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Full-Text Articles in Antitrust and Trade Regulation

Antitrust For Dominant Digital Platforms: An Alternative To The Monopoly Power Standard To Restore Competition, Jordan Ramsey May 2023

Antitrust For Dominant Digital Platforms: An Alternative To The Monopoly Power Standard To Restore Competition, Jordan Ramsey

Senior Honors Theses

Antitrust law is meant to promote competition by prohibiting anticompetitive business practices such as mergers and acquisitions as well as exclusionary conduct. Judicial interpretation of antitrust law has allowed dominant digital platforms to undertake anticompetitive actions without prosecution. The Sherman Antitrust Act should be amended to remove the monopoly power standard that allows firms to engage in anticompetitive conduct as long as the conduct does not create or uphold monopoly power. The amendment would make anticompetitive conduct illegal regardless of monopoly power, as long as six proof requirements are met. This would result in lessened market concentration, which would benefit …


About-Face: How Facebook’S Restrictions On User Posts Could Violate Antitrust Law, Efrem Berk Apr 2023

About-Face: How Facebook’S Restrictions On User Posts Could Violate Antitrust Law, Efrem Berk

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

This Note examines whether Facebook’s restrictions on its users’ posts are subject to Sherman Act § 2. This Note looks at the economic activity generated by social media activity and argues that posts are commerce. While this piece finds that current antitrust jurisprudence likely favors Facebook, an alternative approach sought by some antitrust scholars could influence judges to preclude the platform’s restrictions.


Freezing Innovation: How The Platform Competition And Opportunity Act Will Freeze Funds In The Tech Start-Up Market, Brandon Wong Feb 2023

Freezing Innovation: How The Platform Competition And Opportunity Act Will Freeze Funds In The Tech Start-Up Market, Brandon Wong

Pepperdine Law Review

The rise of technological giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook motivated the House Judiciary Committee to pass a slew of new antitrust legislation bills to curb these companies’ considerable market power. The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act proposes to significantly cut a dominant online platform’s ability to continue growing by deeming certain acquisitions presumptively unlawful. The Act shifts the burden to the acquiring company to prove the proposed transaction would not be anticompetitive by eliminating a potential competitor. In an effort to protect competition, the Act has good intentions to protect start-up companies that are fearful of being acquired …