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   The Return

   Victoria Hislop

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Peter Brantley, May 31, 2009 (view all comments by Peter Brantley)
Free the Market is an excellent introduction to recent U.S. antitrust rulings, with a primacy on high technology, and the intellectual and political contexts in which antitrust enforcement decisions are made by the Department of Justice and the FTC. The narrative will find a welcome audience among business and information technology professionals who have an interest in antitrust and intellectual property law, as well as lawyers who practice in those areas.

As a key participant in cases with sweeping ramifications such as Lotus v. Borland and Microsoft, Gary Reback provides clear explanations of how prevailing interpretations of competition analysis and copyright and patent law framed decisions to go to court, influenced the litigators and judges making the rulings, and the submission and conduct of court appeals and reviews.

Mr. Reback’s well-organized sashay through competition factors, product distribution, patent and copyrights, monopolies and market exclusions, and mergers and acquisitions produces a text that has utility not only as history, but as a framework for understanding both present and future conflicts, intelligently arguing for a more informed and activist stance to protect public interests.

For example, I was struck with the parallels between the Thomson-West merger in case law documentation with the current Google Book Search (GBS) proposed class action settlement (at Justia: http://bit.ly/8fr5r). The merger of Thomson-West, Reback convincingly argues, came at the obvious expense of public interest, and left the inferior positioned Lexus to embark on an acquisition spree to retain a competitive market position. The resulting product arms race raised prices, restricted equal-player access to knowledge, and arguably reduced product coverage and innovation. As may be the case with GBS, which would permit Google to exploit a uniquely court-protected expansive collection of digital books (ruling expected October 2009), the sanction of a comprehensive legal documentation merger portfolio created dominant actors driving consumer lock-in to a product suite with increasing and extensive tie-ins.

Reback demonstrates how the dominant ideology driving antitrust determinations, the Chicago School, has often deprecated considerations of public impact. As a result, mergers often induce spiraling price increases, yielding dramatically negative ramifications for the public interest. Although markets with rising prices should normally spur new entrants spying the opportunity for high rents, mergers often generate barriers to entry sufficient to discourage competitors. Reback writes: “The Chicago School’s reliance on ease of entry as a cure-all for untoward market power ended up being badly misplaced. Subsequent economic research showed that, even after very large mergers, price increases are frequently insufficient to induce new entry, leaving the injury from anticompetitive mergers unremedied by the free market.”

For anyone seeking a useful, perhaps prescient, perspective on challenges in antitrust litigation and procedures, Free the Market is a vital resource.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9781591842460

Subtitle:

Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive

Author:

Reback, Gary

Author:

Reback, Gary L.

Publisher:

Portfolio

Subject:

Economics - General

Subject:

Competition

Subject:

Trade regulation

Subject:

Commerce

Subject:

Competition -- United States.

Subject:

Trade regulation -- United States.

Publication Date:

April 2009

Binding:

Hardcover

Language:

English

Pages:

416

Dimensions:

900x620x160 135

Age Level:

18-17