Deere & Company (“Deere”), better known as “John Deere,” is the leading manufacturer in the North American agricultural equipment market, with market shares of approximately 53 percent of large farm tractors in North America, and 60 percent in the combine segment. Recently, Deere sent shock waves through the American farming community when it announced a new policy with the effect of locking farmers out of the software used in Deere equipment. Deere’s lockout policy prevents farmers from repairing and maintaining their own machines, as they have done for decades. This article briefly discusses how Deere’s repair policy may violate antitrust and consumer protection laws, before turning to a discussion of the potential impact of Deere’s policy on digital farming. Deere asserts that it owns data gathered from its machines’ software. We discuss how Deere may be attempting to monopolize the growing digital agriculture market by collecting, controlling and amalgamating farm data from its equipment’s software. We further discuss how Deere may be conspiring to monopolize digital farming markets through its partnerships with companies such as Bayer/Monsanto, DowDupont, and BASF.
This contribution condenses the author’s previous detailed analyses of antitrust and patent policies in global smartphone markets. The discussion comprises three elements. First, it identifies the key constituencies in the smartphone ecosystem and the role each constituency plays in the technology supply chain. Second, it describes how courts’ and regulators’ interventions in the smartphone market rest on empirically unsubstantiated theories of competitive harm while advancing the private interests of producer-firms and producer-jurisdictions in reduced technology input costs. Third, it shows how this implicit renegotiation of licensing arrangements between innovators and implementers endangers the legal infrastructure of reliable intellectual property rights and contract enforcement that has promoted robust innovation, continuous entry and rapid growth in wireless communications markets.
This paper analyses the legal measures adopted to implement Directive 2014/104/EU into Spanish law. After briefly looking at the context of private enforcement of competition law in Spain, it examines the process followed for the transposition and the issues discussed before the adoption of the Transposition Decree in May 2017. Overall, it can be affirmed that the new rules comply with the mandates of the Directive, only in a few matters there seems that there will be doubts concerning the interpretation of the new provisions. Some of the doubts may be rooted in the Directive itself (relative responsibility of co-infringers, umbrella claimants, harm to suppliers), and others in the lack of express rules in the Transposition Decree on some matters (causation, fault requirement, interests calculation), moreover it is uncertain how the new procedural tools will play out in practice as they imply a revolutionary change in our procedural rules.
Antitrust debates regarding competition in data-driven markets, particularly those dominated by digital platforms, have run headlong into issues of privacy. This was inevitable. At the heart of the platform business model is the collection and use, for commercial gain, of unfathomably large amounts of personal in-formation. Such information is the sine qua non of privacy concerns. Given their increasing power as information gate-keepers and intermediaries across swathes of the digital economy, it is barely surprising that platforms find themselves in the line of fire for modern-day privacy concerns.
A major shift toward passively managed index funds in recent years has led to the re-concentration of corporate ownership in the hands of just three large asset management firms, the Big Three: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. We propose that this trend has re-structured ownership in capital markets. Adopting a contractual view to the corporate share, we re-define share holding and suggest that the New Mandate Owners in fact hold the essence of corporate power, as their aggregated positions capture the core element of the franchise of corporate voting.
Has the antitrust arsenal run out of novel theories or weapons? Think again. Recent scholarship has come to challenge conventional wisdom with the latest target of antitrust imagination being institutional investors, including diversified index funds. New economic research suggests that common ownership of competing industrial firms by large institutional investors leads to potential anticompetitive effects in the form of increased concentration and prices that may be captured by a new generalized HHI measure and have thus far remained undetected under traditional tools and analysis. A number of mechanisms is said to support these anticompetitive effects such as voting, private engagement and compensation contracts. Reactions have been rapid and widespread. Antitrust enforcers started looking closer at certain industries as well as investigating the scope of their existing powers, while policy makers considered that this might be an area prone to future regulation. In the meantime, legal scholars have come forward with solutions to the purported antitrust problem. This essay aims to disentangle the complex issues surrounding common ownership by institutional investors, and suggest a holistic approach that brings together the corporate with the competition law aspects of the problem. Accordingly, the analysis first sheds light on the corporate governance dimensions (Part II). Next, it outlines the theories of harms that correspond to the distinct forms and levels of shareholder activism or passivity (Part III). It then revisits the existing legal and policy antitrust framework and compares the EU versus the U.S. experience (Part IV). Finally, it wraps up the discussion with some concluding remarks on the EU competition law outlook (Part V).
This case shows how private interests find their way in forming public policy. Joseph Wilson (Competition Commission of Pakistan)
But perhaps the bigger takeaway from this year is that causation of antitrust injury remains a major potential pitfall in these cases. Ankur Kapoor & Rosa M. Morales (Constantine Cannon)
It appears the Commission will likely continue to rely on its prior enforcement record, and a case-by-case development of the law, to elucidate Section 5 and, in fact, as Commissioner Ohlhausen highlights in her dissent, the lack of detailed guidance leaves the door open for Section 5 to be used more expansively in the future. Anne K. Six & John H. Lyons (Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP)
Recent international discussion on procedural fairness has recognized that fairness benefits the agencies that provide it. Paul O’Brien, Krisztian Katona, & Randolph Tritell (U.S. FTC)
Even though there have been nearly a hundred complaints over the past 16 years, to date there has yet to be any case filed, in relation to the Act, to the Court by any public attorney. Sakda Thanitcul (Chulalongkorn University)
This means that a SGEI cannot be provided at any cost and that competition limitations have to be proportionate. Aleksander Maziarz (Kozminski University)
I think there are compelling reasons for paying more attention to compliance programs, even over fundamental reforms to the statutes. It is time to make a profound paradigm-shift. Javier Tapia (Chilean Competition Tribunal)
While recognizing the possible pro-competitive effect of RPM, however, the HKCC seems to have adopted a “near per se illegal approach†toward RPM. Ping LIN (Lingnan University)
As for market participants who are regulated by these boards, the Court’s novel ruling brings both potential benefits and costs. Kenneth W. Field, Michael H. Knight, & Bevin M.B. Newman (Jones Day)
The Commission appears to have significantly lowered the intervention threshold for challenging mergers on the basis of non-coordinated effects well beyond what was originally anticipated back in 2004. Nikolaos Peristerakis, Lodewick Prompers, & Mar GarcAa (Linklaters)
The ACA is not a “free pass†to a merger challenge. Deirdre A. McEvoy & Kathrina Szymborski (Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler)
