The Antitrust Week In Review

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

House panel reschedules Big Tech CEO hearing for Wednesday.  A congressional hearing on digital marketplace competition featuring the chief executives of four of the largest American tech companies has been rescheduled for Wednesday, a House subcommittee said on Saturday.  The CEOs of Facebook, Amazon.com, Alphabet’s Google and Apple were to have testified on Monday before the House Antitrust Subcommittee. But the hearing was postponed for the lying in state at the Capitol Building of the late Representative John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement. A subcommittee announcement issued on Saturday said the session now would be held on Wednesday and that witnesses and members could appear in person or virtually.

Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition.  Microsoft is undeniably one of the Big Tech elite, given its size, wealth and stock market value. But the software giant has stood apart from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in one important respect: Microsoft, once the bully of the tech world, has escaped antitrust scrutiny so far. Now Slack Technologies, whose popular chat and collaboration software has become embedded in the daily routines of millions of workers at thousands of companies, is hoping to change that. Slack said on Wednesday that it had filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, accusing the tech giant of using its market power to try to crush the upstart rival.

U.S. Justice Dept won’t challenge COVID-related information sharing.  The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday that it would not challenge on antitrust grounds pharmaceutical companies that seek to share information about how best to manufacture a coronavirus treatment related to monoclonal antibodies. The department said in a business review letter that it would allow Eli Lilly and Co., AbCellera Biologics, Amgen Inc., AstraZeneca, Genentech and GlaxoSmithKline to share information about producing the antibody treatments needed to treat COVID-19.

Tagged in: Antitrust Enforcement, Antitrust Litigation, International Competition Issues,