A serious look at competition problems in tech markets and whether antitrust law can help address them. In recent years, the astronomical rise of tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft has been criticized as anticompetitive, and many have wondered if antitrust law can help protect workers and consumers. In Tech Monopoly, Herbert Hovenkamp explores competition problems in a wide range of high-tech firms—from those that sell purely digital products, such as video streaming, search, software, or email services, to others that sell more traditional “tactile” products, such as hardware, clothing, groceries, or rides. He offers a realistic look at the powers and limitations of antitrust law in tech markets with an assessment that is as comprehensive as it is accessible. After a general introduction to antitrust law, Tech Monopoly considers how competitive harm should be assessed in these markets, as well as some features that make these markets unique, including “two-sided” structures. Then Hovenkamp looks at the role of large digital platforms, including Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, and considers whether their size alone is an antitrust problem or if the concern should be limited to market power. Finally, the author addresses the very difficult problem of remedies. Should we “break up” big tech, and if so, how? What kind of breakup of these firms would make users or others better off? And if breakups are not the only possible antitrust fix, are there more effective and less disruptive alternatives? Offering simple explanations of the complex economics of digital platform markets, Tech Monopoly is an important read for anyone who wishes to understand how antitrust law works and whether it can help defend competition in the formidable era of big tech.
In this integration of law and economic ideas, Herbert Hovenkamp charts the evolution of the legal framework that regulated American business enterprise from the time of Andrew Jackson through the first New Deal. He reveals the interdependent relationship between economic theory and law that existed in these decades of headlong growth and examines how this relationship shaped both the modern business corporation and substantive due process. Classical economic theory--the cluster of ideas about free markets--became the guiding model for the structure and function of both private and public law. Hovenkamp explores the relationship of classical economic ideas to law in six broad areas related to enterprise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces the development of the early business corporation and maps the rise of regulated industry from the first charterbased utilities to the railroads. He argues that free market political economy provided the intellectual background for constitutional theory and helped define the limits of state and federal regulation of business behavior. The book also illustrates the unique American perspective on political economy reflected in the famous doctrine of substantive due process. Finally, Hovenkamp demonstrates the influence of economic theory on labor law and gives us a reexamination of the antitrust movement, the most explicit intersection of law and economics before the New Deal. Legal, economic, and intellectual historians and political scientists will welcome these trenchant insights on an influential period in American constitutional and corporate history.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
After thirty years, the debate over antitrust's ideology has quieted. Most now agree that the protection of consumer welfare should be the only goal of antitrust laws. Execution, however, is another matter. The rules of antitrust remain unfocused, insufficiently precise, and excessively complex. The problem of poorly designed rules is severe, because in the short run rules weigh much more heavily than principles. At bottom, antitrust is a defensible enterprise only if it can make the microeconomy work better, after accounting for the considerable costs of operating the system. The Antitrust Enterprise is the first authoritative and compact exposition of antitrust law since Robert Bork's classic The Antitrust Paradox was published more than thirty years ago. It confronts not only the problems of poorly designed, overly complex, and inconsistent antitrust rules but also the current disarray of antitrust's rule of reason, offering a coherent and workable set of solutions. The result is an antitrust policy that is faithful to the consumer welfare principle but that is also more readily manageable by the federal courts and other antitrust tribunals.
Two late Victorian ideas disrupted American legal thought: the Darwinian theory of evolution and marginalist economics. The legal thought that emerged can be called 'neoclassical', because it embodied ideas that were radically new while retaining many elements of what had gone before. Although Darwinian social science was developed earlier, in most legal disciplines outside of criminal law and race theory marginalist approaches came to dominate. This book carries these themes through a variety of legal subjects in both public and private law.
Creation without Restraint: Promoting Liberty and Rivalry in Innovation analyzes the current state of competition (antitrust) and intellectual property laws, and proposes realistic reforms that will encourage innovation. As with antitrust and a reform process that aligned injury requirements in lawsuits with the incentive to compete, this book proposes similar reforms for patent and copyright law, and considers both the uses and limitations of antitrust as a vehicle for intellectual property law reform.
The central purpose of the federal antitrust laws is to preserve competition to the extent that competitive policy has not been displaced by direct governmental regulation or exemption. Com- petition serves many ends. First and foremost, competition is thought to yield the highest output and lowest prices consistent with competitors' ability to earn minimally profitable returns to their investments. In addition, competitive processes substitute impersonal and hence more tolerable market decisions for the dic- tates of private decision makers, and for the governmental bureau- cratic controls to which unchecked private power may otherwise lead. By controlling cartels and monopolies, moreover, competi- tion limits wealth transfers from consumers to capital owners. Fur- thermore, many believe that competition disperses business assets and broadens independent entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby improving the social and political climates. Finally, competition may promote innovation, at least to an extent.
AUTHOR NEWS! Justice Department Honors Herbert Hovenkamp with Sherman Award - on July 29, 2008, The USDOJ Antitrust Division presented Professor Herbert Hovenkamp with the prestigious John Sherman Award for his lifetime contributions To The teaching and enforcement of antitrust law And The development of antitrust policy . This annual award is given for outstanding contributions To The field of antitrust law, The protection of American consumers, And The preservation of economic liberty. Hovenkamp's publications include some 70 articles, approximately 50 essays and book reviews, and a dozen books. He is the senior surviving author of Antitrust Law (formerly with Phillip Areeda & Donald Turner), which currently spans 20 volumes, and with Mark Janis and Mark Lemley, author of IP and Antitrust Law . IP and Antitrust is a 2-volume reference that focuses on the intersection of the areas of IP and antitrust . While intellectual property licensing arrangements are typically pro-competitive, antitrust concerns may nonetheless arise. Licensing arrangements raise concerns under the antitrust laws if they are likely to adversely affect the prices, quantities, qualities or varieties of goods and services -- either currently or potentially available. The Justice Department's rekindled interest in intellectual property licensing arrangements now requires that companies factor antitrust considerations into the drafting and review of intellectual property licensing arrangements. Thus, licensing agreements involving intellectual property must now be drafted with two considerations in mind: maximizing the commercial value of intellectual property rights, and minimizing antitrust risks IP and Antitrust is the first comprehensive resource that fully examines intellectual property from an antitrust perspective, To help you steer clear of unexpected problems. it provides a sophisticated discussion of intellectual property law not currently available in the antitrust treatises on the market today, including Areeda and Hovenkamp's Antitrust Law treatise.
Maximize intellectual property rights and minimize antitrust risks with the Third Edition of IP and Antitrust: An Analysis of Antitrust Principles Applied to Intellectual Property Law. While intellectual property licensing agreements are generally pro-competitive, antitrust issues can arise. Licensing arrangements raise concerns under the antitrust laws if they are likely to adversely affect the prices, quantities, qualities or varieties of goods and services available. Therefore, companies MUST factor these antitrust considerations into the drafting and review of these licensing agreements. The Third Edition of IP and Antitrust: An Analysis of Antitrust Principles Applied to Intellectual Property Law is reorganized and rewritten to address the following important topics: Exclusion payment settlements in the pharmaceutical industry Post-expiration royalties and payments Monopolization and Refusals to License Tying, Exclusive Dealing and Related Licensing Practices REMS, product hopping and manipulation of the regulatory process Package Licensing, Blanket Licenses and Block-Booking Anticompetitive Royalty Provisions Resale Price Maintenance Confidently draft and review intellectual property licensing agreements with IP and Antitrust: An Analysis of Antitrust Principles Applied to Intellectual Property Law.
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