Big Data

Chapter 8

The Antitrust Laws and Big Data*

Alan D. Rutenberg, Howard W. Fogt, and Benjamin R. Dryden

8.1 Introduction

The purpose of the antitrust laws is to promote competition between market participants. The laws originally arose in the late 1800s as a response to abuses in the railroad, steel, and energy industries. Since that time, however, the antitrust laws have been steadily revisited and refined through judicial interpretation, legislative amendments, and government enforcement to better fit the needs of an evolving economy. In this way, a body of laws that arose from practices in the nineteenth-century railroad, steel, and energy industries is still used to address practices in twenty-first-century businesses, such as the use of Big ...