It is not exactly the application of the consumer welfare standard, nor a scientific survey, but nonetheless an interesting poll at the American Bar Association Antitrust & Intellectual Property Conference before and after presentations from lawyers representing each side.  The results?

While this is an admittedly small sample size and may not be representative of antitrust lawyers on a more widespread basis, a poll taken at an American Bar Association event at Stanford University reveals that nearly 3/4 of the antitrust lawyers present didn’t feel that Google was hurting competition.  The event was a debate and polling before the debate had attendees of the debate set at 61% not feeling that Google has hurt competition.  Those on the other side of the debate? Before it got underway 19% felt that Google was hurting competition and that number lowered slightly to 17% following the exchange.

Interesting results for a group of antitrust lawyers hearing out some version of the arguments likely to be made in from of the antitrust lawyers at the Federal Trade Commission.

UPDATE: Here is Manne & Wright (2011) on the case against the case against Google in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, google

[I am participating in an online “debate” at the American Constitution Society with Professor Ben Edelman.  The debate consists of an opening statement and concluding responses to be posted later in the week.  Professor Edelman’s opening statement is here.  I am cross-posting my opening statement here at TOTM.  This is my closing statement]

Professor Edelman’s opening post does little to support his case.  Instead, it reflects the same retrograde antitrust I criticized in my first post.

Edelman’s understanding of antitrust law and economics appears firmly rooted in the 1960s approach to antitrust in which enforcement agencies, courts, and economists vigorously attacked novel business arrangements without regard to their impact on consumers.  Judge Learned Hand’s infamous passage in the Alcoa decision comes to mind as an exemplar of antitrust’s bad old days when the antitrust laws demanded that successful firms forego opportunities to satisfy consumer demand.  Hand wrote:

we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.

Antitrust has come a long way since then.  By way of contrast, today’s antitrust analysis of alleged exclusionary conduct begins with (ironically enough) the U.S. v. Microsoft decision.  Microsoft emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing effective competition from exclusionary conduct; but it also firmly places “consumer welfare” as the lodestar of the modern approach to antitrust:

Whether any particular act of a monopolist is exclusionary, rather than merely a form of vigorous competition, can be difficult to discern: the means of illicit exclusion, like the means of legitimate competition, are myriad.  The challenge for an antitrust court lies in stating a general rule for distinguishing between exclusionary acts, which reduce social welfare, and competitive acts, which increase it.  From a century of case law on monopolization under § 2, however, several principles do emerge.  First, to be condemned as exclusionary, a monopolist’s act must have an “anticompetitive effect.”  That is, it must harm the competitive process and thereby harm consumers.  In contrast, harm to one or more competitors will not suffice.

Nearly all antitrust commentators agree that the shift to consumer-welfare focused analysis has been a boon for consumers.  Unfortunately, Edelman’s analysis consists largely of complaints that would have satisfied courts and agencies in the 1960s but would not do so now that the focus has turned to consumer welfare rather than indirect complaints about market structure or the fortunes of individual rivals.

From the start, in laying out his basic case against Google, Edelman invokes antitrust concepts that are simply inapt for the facts and then goes on to apply them in a manner inconsistent with the modern consumer-welfare-oriented framework described above:

In antitrust parlance, this is tying: A user who wants only Google Search, but not Google’s other services, will be disappointed.  Instead, any user who wants Google Search is forced to receive Google’s other services too.  Google’s approach also forecloses competition: Other sites cannot compete on their merits for a substantial portion of the market – consumers who use Google to find information – because Google has kept those consumers for itself.

There are two significant errors here.  First, Edelman claims to be interested in protecting users who want only Google Search but not its other services will be disappointed.  I have no doubt such consumers exist.  Some proof that they exist is that a service has already been developed to serve them.  Professor Edelman, meet Googleminusgoogle.com.  Across the top the page reads: “Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.”  In antitrust parlance, this is not tying after all.  The critical point, however, is that user preferences are being satisfied as one would expect to arise from competition.

The second error, as I noted in my first post, is to condemn vertical integration as inherently anticompetitive.  It is here that the retrograde character of Professor Edelman’s analysis (and other critics of Google, to be fair) shines brightest.  It reflects a true disconnect between the 1960s approach to antitrust which focused exclusively upon market structure and impact upon rival websites; impact upon consumers was nowhere to be found.  That Google not only produces search results but also owns some of the results that are searched is not a problem cognizable by modern antitrust.  Edelman himself—appropriately—describes Google and its competitors as “information services.”  Google is not merely a URL finder.  Consumers demand more than that and competition forces search engines to deliver.  It offers value to users (and thus it can offer users to advertisers) by helping them find information in increasingly useful ways.  Most users “want Google Search” to the exclusion of Google’s “other services” (and, if they do, all they need do is navigate over to http://googleminusgoogle.com/ (even in a Chrome browser) and they can have exactly that).  But the critical point is that Google’s “other services” are methods of presenting information to consumers, just like search.  As the web and its users have evolved, and as Google has innovated to keep up with the evolving demands of consumers, it has devised or employed other means than simply providing links to a set of URLs to provide the most relevant information to its users.  The 1960s approach to antitrust condemns this as anticompetitive foreclosure; the modern version recognizes it as innovation, a form of competition that benefits consumers.

Edelman (and other critics, including a number of Senators at last month’s hearing) hearken back to the good old days and suggest that any deviation from Google’s technology or business model of the past is an indication of anticompetitive conduct:

The Google of 2004 promised to help users “leave its website as quickly as possible” while showing, initially, zero ads.  But times have changed.  Google has modified its site design to encourage users to linger on other Google properties, even when competing services have more or better information.  And Google now shows as many fourteen ads on a page.

It is hard to take seriously an argument that turns on criticizing a company simply for looking different than it did seven years ago.  Does anybody remember what search results looked like 7 years ago?  A theory of antitrust liability that would condemn a firm for investing billions of dollars in research and product development, constantly evolving its product to meet consumer demand, taking advantage of new technology, and developing its business model to increase profitability should not be taken seriously.  This is particularly true where, as here, every firm in the industry has followed a similar course, adopting the same or similar innovations.  I encourage readers to try a few queries on http://www.bing-vs-google.com/– where you can get side by side comparisons – in order to test whether the evolution of search results and innovation to meet consumer preferences is really a Google-specific thing or an industry wide phenomenon consistent with competition.  Conventional antitrust analysis holds that when conduct is engaged in not only by allegedly dominant firms, but also by every other firm in an industry, that conduct is presumptively efficient, not anticompetitive.

The main thrust of my critique is that Edelman and other Google critics rely on an outdated antitrust framework in which consumers play little or no role.  Rather than a consumer-welfare based economic critique consistent with the modern approach, these critics (as Edelman does in his opening statement) turn to a collection of anecdotes and “gotcha” statements from company executives.  It is worth correcting a few of those items here, although when we’ve reached the point where identifying a firm’s alleged abuse is a function of defining what a “confirmed” fax is, we’ve probably reached the point of decreasing marginal returns.  Rest assured that a series of (largely inaccurate) anecdotes about Google’s treatment of particular websites or insignificant contract terms is wholly insufficient to meet the standard of proof required to make a case against the company under the Sherman Act or even the looser Federal Trade Commission Act.

• It appears to be completely inaccurate to say that “[a]n unsatisfied advertiser must complain to Google by ‘first class mail or air mail or overnight courier’ with a copy by ‘confirmed facsimile.’”  A quick search, even on Bing, leads one to this page, indicating that complaints may be submitted via web form.
• It is likewise inaccurate to claim that “advertisers are compelled to accept whatever terms Google chooses to impose.  For example, an advertiser seeking placement through Google’s premium Search Network partners (like AOL and The New York Times) must also accept placement through the entire Google Search Network which includes all manner . . . undesirable placements.”  In actuality, Google offers a “Site and Category Exclusion Tool” that seems to permit advertisers to tailor their placements to exclude exactly these “undesirable placements.”
• “Meanwhile, a user searching for restaurants, hotels, or other local merchants sees Google Places results with similar prominence, pushing other information services to locations users are unlikely to notice.”  I have strived in vain to enter a search for a restaurant, hotel, or the like into Google that yielded results that effectively hid “other information services” from my notice, but for some of my searches, Google Places did come up first or second (and for others it showed up further down the page).
• Edelman has noted elsewhere that, sometimes, for some of the searches he has tested, the most popular result on Google (as well, I should add, on other, non-“dominant” sites) is not the first, Google-owned result, but instead the second.  He cites this as evidence that Google is cooking the books, favoring its own properties when users actually prefer another option.  It actually doesn’t demonstrate that, but let’s accept the claim for the sake of argument.  Notice what his example also demonstrates: that users who prefer the second result to the first are perfectly capable of finding it and clicking on it.  If this is foreclosure, Google is exceptionally bad at it.

The crux of Edelman’s complaint seems to be that Google is competing in ways that respond to consumer preferences.  This is precisely what antitrust seeks to encourage, and we would not want a set of standards that chilled competition because of a competitor’s success.  Having been remarkably successful in serving consumers’ search demands in a quickly evolving market, it would be perverse for the antitrust laws to then turn upon Google without serious evidence that it had, in fact, actually harmed consumers.

Untethered from consumer welfare analysis, antitrust threatens to re-orient itself to the days when it was used primarily as a weapon against rivals and thus imposed a costly tax on consumers.  It is perhaps telling that Microsoft, Expedia, and a few other Google competitors are the primary movers behind the effort to convict the company.  But modern antitrust, shunning its inglorious past, requires actual evidence of anticompetitive effect before condemning conduct, particularly in fast-moving, innovative industries.  Neither Edelman nor any of Google’s other critics, offer any.

During the heady days of the Microsoft antitrust case, the big question was whether modern antitrust would be able to keep up with quickly evolving markets.  The treatment of the proferred case against Google is an important test of the proposition (endorsed by the Antitrust Modernization Commission and others) that today’s antitrust is capable of consistent and coherent application in innovative, high-tech markets.  An enormous amount is at stake.  Faced with the high stakes and ever-evolving novelty of high-tech markets, antitrust will only meet this expectation if it remains grounded and focused on the core principle of competitive effects and consumer harm.  Without it, antitrust will devolve back into the laughable and anti-consumer state of affairs of the 1960s—and we will all pay for it.

Filed under: antitrust, consumer protection, economics, error costs, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, technology, tying

Here’s Professor Zywicki in the WSJ on the debit card interchange price controls going into effect, and their unintended but entirely predictable consequences:

Faced with a dramatic cut in revenues (estimated to be $6.6 billion by Javelin Strategy & Research, a global financial services consultancy), banks have already imposed new monthly maintenance fees—usually from $36 to $60 per year—on standard checking and debit-card accounts, as well as new or higher fees on particular bank services. While wealthier consumers have avoided many of these new fees—for example, by maintaining a sufficiently high minimum balance—a Bankrate survey released this week reported that only 45% of traditional checking accounts are free, down from 75% in two years.

Some consumers who previously banked for free will be unable or unwilling to pay these fees merely for the privilege of a bank account. As many as one million individuals will drop out of the mainstream banking system and turn to check cashers, pawn shops and high-fee prepaid cards, according to an estimate earlier this year by economists David Evans, Robert Litan and Richard Schmalensee. (Their study was supported by banks.)

Consumers will also be encouraged to shift from debit cards to more profitable alternatives such as credit cards, which remain outside the Durbin amendment’s price controls. According to news reports, Bank of America has made a concerted effort to shift customers from debit to credit cards, including plans to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit-card purchases. Citibank has increased its direct mail efforts to recruit new credit card customers frustrated by the increased cost and decreased benefits of debit cards.

This substitution will offset the hemorrhaging of debit-card revenues for banks. But it is also likely to eat into the financial windfall expected by big box retailers and their lobbyists. They likely will return to Washington seeking to extend price controls to credit cards. …

Todd closes with a nice point about where the impact of these regulations will be felt most:

Conceived of as a narrow special-interest giveaway to large retailers, the Durbin amendment will have long-term consequences for the consumer banking system. Wealthier consumers will be able to avoid the pinch of higher banking fees by increasing their use of credit cards. Many low-income consumers will not.

Read the whole thing.

 

Filed under: banking, business, consumer protection, credit cards, economics

As I have posted before, I was disappointed that the DOJ filed against AT&T in its bid to acquire T-Mobile.  The efficacious provision of mobile broadband service is a complicated business, but it has become even more so by government’s meddling.  Responses like this merger are both inevitable and essential.  And Sprint and Cellular South piling on doesn’t help — and, as Josh has pointed out, further suggests that the merger is actually pro-competitive.

Read the full piece here.

First, thanks to TOTM for organizing this symposium on a most timely and important topic.  As computers and technology have revolutionized every aspect of human endeavor it is a particularly critical time to ask ourselves why 21^st century law schools closely resemble the law schools of the late-19^th century and why in court litigation would seem relatively familiar to Clarence Darrow.  One significant answer is the regulation of the legal profession, and one possible solution is significant deregulation.

Read the full piece here.

Attorneys earn excess rents by maintaining barriers to entering the legal profession.  Legislation and regulation expanding the scope of work that only an attorney legally can perform is an obvious way in which attorneys attempt to expand or protect the market for their services.  The FTC has a long history of trying to convince state legislators and courts that expanding the scope of the practice of law is likely to have unjustified anticompetitive consequences.   A more subtle way attorneys limit competition for legal services is by interpreting existing legislation and rules in a manner that expands the universe of practices that are considered “unethical” or “unauthorized practice of law.”  In this symposium, I will address the application of antitrust law to this conduct.

Read the full piece here.

Yale’s George Priest authored an op-ed in the WSJ on September 6th in which he raised a few of the arguments discussed here at TOTM over the past several weeks regarding the proposed AT&T / T-Mobile merger.  For example, we’ve focused upon the tension between the DOJ complaint’s theories of competitive harm (coordinated and unilateral effects) and the reaction of Sprint’s stock price.  Along these lines, Priest writes:

If the acquisition would lead to increased prices and lower quality products as the Justice Department has claimed, Sprint would be better off after the acquisition. Sprint would be able to add subscribers, not lose them, because of AT&T’s higher prices and lower quality. Sprint would oppose the acquisition—as it has—only if it thought that the merger would put it in a worse position by increasing the competitive pressures that it already faces.

The market—though not the Obama administration—understands this point. On the day that the Justice Department announced its opposition to the acquisition, Sprint’s share price rose 5.9%, reflecting investors’ belief that Sprint will be in a better competitive position without the acquisition.

As we’ve pointed out, Sprint’s stock price reaction is simply not consistent with the DOJ theories.  To find a theory of harm more consistent with the market reaction, critics of the merger have abandoned the DOJ’s theories in favor for a new one — that the merger will facilitate future exclusion of rivals from access to critical inputs like backhaul or handsets.

The AAI’s Rick Brunell makes this point in our comments.  The basic point is that under an exclusion theory Sprint benefits from the challenge to the merger because it prevents its future exclusion.   Brunell also argued in that comment that Verizon’s stock price movement supported exclusion theories of the merger, pointing out that its stock price fell 1.2% (with a .7% drop in the S&P 500) upon announcement of the challenge.

We challenged the economic logic of Brunell’s claim that Verizon’s non-reaction was consistent with exclusionary theories in a follow up post.  Put simply, assuming the merger will result in successful exclusion of rivals in the future, Verizon would be a gigantic winner from its successful completion:

The relevant economics here are not limited to the possibility that post-merger AT&T would successfully exclude Verizon.  Think about it: both Verizon and the post-merger firm would benefit from the exclusionary efforts and reduced competition.  However, Verizon would stand to gain even more!  After all, it isn’t paying the $39 billion purchase price for the acquisition (or any of the other costs of implementing an expensive exclusion campaign).  Thus, an announcement to block the would-be exclusionary merger — the one that would allow Verizon to outsource the exclusion of its rivals to AT&T on the cheap — wouldn’t happen.  Verizon stock should fall relative to the market in response to this lost opportunity.  The unilateral and coordinated effects theories in the DOJ complaint are at significant tension with the stock market reactions of firms like Sprint (and its affiliated venture, Clearwire).  The exclusion theory predicts a large decrease in stock price for Verizon with the announcement.  None of these comfortably fit the facts.  Verizon more or less tracks the S&P with a slight drop.  What about the smaller carriers?  Take a look at the chart.  MetroPCS barely moved relative to the market (in fact, may have increased relative to the market over the relevant time period); Leap is down a bit more than the market.  Here, with the smaller carriers there is not a lot of movement in any direction.  But, contra NB’s comment (“Verizon, a larger and far more significant competitor, had its stock drop sharply in that same period you show Sprint “surging”. MetroPCS’s stock also dropped.”), Verizon’s small fall relative to the market is nowhere near the magnitude of the positive effect on Sprint and Clearwire.

In other words, contra Brunell and other proponents of the exclusion theory, its not just that Verizon has “nothing to fear” from exclusion but that it has much to gain from it.  If the merger is likely to exclude Verizon’s rivals at a price tag of at least $39 billion paid with its chief competitor’s dollars, the announcement of a challenge should have resulted in a substantial loss for Verizon not one barely detectable beyond market trends. Excluding rivals and gaining market power with other people’s money is good work if you can get it.  If proponents of the exclusionary theory believe exclusion is worth $39 billion for AT&T and is the purpose of the merger, surely they also believe it is worth something quite significant to Verizon who would reap the benefits of exclusion and get it for free.

Unfortunately, AAI (through Brunell) ignores this point in a Letter to the Editor to the WSJ filed in response to Priest’s op-ed:

Mr. Priest ignores the fact that Sprint would be harmed if the merger enhanced AT&T’s (and Verizon’s) ability to exclude Sprint from the market (or raise its costs) through increased control over the best handsets, roaming and backhaul services that Sprint needs to compete effectively in the market, as Sprint alleges in its own lawsuit challenging the merger. Sprint also benefits, from the merger’s demise, as a potential acquirer of T-Mobile.

Mr. Priest also ignores the stock-price movement of Verizon, AT&T’s chief rival, which has no reason to fear exclusion from the market, and would be harmed the most if the merger made AT&T a more efficient competitor. In the two days following the merger announcement in March, Verizon’s stock price jumped 3.1% (compared to the S&P 500’s increase of only 1.1%), while in the two days after the Justice Department’s suit was announced, Verizon’s stock fell by 1.2% (compared to a .7% drop in the S&P 500). Verizon has not opposed the merger.

Event studies of stock-price movements are notoriously inconclusive. However, the data here are entirely consistent with investors’ expectation that the merger will result in less price and quality competition in the industry and higher costs for AT&T’s smaller rivals, all to the detriment of consumers.

If you are keeping score at home: Priest 1  –  AAI 0.  Once again, the exclusion theories don’t seem to hold up to these data.  On the other hand, the DOJ theories are embarrassingly confronted by the response of the rival’ stock price surging upon the announcement of a challenge.  For what its worth, I agree with Brunell that event studies are not dispositive of a merger’s likely effects — though query what data available to predict merger outcomes are?  But event studies and stock-price movements produce valuable information.  In this case, financial market responses cut against the the exclusionary theory favored by AAI and Sprint and the conventional DOJ theories.

Filed under: antitrust, doj, economics, exclusionary conduct, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, telecommunications, wireless

I have spent the last few days reading the recent study by Clifford Winston, Robert W. Crandall, and Vikram Maheshri, entitled “First Thing We Do: Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers” (Brookings Institution, 2011, $19.95).  In it, the authors marshal a variety of empirical methods to argue that the current practice of state bar admission and licensing of attorneys imposes an inefficient barrier to entry that keeps incomes high and reduces access to needed legal services (particularly among the poor). Moreover, the authors argue that the oligopoly rents enjoyed by practicing lawyers have grown further as the federal bureaucracy has grown, essentially feeding a legal / regulatory beast that that artificially increases the demand for lawyers, exacerbating the oligopoly problem.  Given these observations, the authors conclude that the current practice of law is severely afflicted by anticompetitive barriers to entry, regulatory capture, and artificially inflated prices.  In response, they advocate a good old school form of deregulation of the legal industry, allowing free (or nearly free) entry into the profession.  Although they are open to keeping state bar exams around (primarily as certification devices), bar membership should not be – in their view – a necessary condition to the practice of law.

Read the full piece here.

The NY Times starts its op-ed against the AT&T / T-Mobile transaction with a false proposition about antitrust analysis of mergers: “The analysis begins with a mathematical formula for calculating the deal’s effect on competition.”  Any antitrust lawyer or economist will recognize the error.  A major change from the 1997 Horizontal Merger Guidelines to the 2010 version is that the former observes that agency analysis must begin with market definition and evaluation of concentration:

First, the Agency assesses whether the merger would significantly increase concentration and result in a concentrated market, properly defined and measured

However, the it is widely recognized that the 2010 Guidelines shed the cookie cutter, algorithmic approach to merger analysis in favor of a fact-intensive analysis involving multiple tools of which market definition and calculating market shares and evaluating concentration levels and changes is just one.  Indeed, the 2010 Guidelines expressly state:

The Agencies’ analysis need not start with market definition.

This is not trivial detail; these changes were at the very core of the changes in the new Guidelines promulgated by the Obama administration’s antitrust enforcement agencies.  The NYT analysis simultaneously relies exclusively upon market concentration statistics while appealing to the 2010 Guidelines which rejected that approach as authority.  Odd.  But not unsurprising.

What is more surprising is Professor Hovenkamp’s quote, whom we certainly can expect more from than the NYT.  Hovenkamp observes:

“It’s only a slight overstatement to say that if they weren’t going to block this one, the Justice Department might as well just throw the antitrust guidelines out the window,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, professor of law at the University of Iowa, who is considered by many to be the dean of American antitrust law. “This merger clearly seems to violate them.” …

“It was becoming legendary that the Bush administration wasn’t enforcing the old guidelines,” Mr. Hovenkamp said. “What good is a guideline that doesn’t provide any guidance? The Obama administration conceded that perhaps the old guidelines were too strict. So it made it easier, but at the same time said, ‘We’re going to enforce this.’ ”

I’ve got to believe Hovenkamp was quoted out of context here because, frankly, this doesn’t make much sense.  I doubt Hovenkamp would argue that the Guidelines’ thresholds were treated as gospel by any administration regardless of political ideology.   But what is absent from Hovenkamp’s discussion is the primary reason why the Guidelines expressly shifted away from concentration and toward direct analysis of competitive effects.  The answer doesn’t lie in politics.  Put simply, antitrust economists and lawyers at the agencies and elsewhere simply do not believe the HHI thresholds in the Guidelines provide a useful predictor for competitive effects.  The persistence of the HHI thresholds are at least somewhat a result of path dependency; despite some prodding, it proved too tempting for the agencies to keep the thresholds in given their appeal and general acceptance in merger precedent emerging in the 1960s and 70s.  But that was the age when those types of market structure arguments were in fact the economic state of art.  That is no longer true — and rejection of that general approach is a key (if not they key) component of the Guidelines’ evolution toward the current approach.

The theme of the NY Times article and the omission of any sense at all that the shift at the agency level has been the polar opposite of what is claimed — that is, away from treating HHI thresholds as gospel or even related to analysis of competitive effects and toward an analysis more directly focused upon competitive effects — I’m left puzzled by a few things in Hovekamp’s quote.  When the agencies have screamed from the rooftops that competitive effects and not market structure and market definition is what matters in merger analysis, the idea that not blocking a merger that nominally crosses otherwise meaningless thresholds in agency Guidelines threatens the rule of law or means that we ought not have Guidelines is at the very least overstated.  Of course, one could interpret the statement as a critique of leaving the thresholds in the Guidelines at all if one is not going to enforce them.  I agree with that.  But they’ve always been there and often been ignored when the agencies’ analysis concluded the merger would not harm consumers.

And of course, that interpretation is difficult to square with the statement that this “merger clearly seems to violate them.”    Violate them?  The Guidelines do not have the force of law.  If this merely means something like “the merger appears to be one that the agencies’ analytical framework articulated in the Guidelines indicates that they will challenge” — that’s fine.  But, that statement suffers the same analytical flaws described above. Violating the Guidelines would require a showing that the merger was likely to create market power and produce anticompetitive effects — to do so under the new Guidelines requires more than a simply counting the number of firms.  That type of analysis no longer passes muster in antitrust analysis at the agencies.  To claim a merger “clearly seems to violate” the Guidelines  by sole reference to the HHI thresholds at the same time the agencies have distanced themselves from them(in favor of more fact-intensive and direct analysis of competitive effects) is not consistent with the economic letter or spirit of the new Guidelines.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, technology, telecommunications, wireless