Antitrust

October 16, 2020 0

It’s Time to Break Up Big Tech

(Source)   Introduction Amazon obtained a place in the popular psyche that has far surpassed its principal market function as an online retailer and entertainment provider. The conventional wisdom was that Amazon operated much like the major industrial powerhouses at the turn of the last century—standard oil, railroads, and steel—and thus warranted the same basic sort of legal treatment that its ancestor monopolies received. Perhaps the laws would have to be updated somewhat, but the idea was that Amazon had justly achieved its privileged position in society through free and fair competition in the marketplace. Jeff Bezos was predestined to be next in the line of a venerable lineage of American entrepreneurs whose spiritedness and ingenuity entitled them the rarefied perches they occupy in public life. In short, Bezos’s outsized influence in society today, a consequence of his unprecedented wealth (now upwards of two hundred billion dollars), has enabled him to lobby lawmakers for exceptionally lenient policies—skirting oversight of his company’s adverse working conditions and slyly evading a number of pesky environmental issues—for a handsome return payment deposited in the coffers of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.  From one point of view, to deny Bezos of his wealth and fame [read more]
March 17, 2018 0

Antitrust Scrutiny of Vertical Mergers Under the Trump Administration

The business world welcomed the Trump administration with open arms, believing it would usher in a new era of unprecedented growth by disposing of many of the barriers implemented during the Obama Administration, such as Net Neutrality. During his first week in office, President Trump signed Executive Order 13771, which requires federal agencies to cut two existing regulations for every new regulation they enforce. Since the implementation of the executive order, deregulation has ensued, the market has improved, and growth has been steady. One area where this pro-business approach has not been observed uniformly is that of vertical mergers in the cable industry. Most famously, the Department of Justice  (DOJ) sued to block the $85 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner back in November, and the case is headed for an early trial in March. The ruling in this case will be largely influential in the cable industry, as more distributors and programmers of content are merging in order to stay competitive with the relatively new threat of streaming services. The merger between AT&T and Time Warner is a vertical merger—a merger between two companies that operate at different stages of the production process for a specific finished product. [read more]
February 5, 2018 0

Fair Play for Minor League Baseball

People are often quick to criticize professional athletes for the amount of money they make. And within the world of professional sports, baseball players often make more money than their peers in other professional sports. Some of the reasons for this, as some have pointed out, are that Major League Baseball (MLB) has no salary cap, the MLB has a strong players’ union, and sports agents wield a tremendous amount of power. Compared to other major American sports, Major League Baseball also cultivates talent in a unique way. In the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL), professional teams typically recruit players from college. In the National Hockey League (NHL), there are minor league teams, but there are numerous leagues, and individual teams do not have contractual control over all players on the team. In baseball, however, virtually the only way that a player reaches the MLB is by progressing through Minor League Baseball (MiLB). MLB teams typically exercise control over 3-5 MiLB teams, and the MiLB teams have contractual control over all of their players. This level of control has led to unequal bargaining power that teams have over their players, which has not only resulted [read more]
October 20, 2017 0

America’s Favorite National Pastime: 7th Circuit Upholds Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption

Although baseball’s popularity has waned in recent years, the sport remains unique from any other professional sports league in that it is exempt from the scrutiny of federal antitrust laws. While other leagues have attempted to gain a similar exemption, and have consistently been unsuccessful, baseball has managed to maintain the exemption for close to a century. Recently, the 7th Circuit upheld this exemption in Right Field Rooftops LLC et al. v. Chicago Baseball Holdings LLC. The decision begs the question: isn’t it time for baseball’s undeserved, outdated exemption to be overturned? The exemption was originally granted to the sport in a 1922 Supreme Court decision called Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League, in which the Court ruled that federal antitrust laws did not apply to baseball because only interstate commerce was subject to federal antitrust scrutiny, and such “exhibitions” were not interstate commerce. Over thirty years later, in a 1953 decision called Toolson v. New York Yankees, the Supreme Court declined to overturn Federal Baseball, reasoning that the league had “been left for thirty years to develop, on the understanding that it was not subject to antitrust legislation” and that Congress, not the courts, should decide whether [read more]

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