Most Americans don't think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should.
Antitrust law isn't about protecting competing businesses from each other, it's about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public.
Changing technologies, changing marketplaces, and even changing trends in anti-competitive practices have all presented challenges to antitrust enforcement.
Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.
The standard formulation on remedy is that it ought to cure past violations and prevent their recurrence. That's what antitrust is all about.
When I applied to law school, I wrote on my application that I wanted to do two things. One was to solve antitrust law's irregularities and problems, and the second was to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
A significant piece of the wealth that the NFL owners garner is a result of the enormous TV revenues they get - and those revenues are supported by a legislatively granted exemption from the antitrust laws that has been made applicable to sports leagues, primarily the NFL.
With less regulation, I think you would see growth come back. Of course, there are situations where you need regulation. Antitrust regulation, for example, is a good idea because you want competition. But beyond that, it gets very difficult.
Who can complain about the price that Google is charging you? Or who can complain about Amazon's prices; they are simply lower than the competition's. And that's why I think we need to shift back to a more Brandeisian conception of antitrust, where we consider values other than simply efficiency and low prices.
The testimony and the documentary evidence produced by the Government demonstrate that the Bell System had violated the antitrust laws in a number of ways over a lengthy period of time.
