HT: Danny Sokol.]

Leegin, as regular TOTM readers know, will test the continued vitality of Dr. Miles, the 1911 decision making it per se illegal for manufacturers and retailers to agree on minimum retail prices for the manufacturers’ products. I have previously argued (here and here) that such “vertical resale price maintenance,” or “VRPM”, should not be automatically illegal and that Dr. Miles should be overruled. Based on his upcoming eCCP presentation, I believe Josh agrees. He may, however, be reluctant to go head-to-head with a commissioner since he’s now a scholar-in-residence at the FTC.

Read the full piece here. 

Thursday night I will be speaking at a dinner and discussion sponsored by the eSapience Center for Competition Policy (eCCP) on the pending Leegin decision and the application of per se rules to minimum RPM.

Read the full piece here.

Jonathan Baker (American) has a very interesting paper on a very hot topic in antitrust nowadays: the role of antitrust regulation in innovation. The title is “Beyond Schumpeter vs. Arrow: How Antitrust Fosters Innovation.”

Read the full piece here.

Justice Thomas’ opinion is available here.

Read the full piece here.

Soledad O’Brien said a (sort of) bad word on American Morning this morning. I was watching when she said it. I didn’t notice the word, but it’s plain as day in the transcript below (omissions noted by ellipses)…

Read the full piece here.

We’re so immersed in the benefits of a market economy that I fear we sometimes fail to notice what a marvel capitalism is.

Today’s Wall Street Journal points to yet another of capitalism’s benefits. A growing number of very, very fancy colleges with very, very talented professors and very, very expensive tuition are offering their course materials online for free.

Read the full piece here. 

The Sunday New York Times features a lengthy, and mostly unflattering, look at the University of Phoenix, the world’s largest for-profit university. The tenor of the Times piece is set by the headline, “Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits” — the p-word clearly chosen to shock the Times’s modal reader. (Where were the stories on the Times’s Judith Miller scandal titled “Troubles Grow for a Newspaper Built on Profits”?)

Read the full piece here.

Frank Pasquale has taken the time to respond to my earlier post on the use of antitrust to tax consumers on the grounds of fairness or other vague criteria. I take the basic point of Frank’s post to be that I have engaged in unfair burden shifting by demanding a showing of consumer harm prior to condemning the conduct as has been done in the Norwegian/ French investigations, though he goes on to make the some complaints about consumer rationality, a claim that I “refuse to inquire” as to whether the big four in the music industry are engaged in tacit collusion, and an accusation that I am just another “free marketeer” who glibly ignores how other countries handle these problems.
Frank seems to be ignoring the fact that I was responding to his post, not writing a treatise on DRM or a full economic analysis of DRM markets.

Read the full piece here.