It makes no sense — and would flatly contradict the fundamental role of antitrust in constraining abuse of market power — to jettison the long-standing music industry antitrust consent decrees without an appropriate regulatory framework to replace them.
The Justice Department should not lift the antitrust decrees constraining ASCAP and BMI because nothing of legal or competitive significance in music licensing has changed.
The “retail apocalypse story” is false. The lesson from Christmas ‘17 is that Amazon is good for consumers, good for competition and, yes, good for traditional retailers. Leave it be.
The malleability of market boundaries and aggressive AI competition among online services should help rebut claims that not only Google, but Facebook and Amazon as well, are somehow illegal monopolies.
The hipster antitrust narrative about Internet “monopolies” runs headlong into the reality of fierce artificial intelligence competition among the largest tech companies in the emerging voice-controlled digital assistant space.
We should not return to an era when rivals were able to make strategic and unprincipled use of antitrust doctrine to demand special treatment to save themselves from the brutal consequences of competitive failure. America should not let antitrust itself become anticompetitive.
A five-decade consensus on the objectives of antitrust law is under threat today from the extraordinarily divisive politics of contemporary America. It took a long time and sordid episodes to get the politics out of antitrust—it would be a shame to go backwards and politicize competition policy again.
Former music and film producer Jonathan Taplin is way out of his element, merging two distinct issues into a superficial “#resistance” meme that contradicts the central tenets of U.S. antitrust law.
Disruptive innovation is not new and not unique to high-tech. It’s been around for hundreds of years and serves as a key driver of both economic growth and social evolution.
When Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility was announced in 2011, the business press focused mainly on the extension of Google’s core business from Internet search into hardware. But from a legal perspective, the treatment given the deal by competition authorities in the United States, the EU and China raises intriguing questions about the scope and objectives of merger policy in emerging technology markets.