The Justice Department lost another merger the other day. This one was their challenge to Sabre’s acquisition of Farelogix. Sabre aggregates air fares in a hosted environment and serves about 50 percent of the market. ...more
Elizabeth Warren is calling for aggressive enforcement of the antitrust laws. The House Judiciary is opening hearings on big tech, and the Justice Department and FTC have allocated amongst themselves responsibility for...more
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science, the folks who bring you the Oscars, are voting on a rule change that would exclude movies by companies like Netflix from consideration. The Justice Department apparently does not...more
The Luxembourg Competition Authority recently handed down a decision that found an app-based taxi booking system, Webtaxi, was not a hardcore violation of the relevant competition law banning price fixing. The algorithm...more
The European Union (“EU”) recently concluded its investigation of the Bayer Monsanto transaction. As part of the remedy, Bayer has agreed to license to BASF its “entire global digital agriculture product portfolio and...more
Ozzy Osbourne has filed an antitrust suit against against AEG, the operator of the O2 Arena in London and operator of the Staples Center in LA, among others. Ozzy is alleging that AEG is illegally requiring artists perform...more
The European Commission has fined Google €2.42 billion ($2.7 billion) after concluding the company had abused its dominance in search. According to a letter from the EC announcing the results of its investigation, Google has...more
Federal Trade Commission Acting Chairman Ohlhausen and Commissioner McSweeny recently gave two very different speeches on algorithmic pricing. Commissioner McSweeny’s speech seemed to express concern that algorithms would...more
The Economist recently announced that the world’s most valuable resource is now data, displacing oil for the top spot. The “titans” of the digital era—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look “unstoppable” as...more
A few weeks ago, we looked at price setting bots and whether what they were doing could constitute a violation of the Sherman Act. Generally, we concluded that a bot that set price off a competitor’s publicly available prices...more
On Thursday, March 16, 2017, in a speech at the Bundeskartellamt’s 18th Conference on Competition, European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, discussed the specter of automated price fixing cartels. She...more
Fortiline LLC distributes ductile iron pipe. It competes with the manufacturer which somewhat regularly undercuts its distributor in the market. Fortiline on several occasions asked the manufacturer not to do so. Fortiline...more
Last month, AMC and Carmike announced plans to merge. They would form the nation’s largest cinema chain with over 8,000 screens. Also last month, Napster founder Sean Parker announced a new product—Screening Room—which will...more
News Corp recently filed a complaint with the European Commission against Google over “improper scraping of content for use in search results.” News Corp alleges that Google takes News Corp content and makes it available in...more