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An Interview with AAI’s Diana Moss on the Ticketmaster Debacle

AAI President Diana Moss was recently interviewed at length by Vulture magazine reporter Justin Curto about the ongoing pain Ticketmaster’s monopoly creates for music fans and consumers generally.

As the article, “What Would Breaking Up Ticketmaster and Live Nation Actually Do?” notes, the AAI has been focused on Ticketmaster for years — long before its merger with Live Nation made matters even worse of consumers.

“Dr. Diana Moss has been advocating for the companies’ breakup for years. As president of the American Antitrust Institute, she has had her eye on Ticketmaster since before the merger — when it already occupied an outsize share of the ticketing market…The AAI loudly criticized the merger and has called for a remedy following reports that Live Nation coerced venues into using Ticketmaster, which the Department of Justice later corroborated. Now, Moss says, Swift fans’ issues with Ticketmaster’s online platform during the presale are just a symptom of an obvious competition issue.”

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AAI’s Diana Moss Discusses Healthcare Consolidation at the American Medical Association’s 2023 State Advocacy Summit

Diana Moss is joining healthcare competition experts at the American Medical Association’s 2023 State Advocacy Summit on Friday, January 13, to explore antitrust enforcement and competition policy in healthcare. The panel, moderated by Henry Allen, also features AAI Advisors Tom Greaney and Barak Richman. The panel aims to answer the question: “Competition and Antitrust Policy: What’s Going On?” Here’s how summit organizers describe it:

“The waves of health care integration have mostly failed. Cities like Pittsburgh, Boston, and San Francisco are controlled by just one or two dominant multihospital systems. These systems drive up health care costs and marginalize physicians who want to remain independent. What can be done about this? Is the physician union a promising response to tensions within large hospital systems? Seventy-five percent of MSA health insurance markets are highly concentrated. Typically, health insurers face little competition when purchasing the services of physicians. How can antitrust better protect physicians? In this session, leading experts on competition policy and antitrust in health care will offer their thoughts on the questions above and provide recommendations for competition and health care management policy.”

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AAI Talks Live Nation-Ticketmaster Monopoly on PBS NewsHour and CNN This Morning, Says U.S. Needs Strong Antitrust Enforcement to Restore Competition for Music Fans and Artists

AAI President Diana Moss appeared this week on PBS NewsHour and CNN This Morning to discuss the Taylor Swift ticketing debacle. She explained that it is symptomatic of the harms wrought by the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly since the merger in 2010. She explained how the company’s practices harm competition in concert promotion/venue markets, and in event ticketing. Consumers and artists pay the price with little to no choice, high ticket fees, and stifled innovation. Moss noted the need for a two-pronged solution–antitrust enforcement action to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster to restore competition in live events and legislative efforts to establish the “rules of the road” on ticketing transparency and transferability. AAI’s resources and competition advocacy on competition in live events can be found here.

Watch the CNN clip below

 

Watch the PBS clip below

 

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FTC Commissioners Cite AAI Study on Private Equity in Healthcare in Support of Merger Action

On June 13, 2002, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan, joined by Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro M. Bedoya released a Statement in the matter of JAB Consumer Fund/Sage Veterinary Partners, a proposed acquisition of a veterinary practice group by a JAB, a private equity fund. The FTC determined the proposed acquisition would be anticompetitive and proposed an order allowing the transaction to proceed, but only with divestitures and with additional conditions to “establish key safeguards against future dealmaking that may also prove unlawful.” In particular, the proposed order would require JAB to seek advanced approval from the FTC for any acquisitions of veterinary practices within 25 miles of existing JAB facilities in three states and to provide advance notice for all veterinary acquisitions within 25 miles of a practice nationwide that is owned by JAB.  The statement explains that the provisions “allow the FTC to better address stealth roll-ups by private equity firms like JAB/NVA….” Citing AAI’s pathbreaking May 2021 joint report with the Petris Center, Soaring Private Equity in the Healthcare Sector: Consolidation Accelerated, Competition Undermined, and Patients at Risk, the Commissioners noted that “[a] focus on short-term profits in the health care context can incentivize practices that may reduce quality of care, increase costs for patients and payors, and generate appalling patient outcomes.” In line with the recommendations in the AAI/Petris report, the Commissioners state: “Strategic use of prior notice and prior approval provisions is one way that the Commission can better track and prevent unlawful acquisitions by private equity firms and other corporations.”

 

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AAI’s Moss Talks Artificial Intelligence and Agriculture With the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

In a May 23, 2022 article, Who hacked the slaughterhouse? When robots and AI take over farms, Diana Moss highlighted how data and digital farming factor into competition issues involving agriculture and cropping systems. From the article:

…Still, even farmers with access to digitized tools are encountering problems, according to Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute. Farmers who sign technology agreements with big agricultural biotech companies often sign away their rights to the data, leading to what’s known as a “closed cropping system.”

“The closed cropping system basically says, ‘Look, you get to use Monsanto products only. Or you get to use Dow products only,’” Moss said of farmers’ choices for the proprietary seeds, chemicals, and more that go hand-in-hand with corporate data collection. “The big ag biotechs are engineering their cropping systems to be non-interoperative with rival technologies.”

Once farmers are locked into a company that holds their data, both farmers and consumers will pay higher prices, Moss said: “It contributes to a very, very fragile agricultural supply chain.”

How can the risks of automated agriculture be minimized? Advanced technology in agriculture is not inherently bad and is poised to deliver benefits. That said, problems arise when humans fail to predict and prevent the unintended consequences of its use.

“Much like in the digital tech sector with Facebook, Amazon, and Google, it’s all about having just a few or a single dominant player with really strong incentives to use data to control competition, to the detriment of growers and consumers,” Moss said. “Merger control and strong antitrust enforcement is really the starting point for controlling all of this.”

 

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Financial Times Reports on Increasing Antitrust Attention on Private Equity, Citing AAI Report on Competition Concerns from Private Equity in Healthcare

The May 23, 2022 Financial Times story, Private Equity Moves into the Antitrust Spotlight, cites AAI’s report on private equity in healthcare. In June, AAI in collaboration with the University of California at Berkeley Petris Center, released a pathbreaking study of the competition impacts of surging private equity investment in healthcare. The report urged lawmakers and enforcers to increase their scrutiny of private equity companies’ moves into healthcare, including evasion of antitrust scrutiny and their roll-up and buy-and-build strategies that threaten to consolidate markets and decrease competition. The Financial Times article reports on the recent moves from the United States Department of Justice to do just that.

From the FT article:

“Laura Alexander at the American Antitrust Institute said private equity firms have been ‘talented at finding regulatory cracks . . . they are particularly adept at exploiting reporting thresholds and reporting requirements for antitrust review.’”

Full Article Provided Here

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Law360 Highlights AAI Analysis in Reporting on Latest Rash of Airline Merger Proposals

Law360 focused on AAI’s analysis of the Spirit-Frontier merger is its latest reporting on airline mergers. The article Biden Antitrust Efforts May Trip Up JetBlue’s Spirit Bid discusses AAI’s work, as follows:

The American Antitrust Institute, which already raised concerns that the proposed Frontier-Spirit merger would eliminate competition, said a potential JetBlue-Spirit combination raises similar concerns.

“Higher concentration on city-pairs raises concerns about effects on fares, ancillary fees and service quality,” AAI President Diana L. Moss said. “Also, much like Spirit-Frontier, a Spirit-JetBlue merger would raise questions about benefits that could be squeezed from the merger. They have very different business models — Spirit is ‘ultra low fares’ and JetBlue is just ‘low fares’ — and combining them raises questions about what types of benefits they could legitimately claim, and the probability that the combined airline could actually deliver on those benefits.”

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NYT Highlights AAI Opposition to Spirit-Frontier Merger, Cites AAI Work on Dubious Benefits From Past Airline Mergers

The April 8, 2022 New York Times story Bidding War for Spirit Could Undercut Power of Four Big Airlines cites AAI’s opposition to the proposed merger of Spirit and Frontier. Last week, AAI sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice explaining why the proposed merger would likely harm consumers through higher fares, ancillary fees, and lower quality. The letter also explains why any promised benefits from the merger should be viewed skeptically by enforcers. The NYT article cites AAI research on the how past airline mergers have had difficulty in delivering promised benefits. The 2013 report Delivering the Benefits? Efficiencies and Airline Mergers has been cited widely over the last several years.

From the NYT article:

“Diana Moss, the president of the American Antitrust Institute, a left-leaning organization that has long called for tougher enforcement of competition laws, has asked the Justice Department to block the Spirit-Frontier deal. Ms. Moss and others published a study in 2013 that concluded that airlines don’t deliver on the benefits they claim their mergers will provide.”

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Moss Tells Energy Intelligence That Antitrust Isn’t a Good Policy Tool for Combatting Energy Price Gouging

 
Energy Intelligence
Friday, Apr 1, 2022
Emily Meredith
 
On Apr. 6, executives from six oil companies will face questions from US lawmakers over high energy prices — and what, exactly, they plan to do about it.
 
Washington officials for months have accused the oil industry of price gouging as the market tightened, but the ability to directly act on those allegations is limited.
 
House Rep. Frank Pallone (D-New Jersey), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, alleged “the oil industry has not taken all actions within its power to lower domestic gasoline prices and alleviate Americans’ pain at the pump” in his letter asking executives to testify.
 
Representatives from BP, Chevron, Devon Energy, Exxon Mobil, Pioneer Natural Resources and Shell all plan to testify.
 
Political accusations of price gouging when energy prices are high are nothing new in Washington, on either side of the aisle. Both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush called for investigations into gouging when prices rose during their respective presidencies.
 
Gray Area
 
One problem for policymakers trying to rein in rapidly increasing fuel prices is that there is not a uniform definition of “gouging,” experts say.
 
“You can’t really define price gouging without, in essence, establishing a ceiling for price,” says Jeffrey Oliver, an antitrust attorney specializing in energy issues at the firm Baker Botts. “Nobody wants to be instituting a price ceiling in a market that looks competitive.”
 
That can complicate the task for regulators tasked with investigating alleged gouging. Congress directed the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with investigating oil companies and service stations for possible gouging in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when gasoline prices spiked to $3.05 per gallon.
 
That equates to about $4.35/gal today — roughly in line with prices that are currently causing consternation.
 
That investigation found several instances of sudden gasoline price increases, but concluded that those were caused by regional and local market trends.
 
“Market trends” are also how companies defend themselves, said Diana Moss, the president of the American Antitrust Institute.
 
“Companies that engage in price gouging will almost always defend such actions on the basis of shortages or disruptions,” said Moss.
 
The FTC, in its report on Hurricane Katrina, warned Congress off creating a price gouging statute, saying it was difficult to differentiate between gougers and companies “reacting in an economically rational manner to the temporary gasoline shortages.”
 
Maintaining Diversity
 
The FTC does have other tools to reach for, including blocking mergers it believes could lead to higher prices. Just last week, the commission said a merger between oil producers EnCap Energy and EP Energy Corp. could lead to higher prices for waxy crude for Salt Lake City refiners.
 
That’s not an attempt to deal with gouging, Moss said. But it is an effort to keep higher oil prices at bay in a market with fewer players. The FTC has also blocked a handful of mergers of companies with retail gasoline and diesel stations in the last year over concerns that the mergers would leave too few players in certain markets.
 
The FTC can “find ways to be aggressive and investigate,” Oliver said.
 
Hitting Profits
 
The problem for oil companies is that the high oil prices that lead to high profits come at the expense of consumers, who are having a harder time paying bills. That puts industry in the crosshairs.
 
Policymakers — particularly Democrats — are hitting out at those higher profits and say they should be deployed toward increased oil production that would eventually bring prices down for consumers.
 
“For US oil companies that are recording their largest profits in years, they have a choice,” US President Joe Biden said Thursday. “One, they can put those profits to productive use by producing more oil, restarting idle wells, or producing on the sites they already are leasing.”
 
“Or they can, as some of them are doing, exploit the situation: sit back, ship those profits to their investors.”
 
Biden is proposing new legislation that would curb executives’ ability to benefit from the stock buybacks used to return capital to shareholders. Separately, progressive lawmakers have proposed a new tax on windfall profits for the industry, but its not clear that any new taxes or financial controls could be passed in a divided Congress

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AAI and Americans for Financial Reform Awarded Grant to Study Private Equity and Competition

The Economic Security Project Antimonopoly Fund has awarded a grant to AAI and Americans for Financial Reform to study the impact of private equity funds on competition in the health care sector. 

This research will build on path breaking work that both organizations have done to explore and highlight private equity funds’ influence on concentration, quality, and prices in health care. Vice President of Policy, Laura Alexander, will lead this project for AAI.