Compelled interoperability can be a useful judicial or statutory remedy for dominant firms, including digital platforms with significant market power in a product or service. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.
Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability”...
Nascent tech acquisitions have been the subject of renewed regulatory and antitrust scrutiny in recent years. These acquisitions can often be very small—hundreds of tech deals have occurred in the past decade below the current reporting threshold of $101 million—and the current merger review process of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) often fails to capture the harms unique to these early-stage deals. This Note argues that the FTC should...
Introduction In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, the Supreme Court held that consumers who allegedly paid too much for apps sold on Apple’s App Store because of an antitrust violation could sue Apple for damages because they were “direct purchasers.” The decision sidesteps most of the bizarre complexities that have resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1977 […]
Antitrust courts often confront “mixed” conduct that has two contrasting effects, one harmful and the other beneficial. For example, a nationwide agreement not to pay college football players harms the players while benefiting fans of amateur sports. An important tool for analyzing mixed conduct is to compare the action to a hypothesized alternative and to ask whether the alternative action is “less restrictive” and hence less harmful....
In antitrust law, the state action doctrine allows states to take regulatory actions that would otherwise result in violations of the federal antitrust laws. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has not always provided clear guidance in its state action jurisprudence, and lower courts have expressed frustration with this doctrinally confusing area of antitrust law. There is confusion among the lower courts over the relationship between state...
In a historical moment defined by massive economic and political inequality, legal scholars are exploring ways that law can contribute to the project of building a more equal society. Central to this effort is the attempt to design laws that enable the poor and working class to organize and build power with which they can countervail the influence of corporations and the wealthy. Previous work has identified ways in which law can, in fact, enable...
In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reconfigured the administrative state in line with a particular version of Article II. According to the Court’s scheme, known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” all of the government’s operations must be housed under one of three branches, with the head of the executive branch shouldering unique and personal responsibility for the administration of federal law.
Guiding the...
We analyze whether non-shareholder constituencies are better protected with internal corporate law reform or with external regulation. We reply to Professor Aneil Kovvali’s article, Stark Choices for Corporate Reform, that criticizes some of our previous output, in which we warned that a stakeholderist corporate law reform would stymie efforts to achieve effective stakeholder protections with external regulation. In his article, Kovvali...
Recent technological developments related to the extraction and processing of data have given rise to concerns about a reduction of privacy in the workplace. For many low-income and subordinated racial minority workforces in the United States, however, on-the-job data collection and algorithmic decisionmaking systems are having a more profound yet overlooked impact: These technologies are fundamentally altering the experience of labor and undermining...
Gig workers constitute an ever-increasing share of the American workforce, yet they are not afforded the rights to strike and bargain collectively under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) due to their independent contractor status. Independent contractors who attempt to act collectively face antitrust liability, whereas employees who are covered by the NLRA enjoy an antitrust exemption for the same collective action, known as the “labor...