Google’s Integration of Social Content in Search is a Good Development for Consumers
In the past six months since Google’s public disclosure of its Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust investigation, much of the debate around the issue has been focused on the evolution of search–how it has changed over the past decade, how information is presented to users, and where information comes from to provide users with the very best and most useful search results. As we all well know, search engines like Google have become an incredibly powerful tool and are hardly recognizable from their old format of traditional “ten blue links.”
Today, search is smarter and more dynamic–rich with real-time content, news, images, maps and reviews. Search no longer provides users a simple [...]
Welcome to the AntitrustConnect Blog
Welcome to AntitrustConnect. At this time of new direction and change in antitrust enforcement and practice, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business is excited to sponsor this blog as a forum for analysis, commentary, and discussion of antitrust issues for lawyers and economists in the field.
There has been much discussion about the reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement with the change in administration in Washington. Whether or not one agrees that enforcement efforts at the federal antitrust agencies have been revitalized in the last 12 to 18 months, new antitrust leadership has brought change.
Shortly after being sworn in as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice An [...]
American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League
In American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League, 130 S.Ct. 2201 (2010), the Supreme Court held that the NFL acting through its incorporated subsidiary NFL Properties, Inc. (NFLP) was not a single entity but rather a combination of its 32 individual member teams for purposes of the plaintiff’s antitrust challenge to an exclusive licensing agreement. The teams had licensed their trademarks and insignia exclusively to NFLP, which then issued a single exclusive license for the production of logo-bearing caps to Reebok, thus ousting American Needle or anyone else from producing NFL caps.
The American Needle decision could conceivably rest on alternative rationales for its separate entity [...]
