If Apple’s pending appeal of last year’s ebook antitrust verdict fails, the company will have to pay $450 million in “consumer relief,” according to class-action lawyers for the plaintiffs.
America’s antitrust laws are administered by a flourishing establishment of academics, regulators, lawyers, judges, and think-tank analysts whose mission in life is to torment businessmen. Want to see how they operate? Let’s start with an academic journal article by two antitrust scholars named John Connor and Robert Lande, and see where it leads.
The European Union’s competition law is so broad, vague and oppressive that it makes America’s antitrust laws look clear by comparison. Well, not really — the American laws are horribly and incurably non-objective — but the EU’s law surely belongs in a separate ring of legal hell.
Two makers of ski equipment have caved in to threats from the Federal Trade Commission, partially surrendering their control over two important business decisions: celebrity endorsement contacts and employee hiring.
“If Steve Jobs were alive today, should he be in jail?” That’s the astonishing opener of a New York Times article attacking Jobs’s reputation posthumously.
The more you read about antitrust cases, the more you hear that the laws’ goal is to improve “consumer welfare.” And who could be against “consumer welfare”? The term’s rosy connotations seem to foreclose debate before it can begin.
When I blogged recently about a British lawyer’s proposal to make “predatory technology” into a “viable antitrust concept,” I didn’t realize how many prior attempts have been made in American courts and regulatory agencies to do just that.
The British lawyer who blogged about “predatory technology” becoming a “viable antitrust concept” has found support for the doctrine in a recent ruling by the French Competition Authority.