Antitrust Today

Fifth Circuit Rejects Jury Verdict Of Quarter Horse Conspiracy, Finding Elite Animal Registries To Be A Horse Of A Different Color

By Seth D. Greenstein A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a jury’s verdict that a horse breeding association illegally conspired with some of its members to exclude genetically cloned horses from its elite quarter horse breeding registry, holding the plaintiffs’ circumstantial evidence was insufficient to rebut an inference of independent conduct. The court in Abraham &...

Sysco May Be Selling “Fix-it-First” To Save Food Distributors’ Merger, But FTC May Not Be Buying

By Allison F. Sheedy Sysco Corp. announced a divestiture plan this week that it claims should address concerns of the Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”) about the food behemoth’s proposed acquisition of US Foods, which would combine the two largest food distributors in the United States. Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, said on Monday that it is prepared to sell 11 US Foods distribution...

Massachusetts Court Unsettles Partners’ Hospital Merger By Nixing Consent Judgment

A Massachusetts state court on Thursday derailed the settlement of a challenge to the proposed merger of Partners Health System with rivals South Shore Health and Educational Corp. (South Shore Hospital) and Hallmark Health Corp. (Lawrence Memorial Hospital and Melrose-Wakefield Hospital) by taking the unusual step of rejecting a proposed consent judgment negotiated by the state’s top antitrust enforcer. Suffolk...

The Antitrust Week in Review

Here are some of the developments in antitrust news this past week that we found interesting and are following. China Vitamin C Price-Fixing Verdict Scrutinized by Court.  Federal courts often find the extent to which U.S. antitrust laws have a global reach to be one of the thorniest issues to deal with.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is wrestling with this issue as it reviews a $147.8 million...

Baseball Antitrust Exemption Extends 93-Year Winning Streak In Federal Courts

By Nneka Ukpai Although federal courts may consider baseball’s antitrust exemption to make about as much sense as the infield fly rule, last week’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in City of San Jose v. Commissioner of Baseball shows that courts still consider themselves bound to invoke that anachronistic exemption to call antitrust plaintiffs out. According to a three-judge panel...

European Commission Announces Agreement To Cap Interchange Fees For Card-Based Payments

A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office By Yulia Tosheva and James Ashe-Taylor The European Commission has announced that the European Parliament and the European Council have reached a long-awaited political agreement on the Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on Interchange Fees for Card-based Payment Transactions. The Regulation will introduce maximum fees for four-party card schemes’...

Reasonableness Of Licensing Royalties Is On Trial As Courts And Standard-Setting Organizations Wrestle With Standard-Essential Patents

By David Golden The ongoing battle over what constitutes a “reasonable” licensing royalty for standard-essential patents has now been joined by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit with its decision in Ericsson, Inc. v. D-Link Systems, Inc., concerning the alleged infringement of patents essential to the ubiquitous Wi-Fi networking technology. This definitional battle is also being fought in...

European Commission Seeks To Stamp Out Envelope Cartel With Fines Totaling 19.48 Million Euros

A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office By Ana Rojo Prada and Richard Pike The European Commission has announced that it has imposed fines totaling 19.48 million euros on five European envelope producers for coordinating prices and allocating customers through an anticompetitive cartel. The Commission imposed fines on the five companies – Bong (of Sweden), GPV and Hamelin (both of France),...

Net Neutrality – What’s In A Name?

By Robert Schwartz

Although President Obama has endorsed a specific approach to “net neutrality” – the principle that Internet service providers should treat all data on the Internet equally – the debate over whether and how the Federal Communications Commission should enforce that principle is still raging, and may well be decided by whoever wins the battle over defining “Internet access.” In...

European Commission Hits Telecoms With Fines Of 70 Million Euros For Abusing Slovak Broadband Market

A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office By Yulia Tosheva and James Ashe-Taylor The European Commission has signalled that it is not dialing down its scrutiny of the telecommunications sector by imposing fines totalling 70 million euros on Slovak Telekom and its parent company, Deutsche Telekom. On October 15, 2014, the Commission imposed a fine of 38,838,000 euros on Slovak Telekom and Deutsche...