Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Competition Law In The Age Of Sustainability: Regulatory Challenges And Strategic Responses, Emrah Kulakli, Serhat Yüksel, Serkan Eti, Hasan Dinçer

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

The increasing emphasis on sustainability has intensified tensions with competition law, particularly when cooperative initiatives create risks for market competition or consumer welfare. The main challenge is to identify regulatory strategies that balance sustainability objectives with competitive market principles. This requires a systematic assessment of both sustainability benefits and competition related risks. Existing studies largely rely on legal discussions or case-based evaluations and provide limited quantitative guidance for prioritizing regulatory approaches. This study addresses this gap by proposing a structured decision-making framework to reduce conflicts between sustainability goals and competition law. A hybrid model is developed by integrating spherical fuzzy …

Green Rules, Fragmented Fields: Member-State Approaches To Sustainability In Eu Competition Law, Niccolò Galli, Armando Santoni

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

This article provides a comparative, normative-evaluative examination of how sustainability is being incorporated into European competition law. Combining doctrinal legal analysis with economic reasoning, it clarifies competing definitions of sustainability, maps the contest between the consumer-welfare paradigm and sustainability proponents, and evaluates the legal and institutional implications of the Commission’s 2023 Horizontal Cooperation Guidelines. Drawing on national initiatives across Member States plus the UK, the study highlights contrasting instruments, from Austria’s statutory environmental exemption to the Dutch soft-law safe harbour and Greece’s experimental sustainability sandbox, and shows how these divergent approaches produce fragmentation and legal uncertainty for cross-border cooperative initiatives. …

From Amateurism To Open Markets: The Ncaa's Reckoning With Antitrust Lawsuits, Jesse Giffin

William & Mary Business Law Review

Throughout the 2000s the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) has been the subject of many high-profile antitrust lawsuits regarding the financial restrictions imposed on student athletes. The aftermath of some of the most recent decisions has given athletes new ways to earn compensation while competing in college athletics. In House v. NCAA, another historic antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA, the Court for the Northern District of California was tasked with deciding whether student athletes can be paid directly for their athletic performance. By comparing these NCAA antitrust lawsuits with other blockbuster antitrust cases such as the Microsoft antitrust case, …

When Antitrust Meets Labour: Exemption And Enforcement Under Article 101 Tfeu, Giulia Mangiafico

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

Labour rights protection has recently emerged as one of the key objectives of antitrust law, alongside sustainability and privacy. The application and enforcement of competition rules differ significantly between the workers’ and employers’ sides of the market, a distinction that is particularly visible in cases concerning remuneration. Wage-setting may fall within the scope of Article 101 TFEU where it results from coordination between undertakings; whether competition law applies therefore depends on how wages are fixed. While employer cartels that suppress pay are treated as restrictive agreements, collective bargaining arrangements are assessed under a markedly different analytical framework. This article examines …

Anselm Küsters, The Making And Unmaking Of Ordoliberal Language. A Digital Conceptual History Of European Competition Law, Verlag Vittorio Klostermann Frankfurt Am Main 2023, Piotr Oliński

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

No abstract provided.

Consumers, Laborers, And Antitrust, Oh My! Why Labor Considerations Should Be Examined In Antitrust Law Through The Lens Of U.S. V. Bertelsmann Se & Co. Kgaa, Jodi Nicole Kain

University of Miami Business Law Review

Imagine the disappointing feeling of walking into a bookstore and finding shelves filled with only a narrow and non-diverse selection of titles. This feeling nearly became a reality when the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) won an action blocking a proposed merger between mega publishing houses Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster in the case United States v. Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA (2021) (“Bertelsmann”). The DOJ claimed that the merger would harm consumers by reducing the diversity of books available and directly harm authors—the creative labor force—by limiting competition for publishing deals and suppressing their compensation. For the first …

Replay Review: The Case For Federal Baseball And The Case For Overturning It, Rebekah Ansbro

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

Challenging The Raid Boss: Antitrust In Esports, Mason Cole

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal (1994 - )

No abstract provided.

Stealth Consolidation: Healthcare’S Process Of Quietly Dodging Antitrust Enforcement, Nathan Rush

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The healthcare industry has become highly concentrated due to increased rates of consolidation. Mergers and acquisitions among healthcare providers have become extremely common, making dominant hospital systems the norm. When healthcare provider markets are highly concentrated, competition deteriorates, leaving patients to suffer the consequences: higher prices for lower quality care.

The federal antitrust agencies tasked with preserving competition have failed to combat the consolidation trends that are plaguing the healthcare industry. Vertical consolidation between hospitals and physician groups has especially gone unchecked. The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, a federal antitrust law, requires merging parties to give the agencies pre-merger notice. This law, …

Rules Of The Game: Lessons From Sports To Understand Antitrust Law’S Fairness Foundations, Tara Pincock, Daniel A. Hanley

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Traditionally, courts and practitioners assert that the antitrust laws are simply about protecting competition, not competitors. In essence, these parties perceive competition to be inherently desirable, rather than recognizing that it can be beneficial or harmful depending on its intensity and scope. As a result of this mistaken belief, courts hold that certain conduct is legal under the antitrust laws simply because they determine it to be procompetitive, while conduct deemed anticompetitive is condemned. Courts seldom provide definitive boundaries to this pro-competition trope and instead assert it as if it were a well-established truism and universal societal good.

Without details …

Outbid By Technicality: How Streaming Services Weaken Legacy Media’S Matching Rights, Arthur Yolles

American University Business Law Review

Contracts for large-scale media distribution, such as those between sports leagues and broadcasting companies, often include matching rights—rights which guarantee a media distributor the ability to continue distributing content for as long as they can match the bids of third parties. These rights grant media distributors security in their relationships with rights-grantors, and they deliver a more predictable viewing experience for consumers. However, it is not always clear what constitutes a "match."

With the rise of streaming and big tech’s infiltration into legacy media strongholds such as live sports, the need to define a match is increasingly relevant. This Comment …

Cloudy Oversight: How Administrative Conflict Over International Airline Alliances’ Antitrust Immunity Harms Consumers Of Commercial Air Transportation., Hamin Jeong

American University Business Law Review

Antitrust law governs and guides how regulatory agencies should scrutinize unfair, monopolistic corporate behavior. However, when several different agencies are tasked with enforcing the same legal principles, different interpretations of such principles inevitably arise.

 The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) acts as the main body that enforces antitrust actions in the domestic airline industry, but there is an exception to the general rule. Congress delegated the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) the authority to grant antitrust immunity to international airline alliances, which form when domestic and foreign airlines partner to increase flight services between their respective nations.

However, as codified …

Shaping Corporate Behavior Through Enforcement: Evidence From The No-Poach Initiative, Lorenzo G. Luisetto

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In recent years, government entities have pursued legal action against restrictive clauses in employment contracts that limit labor mobility and may stifle competition in both labor and product markets. To date, however, little is known about how firms respond to enforcement actions aimed at regulating the relationships they have with their employees. Leveraging a sample of 293 franchisors, in this paper I investigate the spillover effects of the so-called “No-Poach Initiative,” an unprecedent enforcement action launched by the Antitrust Division of the State of Washington Attorney General’s Office in January 2018. This initiative resulted in 237 franchisors (39 of which …

Control Capture And Competition, D. Daniel Sokol, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay identifies an emerging problem in antitrust law and policy, particularly in the technology industry. Antitrust doctrine has historically revolved around internal control of firm, i.e., equity acquisition. It focuses on the capture of internal control. Mergers and acquisitions trigger regulatory review. In these deals, the locus of anticompetitive behavior lies in ownership and internal governance. However, one can capture control through various ways. An emerging problem in antitrust law is external exertion of control through contract. Competition can be stifled, and thus price, non-price, and innovation factors can be controlled or manipulated through the levers of control existing …

Religious Riders And The Sherman Act, Bailey Sanders

Faculty Scholarship

Can corporations engage in anticompetitive behavior on the basis of religious belief? While the answer may seem like an obvious no, in fact this question has largely been overlooked. It has hovered at the margins of the debate over religious exemptions: Proponents of religious exemptions have essentially argued that there is no harm in providing such exemptions to businesses because a competitive market will ensure consumers who might be denied services or goods by a religious firm can still obtain those goods and services elsewhere. But what if religiously minded businesses act in ways that are specifically designed to limit …

Are Private Equity Funds Liable For Anticompetitive Acquisitions?, Aslihan Asil, Paulo Henrique Alcantara Ramos, Amanda Starc, Thomas Wollmann

Faculty Scholarship

Private equity acquisitions grew tenfold over the past two decades. Over the same period, their focus shifted from financial engineering to industry consolidation, raising antitrust concerns. Heightening these concerns, privately backed acquisitions of competitors historically escaped detection by federal antitrust authorities in their incipiency because they fell below the reporting thresholds of the Premerger Notification Program. However, academic studies and agency investigations are now unearthing these transactions. Most salient is a recent complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission challenging a series of acquisitions stretching back ten years.

In the wave of litigation that is likely to follow this “groundbreaking” …

Antitrust And Tech Giants: Learning From United States V. Google Llc, Marcus D’Agostino

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Note addresses the evolution of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the United States, with a focus on the recent case of United States v. Google LLC. That case is used to frame the broader problem of insufficient remedies being implemented against large technology firms. The mild remedies granted to the government in Google reinforce the findings of the 2020 Congressional Report on Digital Competition. The Report recommended changes to the antitrust laws that would revive structural separation as a remedy. This Note argues that the body of evidence presented compels structural separation to be used more frequently as the …

Recalibrating Article 102 Tfeu In The Digital Economy: The Apple App Store (Music Streaming) Decision And The Rise Of Hybrid Platform Enforcement, Arletta M. Gorecka

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

This case comment analyses the European Commission’s 2024 decision fining Apple €1.84 billion for imposing anti-steering provisions on music streaming apps in the App Store. The decision marks a significant development in the application of Article 102 TFEU to digital platform ecosystems. By characterising Apple’s conduct as an exploitative abuse of dominance, the Commission addressed restrictions that limited consumer information, increased subscription prices, and reduced user choice within the iOS environment. The case illustrates the hybrid nature of Article 102 TFEU, bridging exploitative and exclusionary theories of harm in two-sided digital markets. It also highlights structural features such as network …

Table Of Contents

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

Table of Contents

Yars 19(33)

Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies

YARS Vol. 19(33)