Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Rewriting The Monopoly Playbook: Implications Of U.S. V. Google For Antitrust Jurisprudence, Amilcar Torres

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Controlling Private Economic Power: Lessons Learned From The Us Experience In The First Decades Of The 20th Century, Thierry Kirat, Frédéric Marty

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

Concerns related to Big Techs have led to a proliferation of legislative initiatives to complete competition rules with regulatory devices that would lead gatekeepers to be subject to obligations to preserve an equality of opportunities on the market. Within this context, this contribution revisits American decision-making practice from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century to show how regulatory-type interventions and the enforcement of competition rules have been activated to control the strategies of firms acting as gatekeepers. What we can learn from this experience is that a big firm having private regulatory power …

The Problem Of Market Power In Postwar America: Antitrust Law, Regulatory Discourse, And Changing Ideas Of Market Power, Laura Phillips-Sawyer

Scholarly Works

US antitrust law prohibits anticompetitive restraints of trade, including collusion among firms and single-firm monopolization. The law serves as a democratic check against concentrations of private economic power. However, in the post-World War II era, the law has changed largely through case law, rather than through statutory interventions. Thus, understanding the role that antitrust law has played in reconciling capitalism and democracy requires us to ask what has influenced changes to antitrust law. This chapter traces antitrust law’s postwar development across three key periods: 1940–1970s, mid-1970s to 2010s, and 2010s to present. It argues that each era’s approach to the …

Moral Panic Or Public Health Crisis? Lessons From Drugs And Gambling For “Addictive” Design, Matthew B. Lawrence, Haomin (Kevin) Yan

Seattle University Law Review

Alcohol, automobiles, guns, lottery, loot boxes, meat, music, opioid painkillers, processed foods, prop bets, slot machines, television, tobacco, violent video games. Over the last century each of these has been subject to concerns—some might even say “moral panics”—from parents and policymakers about avoidable harms to kids and adults. In some cases we look back with the benefit of hindsight and dismiss those concerns as naïve or moralistic. In others we look back at them as justified or as having come too late to check an expanding industry before it did unfathomable harm while growing so powerful that it became all …

Let The Sunshine In: Crafting Constitutional Transparency Regulations For Content Moderation, Caitlin Ring Carlson

Seattle University Law Review

In response to public concern about the impact of social media, legislators in some U.S. states have developed laws to regulate the process of content moderation. Many include mandatory transparency and disclosure requirements, some of which courts have already deemed an unconstitutional infringement on social media platforms’ right to free expression. This article explores the parameters for crafting constitutional social media transparency regulations using existing U.S. media policy and insights from recent legal challenges. The resulting analysis identifies content neutral transparency requirements that mandate the disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial information as those most likely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Specifically, …

This Is Not A Game: The Addictive Allure Of Digital Companions, Nizan Geslevich Packin, Karni Chagal-Feferkorn

Seattle University Law Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents have become an inescapable part of modern childhood, reshaping education, leisure activities, entertainment, and social interaction. From AI-powered tutors that adapt to individual learning styles to emotionally responsive chatbots that simulate human companionship, these systems promise unprecedented personalization, cognitive stimulation, and social support. However, these benefits mask significant risks that remain unregulated and inadequately addressed.

Although adults are also susceptible to forming deep emotional bonds with AI companions—often trusting them as if they possessed genuine understanding and empathy—children are particularly vulnerable. Their misplaced trust can more severely distort social development, weaken critical thinking, and foster unhealthy …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

Ftc V. Amazon: A Turning Point For Antitrust Law?, Matthew Cole Conover

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The United States is experiencing crippling economic inequalities that harken back to the Gilded Age. For the first time, legal scholars have turned to antitrust law to reverse this alarming trend. These scholars, including current Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, are testing this ambitious theory in the E-commerce industry. E-commerce is a market largely dominated by one company: Amazon. With its dominance, Amazon lures small businesses into its third-party seller marketplace, where it controls those business’s prices and punishes those that resist. Lina Kahn’s FTC has formally launched its litigation campaign against Amazon, claiming that the company has violated …

Self-Regulation In Emerging And Innovative Industries, Daniel E. Walters, Hannah J. Wiseman

Faculty Scholarship

Self-regulation—governance of firm behavior by private entities—has a long history both in the United States and globally, and there is an extensive literature on the topic. But there has been far less attention paid to the role self-regulation can play in spurring and enabling innovation and growth within emerging industries. These industries—both currently ascendant ones such as hydrogen and artificial intelligence, as well as formerly new (but now well established) activities in hydraulic fracturing and Internet communications—plausibly benefit from self-regulation’s ability to coordinate economic actors and reassure often skeptical publics. Examining the ways that self-regulation impacts this special type of …

The False Choice Between Digital Regulation And Innovation, Anu Bradford

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article challenges the common view that more stringent regulation of the digital economy inevitably compromises innovation and undermines technological progress. This view, vigorously advocated by the tech industry, has shaped the public discourse in the United States, where the country’s thriving tech economy is often associated with a staunch commitment to free markets. U.S. lawmakers have also traditionally embraced this perspective, which explains their hesitancy to regulate the tech industry to date. The European Union has chosen another path, regulating the digital economy with stringent data privacy, antitrust, content moderation, and other digital regulations designed to shape the evolution …

Free Speech Is Incomplete? Big Tech In A Distant Mirror, Jan Polański

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

In 1961, Alexander Meiklejohn claimed that the First Amendment, the US provision guaranteeing free speech, is an absolute. Echoing this in the context of the rise of fake news, Tim Wu has recently asked whether the First Amendment might have become obsolete. Yet, with the growing power of Big Tech, concerns are also voiced that their impact on free speech may go too far. However, there is tension here: on the one hand, the unprecedented role of Big Tech provides incentives for regulation; on the other, free speech is such a sensitive subject that there are reasons for limiting government …

Media Pluralism And Competition In The Media Sector: The Italian Experience, Valeria Caforio

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

In economic sectors where constitutional principles come to the fore, legislators must reconcile individual rights and freedoms with market principles, such as the arm’s length principle, and economic freedoms, particularly the freedom to conduct business. This balance is particularly significant in the media sector, where the principle of media pluralism is paramount. Media pluralism, as acknowledged by the Italian Constitutional Court in 1988, encompasses two dimensions: internal pluralism, which secures citizens’ access to diverse, objective, and impartial information (individual freedoms); and external pluralism, which prevents the concentration of resources among a limited group of economic actors (economic freedoms). Against this …

U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission And The "Deep Administrative State": A Case Study Of Its Esg Rules, Jerry W. Markham

American University Business Law Review

This study examines the highly controversial “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) rules that were adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2024. Those rules require large public companies to disclose their policies for dealing with climate change and report their greenhouse gas emissions. Critics charge that those rules are the product of a “deep state” administrative agency that is operating outside the checks and balances imposed by the Constitution on other government actors. The study relates the background for these deep state concerns and the constitutional and statutory restraints that were intended to prevent the development of such …

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 …

Aclp - Comments To The Fcc Re Net Neutrality - December 2023, New York Law School

Reports and Resources

No abstract provided.

The Power Of The Purse: Instigating Social Change Through Strategic Municipal Bond Investments, Jenna Reifler

University of Miami Business Law Review

Municipal bonds are generally understood as mutually beneficial for both issuer and holder—they allow cities to secure capital for local improvements and investors to earn reliable and tax-exempt profits. It turns out, however, that the lack of disclosure for issuing general obligation bonds presents the perfect camouflage for cities to secure funding despite their local social responsibility inadequacies.

Cities quietly shell out millions of dollars in settlements to the victims of police-misconduct. Largely unreported and untracked, many municipalities fund such settlements through general obligation bonds, which are colloquially termed police brutality bonds. As a result, and often unbeknownst to the …

Taking Care Of Business: An Empirical Examination Of The Top S&P 500 Companies And Their Role As Public Health Regulators During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Megan M. O’Malley

University of Miami Business Law Review

Data from the top 15 constituents by weight on the S&P 500 is assembled to identify trends among the policies these companies implemented in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some policies were fairly consistent across the board, especially in regard to remote work opportunities and health and safety measures for essential and/or in-person employees. Other policies, including vaccination requirements and vaccine incentives, varied across and within industries. Some companies that were examined went beyond the relevant federal, state, or local requirements in effect at the time, while other companies pushed back against public health guidance.

Globalize Me: Regulating Distributed Ledger Technology, Roee Sarel, Hadar Y. Jabotinsky, Israel Klein

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)—the technology underlying cryptocurrencies—has been identified by many as a game-changer for data storage. Although DLT can solve acute problems of trust and coor- dination whenever entities (e.g., firms, traders, or even countries) rely on a shared database, it has mostly failed to reach mass adoption outside the context of cryptocurrencies.

A prime reason for this failure is the extreme state of regulation, which was largely absent for many years but is now pouring down via uncoordinated regulatory initiatives by different countries. Both of these extremes-—under-regulation and over-regulation—-are consistent with traditional concepts from law and economics. Specifically, …

Weaponizing Rhetoric To Legitimate Regulatory Failures, Kat Albrecht, Kaitlyn Filip

FIU Law Review

Pyramid schemes are illegal. According to the courts, they are fraudulent because they must eventually collapse, disappointing or exploiting the members at the bottom. This illegality, largely governed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is narrowly construed to encompass only very specific instances of activity. In particular, we argue that the specificity of the law allows multi-level marketing companies (MLMs) to argue that they are ‘not a pyramid scheme’ both legally and societally in order to obfuscate exploitative conditions within the company. We take LuLaRoe as a case study of the ways in …

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (Spacs) And The Sec, Neal Newman, Lawrence J. Trautman

Faculty Scholarship

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are simply enterprises that raise money from the public with the intention of purchasing an existing business and becoming publicly traded in the securities markets. If the SPAC is successful in raising money and the acquisition takes place, the target company takes the SPAC’s place on a stock exchange in a transaction that resembles a public offering. Also known as “blank-check” or “reverse merger” companies, this process avoids many of the pitfalls of a traditional initial public offering.

During late 2020 and 2021 an unprecedented surge in the popularity and issuance of Special Purpose Acquisition …

Anticompetitive Merger Review, Samuel N. Weinstein

Articles

U.S. antitrust law empowers enforcers to review pending mergers that might undermine competition. But there is growing evidence that the merger-review regime is failing to perform its core procompetitive function. Industry concentration and the power of dominant firms are increasing across key sectors of the economy. In response, progressive advocates of more aggressive antitrust interventions have critiqued the substantive merger-review standard, arguing that it is too friendly to merging firms. This Article traces the problem to a different source: the merger-review process itself. The growing length of reviews, the competitive restrictions merger agreements place on acquisition targets during review, and …

A New Antitrust Framework To Protect Mom And Pop From Big Tech, Cara Macdonald

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

While the economy declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, big technology companies like Amazon and Oracle experienced unprecedented growth and influence. Critics argue big technology companies are finding this level of success in-part due to anticompetitive practices. The crux of the debate rests on whether current, traditional antitrust laws are sufficient to cope with big technology companies. Some theorists argue that current laws are adequate, while others assert that antitrust laws are insufficient to regulate big technology companies because they are so different from the types of companies antitrust laws were designed to regulate. This article concludes that big tech companies …

Sovereignty 2.0, Anupam Chander, Haochen Sun

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Digital sovereignty-the exercise of control over the internet-is the ambition of the world's leaders, from Australia to Zimbabwe, seen as a bulwark against both foreign states and foreign corporations. Governments have resoundingly answered first-generation internet law questions of who, if anyone, should regulate the internet. The answer: they all will. Governments now confront second-generation questions--not whether, but how to regulate the internet. This Article argues that digital sovereignty is simultaneously a necessary incident of democratic governance and democracy's dreaded antagonist. As international law scholar Louis Henkin taught, sovereignty can insulate a government's worst ills from foreign intrusion. Assertions of digital …

Facebook, Welfare, And Natural Monopoly: A Quantitative Analysis Of Antitrust Remedies, Felix B. Chang, Seth Benzell

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article advances a novel theoretical model for assessing policy interventions against Facebook. As prosecutors barrel forward against digital platforms, soon it will fall upon courts and, eventually, regulators to devise remedies. We argue that any sensible solution must include quantification of the welfare effects on the platform’s various constituents. Our model prioritizes the effects upon total societal welfare—or, in economists’ terms, social welfare. Applied to Facebook, the model calculates social welfare as the sum of four components: (i) consumer welfare; (ii) advertising profits; (iii) tax revenues; and (iv) the value of a large user base.

Drawing on surveys of …

Anticompetitive Merger Review, Samuel N. Weinstein

Georgia Law Review

U.S. antitrust law empowers enforcers to review pending mergers that might undermine competition. But there is growing evidence that the merger-review regime is failing to perform its core procompetitive function. Industry concentration and the power of dominant firms are increasing across key sectors of the economy. In response, progressive advocates of more aggressive antitrust interventions have critiqued the substantive merger-review standard, arguing that it is too friendly to merging firms. This Article traces the problem to a different source: the merger-review process itself. The growing length of reviews, the competitive restrictions merger agreements place on acquisition targets during review, and …

Addressing Big Tech’S Market Power: A Comparative Institutional Approach, Thomas A. Lambert

SMU Law Review

This Article provides a comparative institutional analysis of the three leading approaches to addressing the market power of large digital platforms: (1) traditional antitrust law, the approach thus far taken in the United States; (2) ex ante conduct rules, the approach embraced by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act and several bills under consideration in the U.S. Congress; and (3) ongoing agency oversight, the approach embraced by the United Kingdom with its newly established “Digital Markets Unit.” After identifying the general advantages and disadvantages of each approach, the Article examines how they are likely to play out in the context …

Addictive Technology And Its Implications For Antitrust Enforcement, James Niels Rosenquist, Fiona M. Scott Morton, Samuel N. Weinstein

Articles

The advent of mobile devices and digital media platforms in the past decade represents the biggest shock to cognition in human history. Robust medical evidence is emerging that digital media platforms are addictive and, when used in excess, harmful to users’ mental health. Other types of addictive products, like tobacco and prescription drugs, are heavily regulated to protect consumers. Currently, there is no regulatory structure protecting digital media users from these harms. Antitrust enforcement and regulation that lowers entry barriers could help consumers of social media by increasing competition. Economic theory tells us that more choice in digital media will …

Regulation And The Geography Of Inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman, Christopher Serkin, Morgan Ricks

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We live in an era of widening geographic inequality. Around the country, the spread between economically and culturally thriving places and those that are struggling has been increasing. "Superstar" cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta continue to attract talent and grow, while the economies of other cities and rural areas are left behind. Troublingly, escalating geographic inequality in the United States has arrived hand in hand with serious economic, social, and political problems. Areas that are left behind have not only failed to keep up with their thriving peers; in many ways, they have stagnated and seen …

Taking It With You: Platform Barriers To Entry And The Limits Of Data Portability, Gabriel Nicholas

Michigan Technology Law Review

Policymakers are faced with a vexing problem: how to increase competition in a tech sector dominated by a few giants. One answer proposed and adopted by regulators in the United States and abroad is to require large platforms to allow consumers to move their data from one platform to another, an approach known as data portability. Facebook, Google, Apple, and other major tech companies have enthusiastically supported data portability through their own technical and political initiatives. Today, data portability has taken hold as one of the go-to solutions to address the tech industry’s competition concerns.

This Article argues that despite …

A Tale Of Two Regulators: Antitrust Implications Of Progressive Decentralization In Blockchain Platforms, Evan Miller

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Competition regulators have identified the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt traditional sponsor-led platforms, like app stores, that have received increased antitrust scrutiny. Enforcement actions by securities regulators, however, have forced blockchain-based platforms to adopt a strategy of progressive decentralization, delaying decentralization objectives in favor of the centralized model that competition regulators hope they will disrupt. This regulatory tension, and the implications for blockchain’s procompetitive potential, have yet to be explored. This Article first identifies the origin of this tension and its consequences through a competition law lens, and then recommends that competition regulators account for this tension in monitoring …