To: Ron who wrote (6494 ) 3/23/2018 10:15:53 AM From: Glenn Petersen 1 RecommendationRecommended By
Read Replies (1) | Respond to The link at the bottom of that article is very interesting:4. The biggest antitrust story you haven't heard about The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to side with American Express in a ruling that will make it a lot harder for companies with two-sided businesses (companies with two distinct sets of customers) to be tried for anti-competitive behavior. Why it matters: Most of the biggest tech monopolies, like Google, Facebook, etc. serve two distinct sets of customers — advertisers and everyday users. "This will set a radically-new precedent in the space and make it much more difficult to bring antitrust cases against a company serving multiple sets of users," says Lina Khan, Director of Legal Policy at the Open Markets Institute, at South by Southwest. Lina notes that the concept of two-sided company is a very slippery slope. "A whole host of companies could be defined as two-sided," she says, including traditional media companies, like newspapers. How it works: If the Supreme Court sides with American Express in Ohio v. American Express Co. anyone suing a company with a two-sided business would need to prove that the business is not just a threat to one set of customers, but that those threats in turn hurt another set of customers. A plaintiff in a hypothetical suit against a Google, for example, would need to prove that there are no offsetting benefits of dominant behaviors towards one set of customers, like users, if there's an anti-competitive action towards another, like advertisers. This would mean these companies would be subject to very high levels of burden at the very early stages of any antitrust suit. Go deeper: EU and US leaders differ on tech competition policy axios.com
