Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Weiser, Philip J. --- "Rethinking Merger Remedies: Toward a Harmonization of Regulatory Oversight with Antitrust Merger Review" [2009] ELECD 567; in Lévêque, François; Shelanski, Howard (eds), "Antitrust and Regulation in the EU and US" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Antitrust and Regulation in the EU and US

Editor(s): Lévêque, François; Shelanski, Howard

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847207616

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Rethinking Merger Remedies: Toward a Harmonization of Regulatory Oversight with Antitrust Merger Review

Author(s): Weiser, Philip J.

Number of pages: 32

Extract:

5. Rethinking merger remedies: toward
a harmonization of regulatory
oversight with antitrust merger
review
Philip J. Weiser*

The debate concerning merger review in regulated industries often starts
with the claim that regulatory agencies provide little or no added benefit
to the review conducted by competition authorities. In the US telecom-
munications context, Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a former Commissioner
on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has called for an end
to regulatory oversight of mergers between telecommunications provid-
ers, developing his critique in a number of his separate statements while
he served on the Commission and, most recently, in testimony to the US
Antitrust Modernization Commission (Furchtgott-Roth, 2005). In so
doing, he amplified the criticism offered by a number of commentators,
former FCC officials, and practitioners, all of whom bemoan the FCC's
lack of a clear competition policy standard, penchant for imposing condi-
tions unrelated to the merger itself, and tendency to delay the ultimate
approval of the transaction (Barkow and Huber 2000; Tramont 2000;
Russell and Wolson 2002).
Over the last decade, the FCC has vacillated in its approach to merger
review. One constant is that, except for the very rare case, it does not
bar two firms from merging on competition policy grounds (FCC 2002).
Rather, it generally imposes conditions on the merger. In the worst of
cases, the agency, as former Chairman Powell once criticized, "places harm
on one side of the scale and then collects and places any hodgepodge of
conditions no matter how ill- ...