Antitrust Lawyer Blog Commentary on Current Developments

Articles Tagged with ticketmaster

On August 27, 2019, two U.S. senators asked the DOJ to investigate the state of competition in the ticketing business, and to extend the DOJ’s consent agreement with Live Nation Entertainment (“Live Nation”), the industry giant that owns Ticketmaster.

Background

In a letter to Makan Delrahim, the head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) described the ticket industry as “broken” and they lamented the “exorbitant fees and inadequate disclosures” in the ticket buying process.

On November 16, 2017, Makan Delrahim, recently confirmed as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), delivered a speech on the relationship between antitrust as law enforcement and his goal of reducing regulation.

Delrahim explained that effective antitrust enforcement lessens the need for market regulations and that behavioral commitments imposing restrictions on the conduct of the merged firm represents a form of government regulation and oversight on what should preferably be a free market.

Criticizing the early Obama administration for entering into several behavioral consent decrees that allowed illegal vertical mergers such as Comcast/NBCU, Google/ITA, and LiveNation/TicketMaster to proceed, Delrahim said there is bipartisan agreement that behavioral conditions have been inadequate. He shares the same skepticism that John Kwoka, a law professor and economist who previously served in various capacities at the Federal Trade Commission, Antitrust Division, and Federal Communications Commission, and American Antitrust Institute (AAI) President Diana Moss have about using regulatory solutions to address antitrust violations.  Specifically, Delrahim agrees with them that “allowing the merger and then requiring the merged firm to ignore the incentives inherent in its integrated structure is both paradoxical and likely difficult to achieve.”

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