In a September 22, 2022 article, Breaking Down The DOJ’s American-JetBlue Antitrust Trial, Law360 cited AAI’s longstanding concerns over high concentration in domestic passenger air service and the emergence of joint ventures as a workaround to further mergers. From the article:
Diana L. Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, said this case is an “important inflection point in domestic commercial passenger aviation,” particularly when air carriers have increasingly turned to airline joint venture agreements as a strategy to maintain or expand their positions in a heavily consolidated market.
“Further proposed airline JV agreements can be expected, so the outcome of the government’s case in the NEA matter is important,” Moss said. “Further, the NEA is only one type of airline JV on a broader spectrum of JV coordination. Some of those involve coordination with full immunization from the antitrust laws and raise similar, if not more severe, competition concerns. The outcome of the NEA case should therefore affect how the DOJ and DOT think about these other types of airline JVs.”
