Seven years ago, Einer Elhauge published a call to arms. In a provocative essay in the Harvard Law Review, he urged the antitrust agencies to bring enforcement actions against what he called horizontal shareholding and what we now call common ownership. Common ownership raises antitrust concerns because investors own shares in two or more competitors.... Read More
How many times have you heard from an antitrust scholar or practitioner that merely possessing a monopoly does not run afoul of the antitrust laws? That a violation requires the use of a restraint to extend that monopoly into another market, or to preserve the original monopoly to constitute a violation? Here’s a surprise. Both... Read More
After more than a year of aggressive rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has now held them steady after each of the past two Federal Open Market Committee meetings. After peaking at levels not seen in decades, inflation has leveled off in the three-to-four percent range for months now. On top of that, job openings, and... Read More
Over 100 years ago, Congress responded to railroad and oil monopolies’ stranglehold on the economy by passing the United States’ first-ever antitrust laws. When those reforms weren’t enough, Congress created the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers and small businesses from predation. Today, unchecked monopolies again threaten economic competition and our democratic institutions, so it’s... Read More
The Federal Trade Commission has accused Amazon of illegally maintaining its monopoly, extracting supra-competitive fees on merchants that use Amazon’s platform. If and when the fact-finder determines that Amazon violated the antitrust laws, we propose structural remedies to address the competitive harms. Behavioral remedies have fallen out of favor among antitrust scholars. But the success... Read More
America’s working people and their elected representatives in the labor movement have been an untapped resource for antitrust enforcers. That should change. Not only are workers an underutilized source of information about the likely effects of a merger, but their labor organizations also offer an effective counter to employer power. As signaled with the Executive... Read More
“Their goal is simply to mislead, bewilder, confound, and delay and delay and delay until once again we lose our way, and fail to throw off the leash the monopolists have fastened on our neck.” – Barry Lynn Today, the name Draper is associated with either a fictional adman or a successful real-life venture capital... Read More
For years, journalists have reported numerous instances of worker exploitation, hazardous working conditions, and poverty wages in the nail salon and fast food industries. In a blockbuster 2015 New York Times investigation, for example, journalists found that New York nail salonists were “paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid…[and] endure all manner of... Read More
It has become quite common to accuse antitrust enforcers of bias and seek their recusal. FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ Antitrust Division AAG Jonathan Kanter have been the subject of calls for recusal in cases involving corporate giants such as Meta, Amazon, and Google. The argument is that these individuals are biased in their... Read More
