Antitrust Group Offers Experts To Court In Review Of Mergers

ANTITRUST GROUP OFFERS EXPERTS TO COURT IN REVIEW OF MERGERS
[SOURCE: Technology Daily, AUTHOR: Sarah Lai Stirland]
A public advocacy group offered access to two experts with the potential to significantly alter a judge's actions as he considers the merits of two telecommunications mega-mergers. The American Antitrust Institute told Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that a former Clinton administration antitrust expert and a legal scholar critical of the Justice Department's antitrust settlement with Microsoft would be available for questioning for a day as Sullivan determines whether the telecom mergers -- SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI -- are in the public interest. The experts are Darren Bush, an antitrust economist and a law professor at the University of Houston, and Joseph Farrell, now a University of California professor. Farrell was previously the FCC's chief economist and deputy assistant attorney general and chief economist in Justice's antitrust division. Bush co-authored a paper that criticized a federal appeals court's interpretation of the so-called Tunney Act in the court's 2004 approval of the Microsoft deal. Several Senate Judiciary Committee members cited that paper as they moved later that year to amend the Tunney Act -- in an effort to make clear that courts should not treat reviews of antitrust settlements as merely a procedural nicety.
http://www.njtelecomupdate.com/lenya/telco/live/tb-LUWN1153165808441.html