But its grip is loosening, thanks to some plucky foreign upstarts, a looming antitrust claim filed by a competitor and a misjudgment of the market's appetite for popular video-game slots.
What this sets up is a classic antitrust case but a very tough one to win.
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It is a novel antitrust theory, but as a lawsuit it reflects everything wrong with our politicized and anti-business government.
In 2005, a joint venture between MasterCard and Visa led to an antitrust lawsuit by a group of merchants including Sears, Wal-Mart and Safeway.
The union breathed a heavy sigh of relief in May when the American Needle case did not award a sweeping antitrust exemption for the league, a decision that would have wiped out the decertification option.
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The chaos comes at a time when the DoJ Antitrust Division is without a leader.
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As a defender, he helped IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people) ward off a long antitrust investigation, and successfully defended CBS in a libel suit brought by General William Westmoreland.
So even though a group-granted exclusive license to a single manufacturer may be subject to antitrust scrutiny, such a license is not necessarily a violation of the Sherman Act.
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The decision is a setback for U.K. antitrust authorities, who have encouraged private litigation as a way to enhance enforcement of antitrust laws, Majoras said.
Yet another factor in antitrust is whether a company is using its dominant power to discourage competition.
Senators from the antitrust subcommittee introduced a bill to cap "administrative fees" at 3% rather than abolish them.
The antitrust lawsuit is a punch in the nose, and the Internet a right cross to the temple.
Last spring, federal antitrust regulators launched a broad civil probe into whether Google has abused its dominant position in search advertising.
One thing that should be unleashed immediately is antitrust: on a local level many hospitals and doctors work as price-fixing cabals.
Years of antitrust litigation were a total waste of time: Almost every superstore has succumbed to competition from online sellers, chiefly Amazon.
While one merchant could not afford to bring an antitrust case, a group of them could do so, making it an ideal class action.
Little wonder that antitrust has become a lucrative job-creation scheme for economists, as each side hires an army of dismal scientists to prove its point.
Legally binding commitments reached in antitrust decisions play a very important role in our enforcement policy because they allow for rapid solutions to competition problems.
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The Antitrust Division is a perfect example, having experienced exponential growth in the amount of discovery and information that it receives in response to Second Requests.
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Unlike in the United States, where the Microsoft chairman faces an antitrust suit and a legion of committed enemies, in China Gates is usually taken at his word.
The antitrust suit is a companion piece to a separate securities case in the same court against the same investment banks, plus some 300 individual stock issuers over inflated postoffering prices.
Microsoft underwent its Internet epiphany and successfully clobbered Netscape, grabbing the lead in the browser market, albeit at the cost of setting in motion the biggest antitrust action for a generation.
The DOJ's antitrust division reached a settlement with Visa Monday in a suit that stated that MasterCard and Visa had adopted rules that acted to restrain merchants from encouraging customers to use cards with lower fees.
"There are definitely routes where competition will be significantly eliminated, " said Diana Moss, director of the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit group that aims to promote competition, at a March 19 Senate hearing on the American-US Airways deal.
Karel Van Miert, a Belgian who is responsible for antitrust policy, has completed a white paper on reforms to the working of competition law, and hopes to rule on a weighty list of mergers before his term is up.
Once formally agreed, Google will also avoid both a hefty antitrust fine and the kind of transatlantic regulatory assault that hobbled Microsoft for almost a decade.
The case hinged upon a fundamental concept in antitrust law: It is illegal for a company to use its domination of one market to try to take over another.
Although mergers might generate effects that are not recognized as antitrust harms, there is little chance that a merger would escape antitrust scrutiny.
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It is a cardinal principal of antitrust that the law does not turn on a firm simply because it wins by building a better mousetrap.
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Such a get-together would probably invite the attention of antitrust regulators, as would a deal with Exxon Mobil.
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