Last week, the federal district court in San Francisco ruled that Bazaarvoice Inc.’s June 2012 acquisition of PowerReviews Inc. violated Sec. 7 of the Clayton Act. In a “necessarily lengthy Opinion,” the court concluded that the Department of Justice Antitrust Division prevailed in the liability phase of its case against the leading provider of online Ratings…
A number of decisions of various national courts have dealt with the issue of whether a competition law dispute may be referred to arbitration. Although the case law tends to favour a positive answer, it is still an issue that is being continuously brought up in litigation as an easy way out of arbitration clauses….
On November 12, 2013, the European Commission published a summary of its December 20, 2012 decision (the “Decision”) accepting commitments offered by members of the Thomson Reuters group (“Thomson Reuters”). The Decision ended a three-year-long investigation that began in October 2009 into Thomson Reuters’ alleged abuse of a dominant position in a market defined as…
Say you built a better mousetrap, the world beat a path to your door and now you have a high share of the mousetrap market. Let’s further assume that your customers find “the cost of switching [to another mousetrap] prohibitive” through no actions of yours. What else must you do to be accused of entering…
Effective December 16, 2013, Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) coverage of exclusive licenses of patents will change. As HSR practitioners know well, the Federal Trade Commission’s Premerger Notification Office (PNO) has long-interpreted HSR to cover exclusive licenses as a reportable acquisition (assuming all other requirements are met) if the licensor did not retain any rights to “make, use…
On 5 December, the European Commission published a package of measures to reduce the administrative burden of EU merger control, which will apply as of 1 January 2014. The package extends the scope of the simplified procedure for non-problematic cases. This means that more transactions may be notified using the Short Form CO, which will…
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…
