National View: Klobuchar s antitrust bill ignorant of today s big-tech economy duluthnewstribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from duluthnewstribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The most important feature is the proposed change to the legal standard by which regulators approve business deals. It would allow the government to stop any deal that creates an “appreciable risk of materially lessening competition,” and it also defines exclusionary behavior as, “conduct that materially disadvantages one or more actual or potential competitors.”
These may sound like simple, semantic tweaks, but – much like some of the other policy ideas currently circulating – they would upend decades of settled law and create a sea change in U.S. antitrust enforcement. This change could undermine business dynamism, innovation and investment in ways that inhibit the global competitiveness of U.S. businesses.
Significant Changes to the Antitrust Laws May Be Coming | Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP jdsupra.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jdsupra.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sec. 2: Findings and Purposes
Congress finds that:
Competition results in higher-quality goods and services;
Competition fosters small business growth, reduces economic inequality and spurs innovation;
Market power in the U.S. is substantial and growing;
Market power makes it difficult for people to start their own business, depresses wages and increases income inequality;
Market concentration contributes to the concentration of political power;
Anticompetitive effects include higher prices, lower quality, lessened choice, reduced innovation, foreclosure of competitors and entry barriers;
Monopsony power allows a firm to force suppliers to accept below-market prices or force workers to accept below-market wages;
Horizontal and vertical consolidation and conglomerate mergers have potential to increase market power and cause anticompetitive harm;
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The bill would increase and shift the burden for many merger reviews, introduce new categories of prohibited conduct, and undo important common law defenses to single-firm conduct.
On February 4, 2021, Senator Amy Klobuchar, the incoming chair of the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee, presented a sweeping antitrust reform bill, named the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021 (CALERA).
This Client Alert provides an overview of CALERA and its likely impact if it were to pass as currently presented.
Please see full Alert below for more information.