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Antitrust enforcement against anticompetitive platform most favored nations (MFN) provisions (also termed pricing parity provisions) can help protect competition in online markets. An online platform imposes a platform MFN when it requires that providers using its platform not offer their products or services at a lower price on other platforms. These contractual provisions may be employed by a variety of online platforms offering, for example, hotel and transportation bookings, consumer goods, digital goods, or handmade craft products. They have been the subject of antitrust enforcement in Europe but have drawn only limited antitrust scrutiny in the United States. Our Feature explains why MFNs employed by online platforms can harm competition by keeping prices high and discouraging the entry of new platform rivals, through both exclusionary and collusive mechanisms, notwithstanding the possibility that some MFNs may facilitate investment by limiting customer freeriding. We discuss ways by which government enforcers in the United States and private plaintiffs could potentially reach anticompetitive platform MFNs under the Sherman Act, and the litigation challenges such cases present.

Multisided platforms are ubiquitous in today's economy. Although newspapers demonstrate that the platform business model is scarcely new, recent economic analysis has explored more deeply the manner of its operation. Drawing upon these insights, we conclude that enforcers and courts should use a multiple-markets approach in which different groups of users on different sides of a platform belong in different product markets. This approach appropriately accounts for cross-market network effects without collapsing all of a platform's users into a single product market. Furthermore, we advocate the use of a separate-effects analysis, which rejects the view that anticompetitive conduct harming users on one side of a platform can be justified so long as that harm funds benefits for users on another side. Courts should consider the price structure of a platform, and not simply the net price, in assessing competitive effects. This approach in turn supports our final conclusion: that antitrust plaintiffs should not be required to prove as part of their prima facie case more than occurrence of competitive harm in a properly-defined market; thereafter, the burden to produce procompetitive justifications should shift to defendants.

A key feature of antitrust today is that the law is developed entirely through adjudication. Evidence suggests that this exclusive reliance on adjudication has failed to deliver a predictable, efficient, or participatory antitrust regime. Antitrust litigation and enforcement are protracted and expensive, requiring extensive discovery and costly expert analysis. In theory, this approach facilitates nuanced and fact-specific analysis of liability and well-tailored remedies. But in practice, the exclusive reliance on case-by-case adjudication has yielded a system of enforcement that generates ambiguity, drains resources, privileges incumbents, and deprives individuals and firms of any real opportunity to participate in the process of creating substantive antitrust rules. It is difficult to quantify this harm. This Essay argues that rulemaking under § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act should supplement antitrust adjudication, and that this institutional shift would lower enforcement costs, reduce ambiguity, and facilitate greater democratic participation. We build on existing scholarship to debunk the view that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not have competition rulemaking authority pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act conferring Chevron deference, and trace legislative history to underscore how Congress designed the FTC to play a unique institutional role. We close by outlining an initial set of factors that should weigh in favor of rulemaking: when there is significant learning from past enforcement and when private litigation would be unlikely. Finally, we pose questions in the context of the FTC's recent hearings to prompt further discussion on where this unused tool would be most useful.

America's failing antitrust system is, in large part, to blame for today's market power problem. Lax antitrust law and enforcement have allowed troubling trends like corporate consolidation to remain unchallenged, further embedding our skewed economy. In highly concentrated markets, individuals have limited choice and little power to pick their price, quality, or provider for the goods and services they need; workers are met with powerful employers and have little agency to shop around or bargain for competitive wages and benefits; and suppliers can't reach the market without paying powerful intermediaries or succumbing to acquisition. Our Essay offers an alternative to the courts' consumer welfare standard. Ambiguous and inadequate, the consumer welfare standard identifies threats to competition only by the potential consequences for consumers and ignores adverse effects on workers, suppliers, product quality, and innovation. Our effective competition standard would restore the primary aim of antitrust laws—namely, to promote competition wherever in the economy it has been compromised, including throughout supply chains and in the labor market. These changes are essential to protect competitive markets in the United States, as well as individuals and the economy at large, by deconcentrating private power.

No detailed description available for \"Data Cartels\".

This book is an effort to consolidate several different perspectives on antitrust law. First, Professor Hylton presents a detailed description of the law as it has developed through numerous judicial opinions. Second, the author presents detailed economic critiques of the judicial opinions, drawing heavily on the literature in law and economics journals. Third, Professor Hylton integrates a jurisprudential perspective into the analysis that looks at antitrust as a vibrant field of common law. This last perspective leads the author to address issues of certainty, stability, and predictability in antitrust law, and to examine the pressures shaping its evolution. The combination of these three perspectives offers something new to every student of antitrust law. Specific topics covered include perfect competition versus monopoly, enforcement, cartels, section 1 doctrine, rule of reason, agreement, boycott, power, vertical restraints, tying and exclusive dealing, horizontal mergers, and conglomerates.

Discussions about the evolution of the US antitrust system since the early 1970s often dwell upon the influence of the Chicago School in shaping substantive rules and enforcement policy. Many commentators attribute to Chicago School scholars-most notably, Judge Robert Bork-the decisive role in gaining broad acceptance for permissive standards governing mergers, vertical restraints, and dominant firm behavior. In numerous treatments, the Chicago School is seen to be the intellectual foundation for US antitrust policy, including its acceptance of a \"consumer welfare\" standard that is said to focus exclusively on efficiency considerations to the exclusion of other policy objectives.

Growing inequality, the decline in labor's share of national income, and increasing evidence of labor-market concentration and employer buyer power are all subjects of national attention, eliciting wide-ranging proposals for legal reform. Many proposals hinge on labor-market fixes and empowering workers within and beyond existing work law or through tax-and-transfer schemes. But a recent surge of interest focuses on applying antitrust law in labor markets, or \"labor antitrust.\" These proposals call for more aggressive enforcement by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as stronger legal remedies for employer collusion and unlawful monopsony that suppresses workers' wages. The turn to labor antitrust is driven in part by congressional gridlock and the collapse of labor law as a dominant source of labor market regulation, inviting regulation through other means. Labor antitrust promises an effective attack because agency discretion and judicial enforcement can police labor markets without substantial amendments to existing law, bypassing the current impasse in Congress. Further, unlike labor and employment law, labor antitrust is uniquely positioned to challenge industry-wide wage suppression: suing multiple employers is increasingly challenging in work law as a statutory, doctrinal, and procedural matter. But current labor-antitrust proposals, while fruitful, are fundamentally limited in two ways. First, echoing a broader antitrust policy crisis, they inherit and reinvigorate debates about the current consumer welfare goal of antitrust. The proposals ignore that, as a theoretical and practical matter, employers' anticompetitive conduct in labor markets does not necessarily harm consumers. As a result, workers' labor-antitrust challenges will face an uphill battle under current law: when consumers are not harmed, labor antitrust can neither effectively police employer buyer power nor fill gaps in labor market regulation left by a retreating labor law. Second, the proposals ignore real synergies between antitrust enforcement and labor regulation that could preempt the rise of employer buyer power and contain its exercise. This Essay analyzes the limitations of current labor-antitrust proposals and argues for \"regulatory sharing\" between antitrust and labor law to combat the adverse effects of employer buyer power. It makes three key contributions. First, it frames the new labor antitrust as disrupting a grand regulatory bargain, reinforced by the Chicago School, that separated labor and antitrust regulation to resolve a perceived paradox in serving two masters: workers and consumers. The dominance of the consumer welfare standard resolved that paradox. Second, it explains how scholarly attempts to invigorate labor antitrust fail to overcome this paradox and ignore theoretical and doctrinal roadblocks to maximizing both worker and consumer welfare, leaving worker-plaintiffs vulnerable to failure. Third, it proposes a novel restructuring of labor market regulation that integrates antitrust and labor law enforcement to achieve coherent and effective regulation of employer buyer power. It refocuses labor-antitrust claims on consumer welfare ends. In doing so, it also relegates worker welfare considerations to a labor law supplemented and fortified by the creation of substantive presumptions and defenses triggered by labor-antitrust findings as well as labor agency involvement in merger review.

In this paper, we discuss whether the consumer welfare (CW) standard needs to be replaced or revised in order for antitrust law to deal effectively with the economic challenges of the platform economy. We argue that both the general and platformspecific assaults on the CW standard are misguided, that the CW standard is capable of addressing the economic concerns that critics have raised, and that the proposed alternatives would make things worse—not better.

\"Horizontal shareholding\" occurs when one or more equity funds own shares of competitors operating in a concentrated product market. For example, the four largest mutual fund companies might be large shareholders of all the major United States air carriers. A growing body of empirical literature concludes that under these conditions market prices are higher than they would otherwise be. We consider how the antitrust laws might be applied to this practice, identifying a theory of harm and how it matches the law, examining the issues that courts are likely to encounter, and attempting to anticipate litigation problems. While the current literature on horizontal shareholding does not offer a single robust explanation of how the price increase mechanism works, we show that the \"effects\" test expressed in the Clayton Act does not require proof of the precise mechanism. Further, Section 7's \"solely for investment\" exception typically will not apply. We also briefly discuss special problems of private plaintiff challenges. Finally, we elaborate the two ways that efficiencies are relevant to analysis of such mergers.