Professor Wright mischaracterizes both the legal basis and the factual context of the FTC's Three Tenors opinion, recently affirmed by Judge Ginsburg's opinion for a unanimous panel of United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Neither opinion's legal analysis relies on...

The US patent system is a foundation of our nation's economy, encouraging innovation and growth. The exclusive right to use and license an invention provides numerous benefits to its inventor and to the broader economy. The patent system is not costless, however, and significant costs stem from...

The FTC has enjoyed great success for decades, and I address four topics here in this paper presented at the opening session of the FTC's “Hearing on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.” First, what durable success means for an agency like the FTC. Then, the vision I...

The antitrust agencies typically find customer reactions probative of the likely competitive effects of a merger. Thus, merger challenge data released by the FTC reveal that strong complaints from customers almost always lead to a government challenge. Nevertheless, some judges have been quite...

In 1979, the Supreme Court began departing from strict rule of reason/per se categorization and by 1999 the Court made clear that the rule of reason was a continuum. With the Court providing little guidance on the details of the conduct for which truncated analysis is warranted, the FTC has...

Since 1981, the FTC has attacked fraud systematically, successfully using the authority under Section 13(b) to obtain a permanent injunction “in proper cases” to freeze assets ex parte and to force disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. More recently, the Commission has asserted the authority to...

Critics from both the right and the left claim that modern antitrust doctrine, rooted in consumer welfare, is inadequate to handle the challenges of the twenty-first century economy. They express nostalgia for 1960s antitrust, when the field had no clear objectives and cases were decided on...

We are frequently asked how, during our recent tenure at the Federal Trade Commission, we came to create the National Do Not Call Registry, one of the most popular government actions ever under- taken. The answer lies in our search for an approach to regulate the exchange of consumer information...

In 1981, while in the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, two of the authors were instrumental in initiating the FTC's fraud program, relying on Section 13(b)'s authority to obtain a permanent injunction to seek equitable relief, including asset freezes and consumer redress. The fraud program...

In 2018, a large group of former antitrust enforcers and scholars wrote to the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) in charge of the Antitrust Division about the Division’s sharp departure from the long-standing, bipartisan consensus regarding standard essential patents and commitments to license...