Author: Aaron Gott
My morning routine usually begins with reading the news to keep up on current events. As an antitrust lawyer, I often find myself thinking about how stories that were deemed newsworthy for other reasons fail to recognize their often most troubling aspects: the antitrust concerns.
Last week, for example, the news was abuzz with Uber and Lyft drivers going “on strike” to protest their compensation from the companies. The drivers “banded together” in an effort to pressure the companies. Most might see this as a sort of unionization of the gig economy. But I saw it as an antitrust problem: ride referral drivers are independent contractors, so they are not, under well-established federal law, entitled to the union labor exemption from the antitrust laws. They are horizontal competitors who are agreeing to restrain trade. That sort of conduct is called a group boycott, and under these circumstances, it might be per se illegal under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.