Leveling the antitrust playing field

American businesses are suffering as foreign governments misuse their antitrust laws to discriminate against US-based companies. A recent report from Chamber of Commerce’s International Competition Policy Expert Group examined this problem, and Congress is now holding hearings on the topic.

Unfortunately, companies that rely on intellectual property (IP) are particularly vulnerable to abuse. As the report notes, “legitimate IP rights are often not respected for their role in incentivizing investment in innovation that can have an enormously positive long term impact on competition.”

By securing to innovators exclusive property rights to the fruits of their productive labors, intellectual property law incentivizes innovation and forms the foundation of the myriad partnerships and transactions that enable creators and innovators to commercialize their inventions. In theory, antitrust law is supposed to support the IP system by providing a fair marketplace where innovative companies thrive according to their own merit. The main thesis of the Chamber’s report, however, is that several countries are misusing their antitrust laws to pursue domestic industrial policy goals that allow the government to pick particular winners and losers.

When antitrust law is used for industrial policy goals or political favoritism, it undermines the basic premise of the IP system. Often the selected winners are cherry-picked nationals of the countries at issue. This harms innovative American companies who strive to compete in these markets based on the actual economic value of their products and IP.

Full Content: The Washington Times