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August 2013 Blog o’ Blogs

By  |  August 22, 2013

 

 
August 2013, Volume 3, Number 8
A lot of silly season stuff – Does the DOJ want Tim Cook’s job? Run an airline? And how about cloned horses, April Fool’s Day jokes taken seriously, mega-noise, rebukes from a present Commissioner to a former one, patent trolls, and our personal favorite – a fantasy enactment of how a war between Google and Apple would actually go. 
Pushing Tim Cook Aside

Creeping Tentacles of the Antitrust Octopus
You tell me how the innovative Apple of Steve Jobs’s eye can possibly thrive under such a regime.
Tim Bowdon (Voices for Reason)
DOJ Wants to Slap Apple With Antitrust Limits After Trial Verdict
Perhaps more serious over the next five years, Apple will have a government watchdog at its heels, monitoring all of its activities including how it sells products.
Wayne Rash (eWeek)
Mergers – It’s All About Timing

Merge is What Airlines Do
Blocking the American-US Airways deal is a little like closing the barn door after the horses are long gone.
Joe Nocera (NY Times)
Learning to Fly?
Is the development a breakdown in divestiture negotiations or actual DOJ concerns that could not be satisfied via divestiture?
Adam Miller (Upward Pricing Pressure)

Don Draper – your antitrust attorney is on line 2
An entrepreneurial industry that once thrived on ingenuity and originality has become increasingly corporate, bureaucratic and focused on quarterly earnings.
Steven Pearlstein (Washington Post)

Patents – Love ‘Em or Leave ‘Em

Richard Epstein: The Dangerous Adventurism of the U.S. Trade Representative
Lifting the Ban against Apple Products Unnecessarily Opens a Can of Worms in Patent Law
Richard Epstein (Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property)
The Myth of the “Patent Troll” Litigation Explosion
As with all discriminatory slurs, it’s unsurprising that this new claim about an alleged “explosion” in so-called “patent troll” lawsuits is unproven rubbish.
Adam Mossoff (Truth on the Market)

Noise & Credit Cards

Mastercard, Google, and the risks of mega-lobbying
There is always a danger that creating lots of noise will drown out a legitimate argument.
Alex Barker (Financial Times)
Canadian Competition Tribunal Rejects Antitrust Suit on Credit Card Surcharge
This indicates that merchants are not surcharging because they have to in order to cover cost, but because they see surcharging as a way of extracting rents from consumers who have a more inelastic demand for using payment cards.
Todd Zywicki (The Volokh Conspiracy)

The Silly Season

WarGames: Google vs. Apple
Introducing Slate’s totally imaginary simulation of what would happen if the world’s two great powers went to (actual) war.
Farhad Manjoo & Matthew Yglesias (Slate)
April Fools Day Hoax Triggers a DG Comp Request for Information – No Kidding
The piece explained that secret plans to expand the airport had been found in a secret chest, and that they had been drawn up by a secret Commission whose members only drank Spa water and met at restaurants specialized in fish and zinc.
Alfonso Lamadrid (Chillin’ Competition)
Rebuke to ‘unambitious’ Kroes over telecoms reform
Joaquín Almunia, the EU antitrust commissioner, expresses unusually frank criticisms about Ms Kroes’ proposals to create a single European telecoms market, arguing that while the aim is laudable the plans are too unambitious.
Daniel Thomas & James Fontanella-Khan (Financial Times)

Jury rules AQHA violated antitrust laws by barring cloned horses
Send a message to the good old boys.
Jim McBride (Lubbockonline)
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