Google, Yahoo!, Apple Targeted In DoJ Antitrust Probe

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the Washington Post: "The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation's largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review. The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The sources said the review includes other tech companies and is 'industry-wide.' By agreeing not to hire away top talent, the companies could be stifling competition and trying to maintain their market power unfairly, antitrust experts said. ... Obama's antitrust chief at the Justice Department, Christine Varney, has said she plans to look at the network effects of high-tech companies and how their grasp on markets has cut out competitors and hurt consumers."

Re:Good

[harryandthehenderson]

Hopefully these actions will lead to the outlawing of vaguely wide-ranging NDAs which state that employees may not work for "competitors" for X years after leaving their companies.

Why would it? That has absolutely nothing to do with what this probe is about. Secondly, such non-compete contracts are already illegal in California which already covers Google, Apple, Yahoo! and Genetech already.

Re:Seriously?

[harryandthehenderson]

Seriously neither Google nor Yahoo! are anything close to a monopoly.

Nothing in this article was talking about any of the four listed companies being a monopoly. This was about collusive behavior to not recruit away talent from each other.

Re:Apparently the Obama administration doesn't

[harryandthehenderson]

Oh I don't know [arstechnica.com] He has been doing favors for all his supporters, Like those car Dealerships whom supported him somehow manage to stay open.

Nice red herring, but it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that teh whole uproar over Sotomayor was based on a single ruling out of all of her years in the federal judiciary. One ruling hardly justifies being called "pro-RIAA".

But if you want to keep Diluting yourself into "hope and change" then don't mind me, go right ahead.

Except I never voted for Obama and have disagreed with almost everything he's done. Doesn't mean I won't still correct people who are spreading nonsense.

Re:Apparently the Obama administration doesn't

[poetmatt]

You are looking at the wrong statistics. The most profitable dealers have remained open. It's not about performance, it's about profitability on both ends. Those two are not necessarily tied together. You can be a poor performer and there are tons of ways to make excess additional amounts per sale to the manufacturer, and this is in fact quite common at dealerships that have lower volume of sales.

Re:Apparently the Obama administration doesn't

[bledri]

How is this a troll? Sure a link pointing out one of the reasons it's a red herring [fivethirtyeight.com] would have been nice but I don't see how it's a troll.

It's monopsony by collusion

[Animats]

It's an illegal restraint of trade under US antitrust law. It's not "monopoly", which is sell-side, it's "monopsony", which is buy-side.

Farmers classically face monopsony situations. This was much worse when most farm products moved only by rail. When there was only one buyer with a rail loading facility in an area, farmers were really screwed. That's why there are so many farmer's cooperatives in the US, and USDA efforts to control monopsonies. For what it was like before that, see "A Deal In Wheat" [gutenberg.org], from 1903.

Re:antitrust, et al.

[chiguy]

This agreement negatively affects employees because they are not made aware of opportunities for 20% pay raises or other benefits from a large group of major companies. This artificially keeps wages and benefits low for people in the colluding companies.

The very common scenario would be: someone is quite happy working at Google developing AJAX and is not actively looking to switch jobs but does have their resume on job boards. Yahoo wants to find an AJAX expert and is willing to pay 50% more for the expertise to catch up with Google quickly.

Yahoo is unable to contact this expert.

This pretty clearly hurts the employee.

Yes, the employee could troll the job boards, but why do you want to force the employee to do the work when head hunters are paid to find them? I bet you're a Republican.