Reviving an Epithet: A New Way Forward for the Essential Facilities Doctrine

Tracing its origins back nearly a century, the essential facilities doctrine requires the sharing of a natural monopoly asset that serves as a necessary input in another market. Failure to share such an asset can invite antitrust liability. The doctrine rests on two basic premises: first, a natural monopolist in one market should not be permitted to deny access to the critical facility to foreclose rivals in adjacent markets; second, the more radical remedy of dividing the facility among multiple owners, while mitigating the threat of monopoly leveraging, could sacrifice important efficiencies. This duty-to-deal, whereby the owner of an essential facility must share it with all comers, is a narrow exception to the longestablished antitrust rule that firms have no general obligation to share their assets with rivals. Notwithstanding its vintage, the doctrine has received sharp criticism in recent decades. In Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, the Supreme Court stated in dictum that the forced sharing of assets may conflict with the broader goal of the antitrust laws. The late Phillip Areeda, coauthor of the leading antitrust treatise, described the doctrine as “an epithet in need of limiting principles.” Others have been equally critical of its economic purpose. Nevertheless, some scholars continue to defend the doctrine as being economically rational and practically useful in this century

Accommodating Capital and Policing Labor: Antitrust in the Two Gilded Ages

In enacting the antitrust laws, Congress sought to prevent big businesses from maintaining and augmenting their power through collusion, mergers, and exclusionary and predatory practices and also aimed to preserve the ability of workers to act in concert. At times, the antitrust laws have benefited ordinary Americans. Antitrust achievements include the restructuring of the oil industry in 1911, the creation of competitive market structures in the mid-twentieth century, and the termination of AT&T’s telecommunications monopoly in 1984. Yet, the history of antitrust in the United States is not one of uninterrupted successes. Over two forty-year periods, the executive branch and federal courts, in enforcing and interpreting the antitrust laws, have failed to advance Congress’s vision and indeed inverted congressional intent. During the original and current Gilded Ages, the antitrust laws were and are used to protect the power of large-scale business and also to limit the autonomy of workers to organize and demand higher wages and better working conditions. Through this anti-labor application, the federal government has employed antitrust to aid big business, rather than restrain its power. Despite this history of accommodating capital and policing labor, the antitrust laws can still be reinterpreted and redeemed. Congressional, executive, and judicial action can remake these laws to control the power of large corporations and also protect the freedom of all workers to organize for higher wages and better working conditions. A renewal of antitrust, in accordance with the expressed purposes of Congress, would help remedy the inequities of the New Gilded Age and create a more just society

What Iron Pipefittings Can Teach Us About Public and Private Power in the Market

Government restrictions on competition, whether in the market for cars, hotel rooms, or taxicabs, have attracted a great deal of attention of late. As a basic matter, government is not exogenous to the market: a functioning state is, in reality, a precondition for modern markets. Because it establishes the rules necessary for markets to develop and potentially flourish, government unavoidably shapes the bounds and structures of the private economic sphere. And more specifically, public limitations on competition are not intrinsically hostile to the interests of ordinary Americans and can, in fact, advance vital social goals, such as full employment and public safety. Accounting for these considerations, governmental restraints should not be blindly condemned as harmful; rather, they should be examined on a case-by-case basis. Even aggressive newcomers with savvy public relations (such as Airbnb, Tesla, and Uber) and giddy talk of “disruption” should not lead us to denounce legal restrictions on these actors as a matter of reflex. Critically, the present focus on public restraints should not mean that private efforts to create closed markets get a free pass. In contrast to democratic public authorities, large corporations face little accountability. Dominant firms can use predatory and other exclusionary methods to maintain their long-run supremacy and prosper through exploitation of the public. Given the awesome power of monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations, antitrust enforcers and other regulators must reassert public discipline over private empires

The Morality of Monopolization Law

Congress enacted the Sherman Act in 1890 and prohibited, among other practices, monopolization. To prove monopolization, the government and other plaintiffs must show that a firm both possessed monopoly power and engaged in bad conduct. In interpreting the spare language of the statute, the courts have identified many practices that constitute monopolization, including below-cost pricing, refusals to deal with rivals, and tying. In general, however, they have failed to explain why these practices are unfair and restricted by law. Judges have instead applied labels such as anticompetitive without articulating normative foundations for their decisions. A close examination of the case law reveals that the monopolization doctrine embodies implicit notions of unfairness. Legal precedent limits businesses\u27 abilities to use their monopoly power, financial privileges, or generally prohibited conduct to acquire or perpetuate a monopoly. With its expansive unfair methods of competition authority, the FTC can codify and strengthen existing norms on unfair conduct. The FTC should specifically restrict firms\u27 abilities to use exclusive dealing and below-cost pricing and ban the use of generally prohibited practices as unfair methods of competition. By proscribing these forms of business rivalry, the FTC would encourage businesses to grow and succeed through the fair treatment of trading partners, development of new products, and investment in new plants, facilities, and technologies

Tiled fuzzy Hough transform for crack detection

Surface cracks can be the bellwether of the failure of any component under loading as it indicates the component's fracture due to stresses and usage. For this reason, crack detection is indispensable for the condition monitoring and quality control of road surfaces. Pavement images have high levels of intensity variation and texture content, hence the crack detection is difficult. Moreover, shallow cracks result in very low contrast image pixels making their detection difficult. For these reasons, studies on pavement crack detection is active even after years of research. In this paper, the fuzzy Hough transform is employed, for the first time to detect cracks on any surface. The contribution of texture pixels to the accumulator array is reduced by using the tiled version of the Hough transform. Precision values of 78% and a recall of 72% are obtaining for an image set obtained from an industrial imaging system containing very low contrast cracking. When only high contrast crack segments are considered the values move to mid to high 90%

The Contribution of the Pancha Marabu (Five Traditions) to the Development of Tamil Music

The Tamils have many unique features of their own. Among them is Tamilisai (Tamil Music). Since the Sangam period, many books have contributed to the development of Tamil and Tamil Music. In that sense, the Pancha Marabu contains much information, such as Tamil music, dance, musical instruments, etc. Accordingly, in this book, scholars have developed Tamil music through musical traditions, vachchiya traditions, nritya traditions, abhinaya traditions, and taala traditions. The book Pancha Marabu has been written in such a way as to document and educate the younger generation about how Tamil music has helped in its development. This study has been examined in terms of the introduction of the book, the period of its origin, the structure of the book, and the subdivisions. The research has been done through descriptive and historical research methodologies

Build Public Renewables, Again

A review of The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. By Brett Christophers