When tickets first went on sale for her highly anticipated Eras Tour in November 2022, fans agonized over hours-long queues and frozen screens before Ticketmaster’s website ultimately crashed.
Ticketmaster’s failure to adequately prepare for that onslaught of demand by underinvesting in the customer purchase experience might have constituted an abuse of its market power, some economists pointed out.
“The Justice Department should have never cleared the [Live Nation-Ticketmaster] merger, because as a vertically integrated monopoly, they have every interest in encouraging prices and fees to go up, and there is no [one] in a position to discipline the industry, either by using an alternative promoter or ticketing agent,” said Tim Wu, a key architect of the Biden administration’s antitrust policies and a professor at Columbia Law.
Regardless of how the DOJ frames its lawsuit, it will have to show that Live Nation Entertainment has engaged in anti-competitive behavior that has stifled competition and hurt consumers by excessively raising prices or offering products of inferior quality.
Some experts, like Fiona Scott Morton, a professor at Yale School of Management and former chief economist at the DOJ’s antitrust division, think the government may have a strong case.
“Ticketmaster is pointing at the undeniable power of others to obscure its own monopolistic role in facilitating the extraordinary growth in both fees and also, to some extent, ticket prices,” Wu said.
The original article contains 1,148 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When tickets first went on sale for her highly anticipated Eras Tour in November 2022, fans agonized over hours-long queues and frozen screens before Ticketmaster’s website ultimately crashed.
Ticketmaster’s failure to adequately prepare for that onslaught of demand by underinvesting in the customer purchase experience might have constituted an abuse of its market power, some economists pointed out.
“The Justice Department should have never cleared the [Live Nation-Ticketmaster] merger, because as a vertically integrated monopoly, they have every interest in encouraging prices and fees to go up, and there is no [one] in a position to discipline the industry, either by using an alternative promoter or ticketing agent,” said Tim Wu, a key architect of the Biden administration’s antitrust policies and a professor at Columbia Law.
Regardless of how the DOJ frames its lawsuit, it will have to show that Live Nation Entertainment has engaged in anti-competitive behavior that has stifled competition and hurt consumers by excessively raising prices or offering products of inferior quality.
Some experts, like Fiona Scott Morton, a professor at Yale School of Management and former chief economist at the DOJ’s antitrust division, think the government may have a strong case.
“Ticketmaster is pointing at the undeniable power of others to obscure its own monopolistic role in facilitating the extraordinary growth in both fees and also, to some extent, ticket prices,” Wu said.
The original article contains 1,148 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!