"Never Seen Anything Like It:" The Biggest Month in Antitrust in 50 Years
"Never Seen Anything Like It:" The Biggest Month in Antitrust in 50 Years
The Google trial, an Amazon complaint, an attack on a private equity roll-up, a giant meat price-fixing suit, going after pharma cheating, and populist GOP antitrust nominations. Astonishing.
Big if true, those corpos need more than a slap on the wrist.
I don't think its going far but I like the direction?
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There is also smaller stuff, the behind-the-scenes institutional changes, like funding levels for antitrust enforcers and newly populist conservative nominees for regulatory agencies that could make a more assertive competition agenda part of a new bipartisan consensus.
The trial has generally gone well for the government, with good evidence that Google thwarted competition from small firms (Branch Technologies) and big ones (Microsoft and Apple), using payoffs.
September 14: The Federal Trade Commission pledged criminal referrals and civil litigation for pharmaceutical executives that use a certain technique - known as ‘Orange Book fraud’ to lie about their patents and in turn block lower priced drugs.
September 21: The Federal Trade Commission, with votes from Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya, Becca Kelly Slaughter, and Lina Khan, sued a New York private equity firm and its subsidiary, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, for rolling up and monopolizing the anesthesiology market in Texas.
September 28: The Antitrust Division sues over meat price-fixing in the chicken, turkey, and poultry industry, alleging that 90% of the market is unlawfully inflated through a conspiracy run by a company called Agri Stats.
This one didn’t get a lot of notice, but it’s about a way that CVS Caremark, one of the largest pharmaceutical middlemen, ends up harming independent pharmacies by charging them excess and unpredictable fees involving Medicare prescription dispensing.
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