After a long hiatus, I’m back to blogging. Thanks to all of you who sent emails. (I’m fine. It just took a while settling in after the move from NY to SF.) Many thanks to David, who has been carrying the torch for the last three months. David, you’re the man!
The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division launched a new website yesterday “to educate consumers and policymakers about the potential benefits that competition can bring to consumers of real estate brokerage services and the barriers that inhibit that competition.” The DOJ press release also states:
Among its features, the Web site includes maps identifying states with real estate laws that can inhibit competition, a calculator to help consumers tally their potential savings when brokers pursuing new business models compete for their business, and links to additional government resources.…
The Web site also explains how consumers are harmed when states forbid competition between lawyers and non-lawyers to conduct real estate closings, and when brokers tailor the rules governing local multiple listing services to exclude lower-cost rivals.
(Note: I suspect NAR will have a press release criticizing the website out later today or tomorrow. If you want to take the over - and are willing to put beer on the line - drop us an email).
The Railroad Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2007, which would repeal the legislative antitrust exemption relating to freight railroad was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. According to the Mainitowoc Herald Times Reporter:
The Senate Judiciary Committee today approved legislation sponsored by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., to repeal the obsolete antitrust exemptions protecting freight railroads from competition.These exemptions deny rail consumers antitrust protections available to consumers in virtually every other industry, Kohl said.
…
Kohl authored the Railroad Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2007 in response to concerns that freight railroads are abusing their dominant market power and raising rates for those who rely on them to ship dozens of vital commodities, including coal and agricultural products.
“Freight railroads have the luxury of being protected from the competition other industries face,” Kohl said. “They can name their price and the consumer pays. We have seen the result of this outdated policy in Wisconsin, where our utilities were forced to absorb staggering cost increases for shipping coal. This bill will bring scrutiny to freight railroads and encourage competition in this highly consolidated industry.”
I suspect that this is legislation would have Antitrust Modernization Commission approval.
We’ve gotten some complaints about our old Captcha (the “anti spam word”) from bona fide humans, so we modified our little (not-) Turing test. We are now using recaptcha. What’s cool about recaptcha is that every time you enter an “anti spam word,” you are doing a public service! Currently, there are number of efforts underway to scan and make accessible books that were written before the digital age. The bulk of that work is done by OCR software, but as every litigator knows, OCR software sucks still has room for improvement. Whenever the OCR software used by the Internet Archive’s book scanning project can’t read a word, it farms out the image to the recaptcha pool, which in turn sends it out to participating websites. Please let us know if the new system works better.
Technorati Tags: andmin
On Monday, the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Cavaliers allege:
that Ticketmaster violates federal antitrust law by preventing the Cavs from using Flash Seats, a Web service designed to let season ticketholders resell and transfer tickets to other fans. … At issue is an item in Ticketmaster’s contract with the Cavs requiring season ticketholders who want to resell their seats to use Ticketmaster’s own resale operation, TicketExchange. Earlier this month, Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against the Cavs and Flash Seats in federal court in California to defend that obligation. Ticketmaster has sold Cavs tickets on the primary market since 1993. … Flash Seats, meanwhile, claims that Ticketmaster is keeping it from expanding. Sam Gerace, chief executive of the Cleveland-based company - closely affiliated with the Cavs through some common ownership - said Flash Seats has attempted to sell its services to other sports teams, only to be blocked by existing contracts with Ticketmaster.
Antitrust Review has a wonderful disclaimer. There is always a link to it in the upper right hand corner. As we have not mentioned it for several months, this seems like a good time to reprint it:
(1) Posts on this website reflect only the author’s personal opinion, not that of his or her law firm, university, partners, associates, colleagues, friends, family, pets … you get the idea: the author is speaking as a private person, nerdy and passionate enough to read and write about antitrust in his or her spare time. (2) Neither posts nor comments reflect the views of other contributors to the Antitrust Review, the author’s past, present, or future employers, or institutions with which the author is, has been, and will or will not be affiliated. In other words, if you disagree with what author X posted on this site, don’t blame me for it unless I happen to be X. (3) Nothing on this website is legal advice, and nothing (as in absolutely, totally, unqualifiedly, and 100% vacuum-grade nothing) will create an attorney-client relationship between you, the reader, and any of the authors or commenters. (4) None of the authors are advertising anything. Read (1) above. This is a personal website. Let me repeat that: We are not trying to sell you anything, nor are we representing anything to you. (5) If there is anything on this site that you feel is inappropriate, wrong, stupid, misguided, embarrassing and would like us to remove, let us know. We’re reasonable people who just happen to be sufficiently passionate about antitrust to want to share our enthusiasm and thoughts with the world. We are not looking for trouble, especially not from you.
I finally got around to implementing the following features:
I don’t know about you, but I love public transportation. Not necessarily for ideological reasons only, but also because I got stuck once too often in a car trying to go crosstown in Manhattan at the wrong time (which seems to be pretty much anytime). HopStop makes using public transportation even easier. In fact, HopStop must be one of the coolest, most useful day-to-day travel service inventions ever. Meeting at a law firm that’s not across the street? Going to a function at some obscure venue? Trying to get to DOJ, FTC, or your State AG? HopStop gives you subway and walking directions, even with a 360 degree panoramic view for the directionally challenged. Awesome. The service is available for NY, SF, DC, Boston, and Chicago.
Technorati Tags: hopstop, getting around, public transportation
We apologize for the spotty performance of The Antitrust Review this morning. Our ISP informs us that
Currently, there is a problem with your host server which may affect temporarily the performance of your website. Our administrators are aware of the issue and are investigating the problem. They work as quickly as possible together with the technicians from our data center to restore the service back to normal. We will keep you updated on the progress of our work by posting regular messages in the Server Status Check section. … We will do everything possible to quickly restore service.
Please drop us an email if you continue to have issues this afternoon.
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Check out the Sidebar for this long overdue feature update.
Reacting to competition from the newly renamed Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog, Antitrust Review will be changing its name to: antitrustandsexymodelsreview.com.
HT: Volokh Conspiracy.
Blawg Review, in lieu of a Blawg Review this week, has handed out the 2006 Blawg Review Awards - and Antitrust Review is honored to have received an award this year. We’d like to thank our agent …
UPDATE (Hanno): Let’s do this properly … FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: The Antitrust Review picked up a 50% share in the Group Blog by Lawyers in a Law Firm Market, and a dominating 100% market share in the critical Group Blog by Antitrust Lawyers in a Law Firm Market. Given that brand recognition is the most significant entry barrier in the legal blogging industry, the Antitrust Review is well positioned to leverage its position into adjacent markets. We have our eyes on the “Blog by a Practicing Attorney” and on the “Legal Specialty Blog” markets. To that end, we will continue to pursue our active, passive-aggressive defensive acquisition strategy, to lock up key inputs which will put our competitors at a significant disadvantage. The ensuing consolidation will have a disciplining effect on the industry, in which the remaining responsible participants will enjoy a rising tide to lift all boats.
The Antitrust Review has been subject to a massive comment spam attack over the last couple of days, which threatened to overwhelm our server. For now, comments are disabled. If you like to post a comment, please email it to antitrustreview@gmail.com. Also, we noticed that online casino spammers spoofed our domain (along with hundreds of others). So if you get an email from this domain, we didn’t send it. In fact, to avoid the problem altogether we disabled the email server for this domain and moved all Antitrust Review related email to the Gmail account. Sorry for the inconvenience.
It’s August. It’s hot. And it seems like everyone is on vacation. So we’re going to spend some time over the next few weeks making some minor adjustments to the site. Some of the adjustments are the result of our internal deliberations (at least that’s what I prefer to call late night “inspiration” after a few drinks) and some are the result of reader suggestions. Along those lines, if you have any suggestions (such as the one we recently received about adding a tool that would increase the article text size (like on the top of this page, for example)), we’d love to hear them.
We’re still going to be posting but you may notice some changes, particularly to the sidebar. With luck, none of our changes should interfere with your ability to view the site. If it does, please email us.
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