What Iron Pipefittings Can Teach Us About Public and Private Power in the Market
VOLUME 91

Sandeep Vaheesan

In this Article, the author examines the current debate on whether state and local regulations that impede emerging players (like Airbnb, Tesla, or Uber) serve the public interest. Vaheesan argues that this focus on government restraints implicitly discounts private efforts to create closed markets—whether it is, for example, by Amazon, Comcast, or Google. This Article goes on to demonstrate, through the example of a recent Federal Trade Commission decision on the monopolization of the domestic iron pipe fittings industry, that sometimes it is only through public intervention that competition can be maintained against private forces seeking to do away with it.

Full article available here.