The Antitrust Week In Review

Here are some of the developments in antitrust news this past week that we found interesting and are following.

White House encouraged by rejection of Facebook request to dismiss antitrust lawsuit.  The White House said it was encouraged by a U.S. judge’s decision not to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. “Certainly we are encouraged by the district court’s decision”, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “We’ve been clear and he (President Joe Biden) has been clear we need more competition in the tech industry.” Facebook, now Meta Platforms, had asked Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., federal court to dismiss the lawsuit in which the government asked the court to demand that Facebook sell Instagram and WhatsApp. The judge said the FTC had a plausible case that should be allowed to proceed.

Lawsuit Says 16 Elite Colleges Are Part of Price-Fixing Cartel.  A lawsuit filed in federal court accused 16 of the nation’s leading private universities and colleges of conspiring to reduce the financial aid they award to admitted students through a price-fixing cartel. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago on behalf of five former undergraduates who attended some of the universities named in the suit, takes aim at a decades-old antitrust exemption granted to these universities for financial aid decisions and claims that the colleges have overcharged an estimated 170,000 students who were eligible for financial aid over nearly two decades. The universities accused of wrongdoing are Brown, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale.

Edited by Gary J. Malone

Tagged in: Antitrust Enforcement, Antitrust Litigation,