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Tech Giant Exclusion, John B. Kirkwood
Tech Giant Exclusion, John B. Kirkwood
Faculty Articles
There is no topic in regulatory policy that is more pressing and more controversial than what to do about the tech giants – Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Critics claim that that these powerful platforms crush competitors, distort the political process, and elude antitrust law because it cares only about consumer prices. The only solution, they argue, is to break them up.
This diagnosis is mistaken. The tech giants have indeed engaged in anticompetitive conduct. They have excluded rivals selling products on their platforms by demoting them in search results, copying their products, or refusing to deal with them. While …
Market Power And Antitrust Enforcement, John B. Kirkwood
Market Power And Antitrust Enforcement, John B. Kirkwood
Faculty Articles
Antitrust is back on the national agenda. The Democratic Party, leading Senators, progressive organizations, and many scholars are calling for stronger antitrust enforcement. One important step, overlooked in the discussion to date, is to reform how market power — an essential element in most antitrust violations — is determined. At present the very definition of market power is unsettled. While there is widespread agreement that market power is the ability to raise price profitably above the competitive level, there is no consensus on how to determine the competitive level. Moreover, courts virtually never measure market power (or its larger variant, …