The Department of Justice is reported to have arrived at a settlement in lieu of antitrust litigation with LucasFilms and Pixar similar to settlements recently reached with Adobe, Apple., Google, Intel, and Intuit. These companies had previously agreed between themselves agree to refrain from the “anti-competitive practices” of cold calling each other’s employees or giving their own employees a counter offer that is more valuable than the competing company’s offer and they further agree to notify each other when making an offer to an employee of the other company.
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It’s hard enough to make a case for the prudence, let alone justice of anti-trust laws when the product or service at issue is something non-trivial like oil or rail services, etc. (And by “hard enough,” I mean impossible.) But digital film animation? Especially in what is almost certainly the Golden Age of film animation and, absent DoJ interference, a robustly competitive business?
For that matter, if I didn’t know that the Department of Justice is a vigilant and disinterested protector of the work force and the consumer against the rapacious greed of these heartless behemoth corporations, I might suspect that agreeing to cease these particular “anti-competitive” practices actually serves the interests of LucasFilms and Pixar to the detriment of their employees and, arguably, the viewing public.
Nah, that couldn’t be. Could it?
UPDATE: Well, it could, but in this case it isn’t. See comment by Creon Critic below. I remain of the opinion that antitrust actions against the likes of Pixar and LucasFilms is per se absurd, but at least it isn’t absurd in the way I obviously misread the story originally. My apologies.
It things like that that lead me to think that while there are theoretical merits to having anti-trust law, in practice I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.
Though the policy wonk in me wonders if there isn’t a better way to do it. If I were in a position to reform anti-trust law I’d re-arrange it to focus on contestability rather than concentration. It really doesn’t matter how many or few firms are in the market, so long as it’s relatively easy for new firms are able to enter.Report
Very true! How many markets exist in a virtual monopoly because government has limited the playing field. The Institute for Justice has tons of cases like that.Report
Oh come on! What is the point of being an extremely talented technical professional if you can’t get two or more companies into a bidding war over your services?! That is half the fun of doing all the hard work (math classes, science classes, programming classes, make work, grunt work, practice work that will never amount to anything except to hone your abilities, etc. (see, a parenthetical expression!)) to become an extremely talented technical professional.
This regulation needs to expand and cover the legal profession & the financial sectors. Betcha it evaporates pretty quick then.Report
I really don’t understand your take on this, several tech companies colluded to suppress the wages of employees and the DoJ intervened (FT). What is the problem?Report
You’re absolutely correct. I grotesquely misread the story to which I originally linked and, although I could not open your linked Financial Times report (registration failed), here is the DoJ press release.
I will make appropriate edits above.
Thanks.Report
Exactly. It’s not as if they employed professional athletes.Report
Makes for an interesting pursuit: If we remove antitrust laws from the non-essential matter of cartoon production, then perhaps we can remove it also from the less-essential matter of baseball?Report
Baseball is one of the few sports that doesn’t collude to limit their employees’ compensation.Report