Legal Commentary

Obama DoJ May Revive Anti-Trust Enforcement

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

I found this blog posting by Jamie Love to be very interesting — Knowledge Ecology Notes » Meeting at DOJ on the Ticketmaster /Live Nation merger — especially if its optimism turns out to be justified.

There were several interesting things that came out during the 90 minute meeting. One was that the DOJ clearly understood that the opposition to the merger would not be satisfied with a few divestitures, and this was really an up or down decision for the merger as a whole.

One early question put to us was, would consumers be better off with two vertically integrated companies, rather than one (a not too hypothetical case of TM and LN vertically integrating both promoting and ticket sales). This was not a difficult question for anyone.

My own take was the DOJ is willing to stop the merger, and is devoting resources to build a case against the merger.

This isn’t anywhere near the most important merger in history, but could be a major sign of things to come.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on March 18, 2009 (boomark / email).