Posts Tagged: "Antitrust"

As of today, the world’s major platforms—Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance—must be in full compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), an EU regulation intended to level the playing field in the digital marketplace. Signed into law in September 2022, the DMA imposed a complex regulatory framework upon the major Internet services platforms that are deemed to be “gatekeepers” (i.e. have a market capitalization of at least €75 billion [$83 billion USD]) due to their dominant market position. These gatekeepers each market at least one “core platform service” (CPS) that connects large numbers of users and business interests.

Just about everyone bundles. It’s about as American as apple pie: if you buy more, you get a better price. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. Consumers benefit from lower prices. The question is, can bundling violate the antitrust laws? It can. So, the real question is, how do we determine when a generally good thing – bundling – should be condemned under the sledgehammer that is antitrust? In cases where usually beneficial conduct is challenged as anticompetitive, clear standards and tests are critically important so that a good thing is not stifled by uncertainty.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary yesterday held a hearing featuring Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, who has recently come under fire from the Republican-led House leadership. Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) repeatedly grilled Khan about testimony from the independent assessor for Twitter, Ernst & Young, in the Commission’s recent investigation into the social media platform, which Jordan characterized as “targeted harrassment.”

The Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer (R-KY), announced an investigation this week into accusations raised by former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Christine Wilson in her resignation against the conduct of FTC Chair Lina Khan. Wilson sent a letter to President Joe Biden in March claiming that his appointment of Khan as Chair brought “an abrupt halt” to Biden’s promised “return to normalcy” for the agency. She said that Khan “scorned and sidelined” knowledgeable career staff, in part by imposing a gag order on staff “that prevented them from engaging in consumer and business education — a vote of no confidence in our staff and a disservice to those we serve.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday affirmed a district court’s ruling dismissing antitrust and patent infringement claims brought by a pro se patent owner against Intel. Larry Golden owns a family of patents that cover a system for locking, unlocking or disabling locks on vehicles upon detection of chemical or biological hazards. Golden has also unsuccessfully sued Apple and the U.S. Government for infringement of the patents.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Attorneys General of eight U.S. states on Tuesday announced they are suing Google for antitrust violations of the Sherman Act with respect to the tech company’s monopoly on digital advertising technology. The Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia joined the suit. In a 155-page complaint filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, the DOJ and Attorneys General explained that Google “has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”

Patent laws and antitrust laws (known as competition laws or anti-competitive laws in other jurisdictions), may seem antithetical to each other at first glance. Antitrust law is concerned with ensuring the existence of a free and fair market by promoting fair competition practices and discouraging monopolies, which often stagnate business innovation. In contrast, patent law grants inventors a limited period of exclusivity in exchange for disclosing their invention- i.e., a monopoly of sorts. These opposing objectives may not, however, be quite as conflicting as they initially appear to be. Both of these laws aim to balance individual interests with the greater public interest. In the July 2022 case of Vifor International Ltd. v. CCI, we see this intersection of patent and competition laws in India. The case highlights how these laws can exist in tandem and provide relief to the aggrieved.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit agreed with a district court earlier this week that neither a settlement agreement between AbbVie and a number of generic biologics companies, nor the 132 patents owned by Abbvie covering its blockbuster drug, Humira, violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. This holding, which is significant in its own right, also has broader implications for patent-antitrust analysis.

On June 8, news reports indicated that U.S. Senators from both sides of the political aisle were confident that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee this January, has the necessary votes to pass the Senate and move on to the U.S. House of Representatives. While several top Senate lawmakers continue to argue that the bill will enact much needed antitrust enforcement mechanisms against Big Tech, the bill has several critics and has raised midterm election concerns for some Senators facing tough re-election cycles.

On February 3, during an Executive Business Meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) proposed several amendments on the markup of S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. The bill would apply existing U.S. antitrust law under the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act or the Clayton Act for enforcement actions against companies that engage in anticompetitive practices in app stores, such as requiring app developers to use a favored in-app payment system for accessing consumers through that app store.

On January 20, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary voted 16-6 to advance S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, out of committee and toward a full vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate. If passed, the bill would give the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the U.S. Attorney General and state attorneys general new powers to bring antitrust enforcement actions against major online platforms that are alleged to be engaging in discriminatory conduct by preferencing their own products and services over competing products and services that are also available on those platforms.

On Tuesday, January 11, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia denied Facebook’s motion to dismiss a complaint brought against it by the U.S.  Federal Trade Commission (FTC), holding that the FTC had stated a plausible claim for relief under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The FTC filed a complaint on December 9, 2020, asserting one count of monopoly maintenance under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Facebook moved to dismiss both this case, and a related state case. The district court dismissed the Commission’s complaint but granted the FTC the opportunity to amend. Following a leadership change from when the complaint was initially filed, the FTC filed an amended complaint in August of 2021. L

The Justice Department’s December 6, 2021 Draft Policy Statement on Licensing Negotiations and Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments (“2021 DPS”) badly misses the mark and merits a failing grade. By contrast, the 2019 PS (issued by the Justice Department, NIST, and the U.S. PTO) is eminently sound, and merits being reaffirmed. The DPS should be viewed in the context of the benefits conferred on society by patents that read on standards, commonly referred to as standard essential patents (SEPs). Given the economic importance of SEPs, public policy should encourage investment in them and ensure that they receive adequate legal protection. Such sound policies inform the New Madison Approach (NMA), publicly described by Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim in 2018.

Even as Europe and the rest of the world continued to face the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, the development of 5G and other Standard Essential Patent (SEP)-enabled technology standards has continued at an unabated pace. While the year has not yet ended, more than 100,000 technical contributions have already been submitted at 3GPP meetings for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G in 2021 – a near-record yearly contribution count. The invention and standardization of massive, complex communication technologies continues to generate significant numbers of SEPs. According to IPlytics data, the cumulative number of self-declared SEP families has surpassed 72,000 in 2021, indicating a five-fold increase in just 10 years.