Commercial Roundup has some catching up to do this week. See the jumbo installment below.
Commercial Roundup – April 16, 2024
Ordinary people catch a break (on airfares)
On January 17, 2024, a judicial appointee of a President whose administration sharply curtailed antitrust enforcement* blocked a $3.8 billion attempt by JetBlue to merge its way into making the Big Four U.S. airlines (American, Delta, United, and Southwest) into the Big Five (with JetBlue as
Who Cares About Passengers? Not the News.
Blawgletter has lately started scanning news reports about the U.S. Justice Department Antitrust Division's bid to block the minnow-eats-whale merger of U.S. Airways and American Airlines. Wowsers.
Let's start by saying we've found that the biz reporters have a not-very-good grasp of antitrust law. A terrible one in fact. They seem to think that whatever
DOJ Sues to Stop U.S. AAirways Merger
On Aug. 12, the AAntitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice joined with the attorneys-general of six states and the District of Columbia to file a lawsuit to stop the merger of AMR, which owns American Airlines, into U.S. Airways. You can see the complaint here.
The filing took Blawgletter by surprise. Living in DFW, which
Enemy of the Good: Class Cert Doesn’t Require Perfect Proof, Seventh Circuit Says
The Seventh Circuit held last week that a district court set too high a standard for class certification in an antitrust case.
"In essence," the panel ruled, it is important not to let a quest for perfect evidence become the enemy of good evidence." Messner v. Northshore University HealthSystem, No. 10-2514, slip op. 3
AT&T Quits Quest for T-Mobile
AT&T just told the world that it and Deutsche Telekom would halt the purchase and sale of T-Mobile USA. The press release stated:
AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) said today that after a thorough review of options it has agreed with Deutsche Telekom AG to end its bid to acquire T-Mobile USA, which began in
Wireless Goes Haywire
AT&T Wireless tried for T-Mobile in what looks like an attempt at building a bridge too far. Which Blawgletter thought from the get-go.
[Let's ignore for now the thing the editors of our — and AT&T's — hometown paper wrote about the FCC's failure to shoo the AT&T/T-Mobile deal through. Let's just say they'd have
DOJ Antitrust Division Sues to Stop AT&T from Gobbling T-Mobile (Update)
Dang. The Antitrust Division has teeth after all.
(Blawgletter called it in March, by the way.)
Per the WSJ, the AD sued to enjoin the deal for AT&T to acquire T-Mobile.
The pact would create the biggest, baddest, anticompetitivest wireless firm in the U.S.
The Division's press release said:
The department’s lawsuit, filed in
The Politics of Merging
Blawgletter said, in the first blush of astonishment at AT&T's plan to buy T-Mobile, that we felt in our gut the deal would never go through.
But now we read that left-leaning groups like the NAACP, NEA, AFL-CIO, and GLAAD support the merger. Will wonders never cease?
No one, we suspect, would accuse any of those outfits of
Fear, Antitrust, and AT&T
Blawgletter felt in our gut that the AT&T deal with Deutsche Telekom to buy the T-Mobile wireless system would never go through.
Christine Varney, the head of the Antitrust Division in the U.S. Department of Justice, wouldn't stand for it. She threw out a Division report that she saw as too deal-friendly and teamed up with