Competition Matters

The PNO handles Hart-Scott-Rodino Premerger Notification Filings for well over a thousand transactions each year. Each transaction requires the acquiring person to pay an HSR filing fee, which must be paid within two days of filing an HSR Form in order for the HSR waiting period to begin. If payment isn’t received on time, the PNO will "bounce" the filing as incomplete and delay the start of the waiting period.

The FTC has recently made some changes that will make it easier to get your HSR filing fee to the agency.  This blog provides an overview of what’s new.

Now available on the FTC website: the Bureau of Competition’s Health Care Division has posted updated versions of our three overviews of FTC enforcement actions and policy work in the health care sector undertaken across the Bureau. Together, these documents contain hundreds of pages of detailed summaries of four decades of FTC efforts to promote competition in healthcare markets – which make them invaluable resources for health care antitrust practitioners, market participants, and other stakeholders.

Look up and you just might see one: solar panels are on top of more homes and businesses than ever before. Around the country, rooftop solar is an increasingly important source of electricity. For many customers with solar panels, solar power provides most of their electricity; many even sell power back to the power company.

Once a year, the ABA Antitrust Section Spring Meeting presents the perfect occasion to take stock of the Bureau’s work. This has been an especially busy year for the Bureau of Competition, requiring extraordinary effort from our attorneys and support staff to keep up with the unprecedented litigation workload. As of today, we have multiple merger challenges in various stages of active litigation, as well as three federal court cases involving reverse patent settlements or sham litigation.

Ten years ago this month, the FTC and DOJ issued the Commentary on the Horizontal Merger Guidelines.

There is a basic but important difference between antitrust cases brought by the government and those brought by private parties: All plaintiffs, including government enforcers like the FTC, must prove an antitrust violation, which requires showing harm to competition. But private plaintiffs must make an additional showing: to establish antitrust ‘standing,’ private plaintiffs must prove that the antitrust violation caused harm to them.

Videos from the live webcast of our Jan. 19th event are now available.

Since 2004, brand-name and generic drug manufacturers have filed certain agreements with the FTC and DOJ as required by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (also known as MMA filings).

For many of us, the holiday season involves at least one loooong automobile ride. We travel over the river and through the woods in our beloved cars, our trunks stuffed with presents for family and friends. Today, the way we buy those presents and the way we buy the car that carries them look very different. While the retail landscape has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, the system of automobile sales in the United States has stayed mostly the same. Are consumers benefitting from the current distribution system for automobiles or are changes needed?