In anticipation of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing next week, entitled “The FTC at 100: Where Do We Go from Here,” David Balto offers this post, discussing the important role Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act can play in the battle with patent trolls. One hundred years ago Congress created the Federal Trade…
Protecting data security is the most important consumer protection issue for the economy. Each year the Federal Trade Commission receives a flood of identity fraud complaints. Efforts to diminish the problem by noting the limits on consumer liability are just plain wrong. There are liability protections but the external costs can be overwhelming. Consumers must…
Charles Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities begins with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens’ brilliant prose could have been describing our twin antitrust enforcement agencies. This Friday the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to evaluate antitrust enforcement. After a period of inactivity, the Department of…
Wow, what a success! The Antitrust Division recently announced that its investigations in the auto parts market uncovered “separate conspiracies to fix the prices of more than 30 different products sold to US car manufacturers ….” [1] This adds to the results thus far in the investigation, with guilty pleas from 20 companies and fines…
Recently, there have been two striking cases of organisations behaving badly in a way that the outside world would think was well out of order. In the first example – the Roma Medical Aids case – it isn’t just about somebody breaking the rules. It’s about a company acting in a way that a half-decent…
Two of the most significant conferences on the antitrust calendar were held last week. Georgetown Law Center featured its Seventh Annual Global Antitrust Enforcement Symposium on September 25, and Fordham Law School’s 40th annual international antitrust law and policy conference took place on September 26 and 27. FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and William Baer, Assistant…
Attention antitrusters! I’m pleased to pass along news of interest to all lawyers and economists active in antitrust litigation: The American Antitrust Institute has instituted a new award program to recognize those each year who have made the most significant contributions in antitrust enforcement. While I don’t speak for the group, I expect the goal…
The authors are David Balto, an antitrust attorney in Washington, D.C., who was formerly a policy director of the Federal Trade Commission, attorney-adviser to Chairman Robert Pitofsky, and trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, and Hal J. Singer, Ph.D., who is a Managing Director at Navigant Economics and a Senior Fellow at the…
Cartel enforcement in Canada is heavily dependent on the use of informants. This is explained by two principal factors. First, cartel conduct is, by its very nature, secretive and carried out in the shadows of business life. Second, Canada’s Competition Bureau, which is responsible for investigating cartels, is subject to budget constraints that limit its…
Nearly 100 year ago, Congress established the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers against unfair, deceptive and anticompetitive practices. Part of the reason for its creation was to create an independent, fair and expert body to resolve complex antitrust claims, because the federal courts seemed incapable of enforcing the antitrust laws. So Congress enabled the…
