Two writers who cover antitrust issues asked me to comment on a Northern District of California judge’s July 11th ruling that the Federal Trade Commission hadn’t met its burden of proving grounds for a preliminary injunction against Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. The deal promised to catapult Microsoft into second place in
Robert Bork said that serving on the U.S. Supreme Court “would be an intellectual feast”.[1]
Abstract, arcane, and avid for tricky math, the technocratic approach Bork advocated in The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself has all but devoured the faintly-beating populist heart of antitrust law.
As a result, Paradox has for the 45 years since its 1978 debut made antitrust enforcement actions increasingly costly to bring, far harder to win, and challenging for even competition experts to understand.
In an economy that has grown 1,000 percent since 1978, suffers from far greater concentration of markets, and brims with ever more gigantic firms, antitrust agencies need more resources (in terms of today’s dollars) than they did then.
Yet they have less. That must change.[2]Continue Reading Antitrust enforcers must have more funding
Last month, the American Antitrust Institute and three economists moved to file amicus briefs in favor of an economic model that quantifies what Google describes as “happiness”. AAI and the economists seek to support opinion evidence in antitrust litigation against Google, In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litig., No. 3:21-md-02981-JD (N.D. Cal.), pending before
A golden age of civil antitrust, from the 1960s into the 1980s, enriched the victims of cartels and monopolies but upset corporate America. The high cost of paying treble damages claims eventually provoked a spare-no-expense approach to defense. That in turn influenced the way plaintiffs prosecuted their Sherman Act claims.
Much the same thing has
The last week brought losses for antitrust enforcers (“Apple’s concerns over app security” and “Laches and Trinko kill”), for a man who sued to get “co-inventor” status (“Adding option to patent”), for distributors invoking franchise-law protections (“State franchise statute didn’t apply”), for plaintiffs wishing to toll limitations under an 1841 statute (“Defendant’s ‘absence from state”), for some contract deadline enforcers (“Time ‘from’ or ‘after’”), and for some avoiders of collateral estoppel (“Ruling on question of issue preclusion”).
Have a terrific week–Commercial Roundup will see you again next Wednesday morning.
Barry BarnettContinue Reading Commercial Roundup – May 3, 2023
This week’s Commercial Roundup follows three days of all antitrust, all the time at the ABA Antitrust Law Section’s annual Spring Meeting in our nation’s capital. More than 3,700 government enforcers, private lawyers, judges, economists, econometricians, academics, students, and others assembled to talk about the recent past and future of antitrust in the U.S. and around the world.
The Roundup includes but one post about the Spring Meeting—BIG meets ABA—but it will give you a good sense of the combat that flickered into view amid the nerdy bonhomie. You can find other posts on the Spring Meeting here, here, and here.
Now, let’s get to the Roundup!Continue Reading Commercial Roundup – April 5, 2023
Like 3,700 or so other folks, I spent a few days last week at a world-class nerdfest—the Spring Meeting of the Antitrust Law Section. You can see my notes from a couple of the half-dozen sessions I attended here and here. You can also see the insights of Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project and publisher of BIG on Substack, on his experience as a panelist here.
The four days in D.C. again reminded me of the strongly pro-defense orientation of Section members. Many of them spend their days pushing mergers through the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act process. Many others litigate civil and criminal lawsuits charging their clients with price-fixing, abuse of market power, and other violations of antitrust law.
No wonder they believe Robert Bork—the patron saint of trusting in the beneficence of behemoths—hung the antitrust moon.Continue Reading Antitrust Enforcers Must Do More with Less