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Hollywood's Triple Threat: Writers, Actors, And Antitrust Regulators Take On The Streaming Giants, Remy S. Farkas

American University Business Law Review

In the summer of 2023, Hollywood froze when actors, writers, and crew took to the picket lines. Their gripe: the recent mega mergers by media conglomerates. The Writers Guild Association and Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists joined forces to protest recent acquisitions by Disney, Amazon, and Netflix; these companies vertically integrated within the industry, which allowed them to exploit workers, limit content, and raise prices for consumers. In the same summer, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission released Draft Merger Guidelines, which included thirteen new guidelines for evaluating whether a merger violates antitrust …

From Rancid To Reasonable: Unfair Methods Of Competition Under State Little Ftc Acts, Samuel Evan Milner

American University Law Review

When Congress gave the Federal Trade Commission the power to identify and enjoin unfair methods of competition, it did not create a parallel private right of action as it had for other antitrust laws. Yet approximately two dozen states have since enacted their own “Little FTC Acts,” under which private plaintiffs may sue for damages and other remedies. These poorly understood state laws are actively shaping American competition policy on a national scale. The Ninth Circuit recently affirmed the nationwide injunction that Epic Games obtained against Apple under California’s law despite concluding that Apple violated no federal or state antitrust …

Antitrust, Amazon, And Algorithmic Auditing, Jens Frankenreiter, Abhisek Dash, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Saptarshi Ghosh, Animesh Mukherjee, Stefan Bechtold, Krishna P. Gummadi

Scholarship@WashULaw

In digital markets, antitrust law and special regulations aim to ensure that markets remain competitive despite the dominating role that digital platforms play today in everyone's life. Unlike traditional markets, market participant behavior is easily observable in these markets. We present a series of empirical investigations into the extent to which Amazon engages in practices that are typically described as self-preferencing. We discuss how the computer science tools used in this paper can be used in a regulatory environment that is based on algorithmic auditing and requires regulating digital markets at scale.

From The Issue Editors, Michał Będkowski-Kozioł, Łukasz Gołąb

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

From the issue editors

Glosa Do Postanowienia Sądu Najwyższego – Izby Kontroli Nadzwyczajnej I Spraw Publicznych Z Dnia 23 Lutego 2022 R., Sygn. Akt I Nsk 16/21, Daria Niesteruk

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

This commentary provides a critical analysis of the resolution of the Polish Supreme Court, Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs, issued on the 23rd February 2023. In its resolution, the Supreme Court stated that the Polish Competition Authority (President of UOKiK) is not absolutely bound by the substance of its decision to initiate proceeding. This means that the specified legal basis could be changed or complemented during the proceeding, as could the definition of the relevant market, provided that the procedural parties have had an opportunity to take a stance on the mentioned change before the NCA takes its …

Hans-Bernd Schäfer, Claus Ott, Jarosław Bełdowski, Ekonomiczna Analiza Prawa Cywilnego. Tom 1. Zagadnienia Ogólne I Prawo Umów, Wydawnictwo C.H. Beck, Warszawa 2024, Ss. 510, Marcin Kraśniewski

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

Review of the book by Hans-Bernd Schäfer, Claus Ott, Jarosław Bełdowski, Ekonomiczna analiza prawa cywilnego. Tom 1. Zagadnienia ogólne i prawo umów [Economic Analysis of Civil Law. Vol. 1. General issues and contract law], Wydawnictwo C.H. Beck, Warszawa 2024, pp. 510

Public Services In Railway Freight Transport, Stefan A. Jarecki

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

So far, practitioners and academics generally believed that in land transport, the concept of public services could only refer to passenger traffic. Recently, this approach has changed. The European Commission has stated that public services can also be provided in railway freight transport. Railway freight transport services can only be qualified as public services when the given Member State establishes that there is a genuine need for such services, a need that is not, or is not sufficiently met by the market. Currently, to provide financing of some railway freight services, Member States have to fulfil the Altmark conditions, or …

International Conference Charting Tomorrow: Bridging Knowledge And Action In Sustainable Finance, Warsaw, September 30th 2023, Helena Kordasiewicz

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

Report from the Charting Tomorrow: Bridging Knowledge and Action in Sustainable Finance International Conference

Entire Issue Vol. 13 No. 1 (2024)

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

Vol. 13(1) 2024

Towards An Effective Merger Review Policy: A Defence Of Rebuttable Structural Presumptions, Filippo Lancieri, Tommaso Valletti

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We discuss the design of an effective merger review policy for the 21st century. We argue that the practice of the past decades is inadequate and propose a move towards much stronger rebuttable structural presumptions. These presumptions establish that all mergers above certain thresholds are illegal unless the merging parties can prove that merger-specific efficiencies will be shared with consumers and yield tangible welfare gains. These presumptions are grounded on solid economics and also acknowledge the real-world limitations in enforcement resources and information asymmetries between companies and regulators. We outline how to establish such presumptions in practice, defending the implementation …

Tesla, Let Me Fix My Car: The Right To Repair And The Need For A Balance Between Public And Private Enforcement, Emanuele S. Putrino

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …

Consumption Governance: The Role Of Production And Consumption In International Economic Law, Timothy Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last decade, international economic conflict has increased dramatically. To name only a few examples, the European Union banned the import of products from deforested land and is poised to impose duties on carbon-intensive imports; the United States banned Chinese imports made with forced labor; and countries the world over threatened to impose digital services taxes on U.S. corporations, leading to a new multilateral agreement on apportioning income tax revenue among countries.

This Article argues that these conflicts represent a shift in norms governing the authority to tax and regulate international commerce. Different fields within international economic law describe …

Deconstructing Trinko, Edward D. Cavanagh

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Recent monopolization cases against Google and Facebook brought by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission signal that the United States is at the dawn of a new era of aggressive antitrust enforcement. If those cases are to be harbingers of an antitrust renaissance, then antitrust enforcers must confront and successfully overcome the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Trinko, which has cast a long shadow over antitrust enforcement efforts in monopolization cases. In breathtakingly broad and provocative language that is decidedly unsympathetic to enforcement of §2 of the Sherman Act, particularly in unilateral refusal to deal cases, …

Beyond Nil, William W. Berry, Iii

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The name, image, and likeness (NIL) changes and shifting landscape obscure more existential threats to the student-athlete model on the horizon. The television money that Power Five conference teams receive still comprises much of the budget of athletic departments. The football and basketball players—-the revenue sport athletes-—may have a claim to a greater share of this revenue.

Some athletes argue that they are employees of their universities, which would entitle them not only to additional benefits but also to other tools, such as collective bargaining. All of these advantages could make universities responsible for increasing the amount of remuneration available …

The Ncaa's Challenge In Determining Nil Market Value, Meg Penrose

Faculty Scholarship

This Article proceeds in three parts. Part II discusses the changes that NIL has wrought in college athletics. It briefly explains collectives and their impact on NIL. Part III discusses the impossibility of limiting athletes’ “fair market value” given market value depends on what the market is willing to pay. Congress has failed to pass national legislation. Yet the mosaic of state laws is simply unfit to stand in for national legislation. And, following multiple litigation losses, the NCAA cannot be trusted to “value” the athletes themselves. Market value, if one is to be established, must be uniform and assessed …

A Reputational View Of Antitrust’S Consumer Welfare Standard, Murat C. Mungan, John M. Yun

Faculty Scholarship

A reform movement is underway in antitrust. Citing prior enforcement failures, deviations from the original intent of the antitrust laws, and overall rising levels of sector concentration, some are seeking to fundamentally alter or altogether replace the current consumer welfare standard, which has guided courts over the past fifty years. This policy push has sparked an intense debate over the best approach to antitrust law enforcement. In this Article, we examine a previously unexplored potential social cost from moving away from the consumer welfare standard: a loss in the information value to the public from a finding of liability. A …

The Radical Challenge To The Antitrust Order, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The U.S. antitrust order is undergoing a radical challenge along three key dimensions. First, the challengers seek to denaturalize markets and replace a commitment to competition with an anti-domination norm. Second, the challengers seek to dramatically alter institutional arrangements, with Congressional legislation and agency rulemaking replacing antitrust's longstanding commitment to judicial common law incrementalism. Finally, the challengers would replace the antitrust order's preferred juridical approach-open-ended rule of reason analysiswith a return to bright-line prohibitory rules and a related demotion of economists as decision-makers. Each of these challenges entails significant consequences, many of them unintended, counter-productive, or perverse. Contrary to the …

The American Antimonopoly Tradition: Origins, Contradictions, Transformations, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Proponents of antitrust reform argue for the rediscovery of an American antimonopoly tradition that predated the Sherman Act by centuries and suggests the reimagination of a more robust contemporary policy against concentrated economic power. But historically there have been a number of distinct and often contradictory strands of American antimonopoly. The American colanists inherited a weak, recent, and largely invented antimonopoly common law tradition focused on exclusive grants of privilege from the crown. In the nineteenth century, antimonopoly became a generative and ubiquitous concept in state legislatures and courts, but one with multiple, inconsistent meanings that evolved in the decades …

Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein

Articles

Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive, and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …

Antitrust Regulation Of Copyright Markets, Jacob Noti-Victor, Xiyin Tang

Articles

Late last year, a federal court sided with the Department of Justice and blocked the planned merger of book publishers Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House. The decision was a rare collision between antitrust law and the deeply consolidated copyright content industries. Over the course of the past decade, acquisitions and mergers in the recording, music publishing, and audiovisual space have left just a handful of juggernaut content producers in their wake. Moreover, new technology companies that have entered the content-creation and distribution markets have begun to leverage their scale to further their own industry consolidation.

This Article examines …