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More inside anti-trust baseball |
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Today's Gray Lady weighs in on Obamaite anti-trust policy now that its reporter got an advance briefing on DoJ heavy Christine Varney's upcoming speeches this week. And it's P1 at that (access journalism, anyone?).
Point is, the speechifying will be still more evidence that the move at Google we wrote about last week was no one-off. UPDATE: The article is also prescient in noting that the Obama team may be coordinating with tough-as-nails folks at the EU. And sure enough, Intel is about to get hammered by them, which makes you wonder what's in store at home. (Look for a folo-up story on the home page today.)
Still, the Times didn't do a very good job of explaining the substance of the dispute between the Bush DoJ and the FTC at the end of last year. As I also wrote about, this involved "single firm" action, in which predatory activities by individual companies, as opposed to, say, mergers, are taken on by the trust busters. Essentially, the DoJ said everyone should forget about it. And even the Bush-appointed FTC found that too lax.
But that doesn't mean that collusion and other "multi firm" actions besides mergers won't also rank high on the newbies' to-do list. Look out strategic alliances like the one that FedEx and DHL inked not long (natch) before Obama took office (sorry, no link, will try to update).
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