Law Commons^™

Comments On Federal Trade Commission Non-Compete Ban Proposed Rule, Matter No. P201200, Chaz D. Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Within signed law professors and law students submitted this letter to the Federal Trade Commission, writing in their individual capacities, not as agents of their affiliated institutions, in support of the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed rule to ban most non-compete clauses (the “Proposal”) as an unfair method of competition.

This letter offers comments in response to areas where the FTC has requested public comment. To make our views clear, this letter contains the following sections: I. Summary of the Proposal; II. The Commission Should Consider Expanding Its Definition of Non-Compete Clauses to Prevent Employers from Requiring Workers to Quit Before …

It's Time To Remove The 'Mossified' Procedures For Ftc Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

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This article, prepared for The George Washington Law Review’s Symposium “The FTC at 100,” addresses the FTC’s rulemaking process — specifically the quasi-adjudicative process mandated by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty — Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 and the additional procedures added by the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980 (collectively called the “Magnuson-Moss Procedures”). The article compares how long it took the FTC to complete or terminate the rulemakings it undertook under the Magnuson-Moss Procedures (including amendments to previously issued rules) with the amount of time it took the FTC to issue rules under the “regular” Administrative Procedure …

In Personam And Beyond The Grasp: In Search Of Jurisdiction And Accountability For Foreign Defendants, Andrew Popper

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The focus of this article is on the difficulty of securing in personam jurisdiction over foreign entities who steal information technology and intellectual property (IT and IP). The value of stolen IT and IP is somewhere in the range of a trillion dollars over the last decade. Given the current inability to prevent those losses or deter meaningfully those engaged in the misconduct, the article explores the core of the problem: the difficulty of satisfying the minimum contact/fairness requirements of Article III courts. The article addresses several alternative approaches that might allow for more efficient protection of IT and IP. …

Beneficiaries Of Misconduct: A Direct Approach To It Theft, Andrew Popper

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Stolen information technology (IT) is a domestic and global problem. Theft of IT by upstream producers has a pernicious effect on the competitive market and violates fundamental policies designed to protect those who create and invent such assets. Companies profiting from stolen IT are not just free-riding on the successes of those who design and produce the products and ideas that are a driving force in the U.S. economy – they are destabilizing rational pricing and distorting lawful competition by virtue of outright theft. Current legal recourse is insufficient to address such misconduct; new approaches are needed at the state …

Equity, Antitrust, And The Reemergence Of The Patent Unenforceability Remedy, Jorge Contreras

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The conventional legal analysis of technical standard setting derives primarily from antitrust law. But antitrust remedies, taken alone, may not be broad enough to address recent abuses of the standardization process. The principal example of this shortcoming is the well-known case of Rambus, Inc., which, over the course of several years, was alleged to have concealed relevant patent applications from a standards organization in which it participated and then successfully sued the entire DRAM industry for royalties after the standard was “locked-in.” Remarkably, Rambus prevailed in its litigation campaign despite aggressive enforcement efforts by the Federal Trade Commission. Rambus’s success …

Detecting And Reversing The Decline In Horizontal Merger Enforcement, Jonathan Baker, Carl Shapiro

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Evaluating the Accuracy of Horizontal Merger Enforcement. There is no easy way to evaluate horizontal merger enforcement in the courts and at the DOJ and the FTC. As explained below, our approach is to rely on several different categories of evidence. The most compelling way to evaluate the accuracy of merger enforcement policy would be through merger retro-spectives—detailed studies evaluating the actual effects of consummated mergers on market prices, product variety, or innovation. The most revealing mergers to study in depth are those that went forward despite presenting serious antitrust concerns. Armed with a large number of such studies , …

Econometric Methods In Staples, Jonathan Baker, Orley Ashenfelter, David Ashmore, Suzanne Gleason, Daniel Hosken

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Econometrics played a major role in the investigation and litigation of the Federal Trade Commission's successful challenge to the proposed merger between two office superstore chains, Staples and Office Depot. Our goal in writing this essay is to describe the econometric issues at stake in evaluating the FTC's central claim that the price charged by office supply superstores was related to the number and identity of superstore firms participating in the market. Similar statistical models were relied upon by the FTC and the merging firms to analyze pricing. Our discussion of these models highlights the advantages and disadvantages of alternative …

Unleashing Instant Messaging From Regulatory Oversight, Fernando Laguarda

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INTRODUCTION: { 1 } America Online, Inc. ("AOL") and Time Warner Inc. announced their intention to merge on January 10, 2000.' At that time, there was a great deal of excitement about combining these two companies and harnessing the power of an increasingly broadband Internet. In addition to the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") and Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"), more than one thousand local communities conducted their own reviews of the merger. The FTC identified "open access" to the Time Warner Cable platform as an issue meriting specific relief {2} The FCC, for its part, specifically identified "instant messaging" ("IM") as …

Should Concentration Be Dropped From The Merger Guidelines?, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop

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As members of the ABA Antitrust Section's Task Force on Fundamental Theory, we are pleased to provide a briefdiscussion of the appropriate role of market concentration in the review of mergers under the antitrust laws. Thispaper, organized in four main parts, will offer some suggestions for revising the Department of Justice and FederalTrade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines. A final section of this work will analyze whether it would bepreferable to conduct merger analysis by applying Professor Michael E. Porter's business strategy framework ratherthan the Merger Guidelines.

Econometric Analysis In Ftc V. Staples, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In mid-1997, a federal district court in Washington, DC, granted the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) request for a preliminary injunction blocking the proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot (Federal Trade Commission v. Staples, Inc. [hereafter, Staples] 1997a). The transaction would have combined two of the nation's three leading office superstore chains. The firms chose not to pursue the case further after the preliminary injunction was issued, thus giving up on their efforts to merge.