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“A Very Traditional Monopoly”: AAI Expertise Dominates the News

AAI’s Vice President for Legal Advocacy, Kathleen Brandish, delivered compelling testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Ticketmaster-Live Nation monopoly. The hearing – the first convened in the new 118th Congress – was entitled That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment.

In her testimony, Bradish drew on AAI’s substantial and highly-cited competition analysis, describing Ticketmaster-Live Nation as a “very traditional monopoly” that dominates the supply chain – limiting competition and hurting artists, consumers, and market innovation. She urged the DOJ to take a new enforcement action that seeks effective structural remedies, through, for example, Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

Bradish also focused on policy solutions to address the Ticketmaster monopoly, including strong antitrust enforcement, legislation to enhance and clarify U.S. antitrust laws, and potential “rules of the road” to increase ticketing transparency.

Following the hearing, AAI President Diana Moss, along with Bradish, were called upon to offer more insight and analysis on the Ticketmaster monopoly by media outlets across the United States and abroad.  AAI’s legal, economic, and policy expertise was clearly in high demand. Here’s a small sample from across the international media landscape of what AAI had to say on this critical consumer issue. 

AAI on CNN

AAI on CNBC

AAI on Good Morning America

AAI on NBC News

AAI featured in Bloomberg

AAI in Vox

AAI in the Intercept

AAI in the Globe Echo World News 

AAI on Marketplace

AAI on PBS NewsHour

AAI on NewsNation

You can watch opening testimony from AAI’s Kathleen Bradish here (courtesy of Forbes Breaking News).

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AAI’s Diana Moss Featured in CNN Reporting on New Thinking by DOJ on Antitrust Enforcement

AAI President Diana Moss was recently featured in new CNN reporting about fresh thinking and new approaches to antitrust enforcement at the U.S. Department of Justice. CNN reporter Brian Fung’s report “The US government is still trying to find ways to regulate Big Tech” focuses on novel approaches top antitrust officials at DOJ might take to tackle anticompetitive practices by Big Tech.

The CNN report explores whether DOJ might be entering a new era of antitrust enforcement. While it may be premature to answer that bigger question, Dr. Moss offered the perspective that recent challenges to mergers by DOJ have “beefed up the powers of antitrust enforcers, who can now vigorously pursue other cases where anticompetitive behavior may arguably harm workers.”

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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 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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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.”