Just need a response for the 2 separate post below

Post 1

The Bundeskartellamt in Germany filed an antitrust lawsuit with Facebook, stating user and licensing terms breached the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) data protection law principles and consent. Their stance is that the law states that the end user must have a genuine or free choice to make personal decisions in regard to their private and proprietary information and therefore breached the governmental competition law in the principle of exploitive abuse, whether intentional or non-intentional (Carugati et al., 2023).

Bullet Points

• The article proposes new rationale to assist with solving the dilemma of antitrust laws and proposes a new way of resolving antitrust cases related to privacy uses and concerns.
• The article describes both economies of scale and scope in regard to data collection led to data-driven network effects subdivided into trial-and-error effects, the scope of data effects, and spillover effects. The author suggests that platforms use data from various services to learn about an individual end-user in order to resolve the anti-trust dilemma by proposing a new approach of managing analytical framework (Carugati et al., 2023).
• The article demonstrates a coordinated participative approach with competition and non-competition regulators and stakeholders to address competition and privacy concerns with tailored remedies to what is necessary without eliminating pro-privacy effects (Carugati et al., 2023).

Post 2

• A group of employers and policy holders of Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) brought forward the antitrust claims in 2012. The most recent update was August 9th, 2022, ruling that Blue Cross Blue Shield insurers had to pay $2.67 billion and change how they were competing with other insurance carriers.
• The chief complaint that caused the antitrust claim was that BCBS, held exclusive rights within certain territories, acting like a cartel, trying to divvy up markets and avoid competing amongst one another and therefore causing inflated customer cost.
• The settlement works to ensure that competition will increase moving forward and loosen rules that had limited Blue insurer's ability to compete for businesses of large national employers.
• I also found a new antitrust suit that is recent and still in the process against BCBS from doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers due to requiring that specific fields of expertise are declined employment or accept being paid below market rate (Walsh, 2022).

When I think of BCBS, of which is my current insurance provider, it reminds me of enrolling in benefits, and the different options available, United health care and Aetna are the primary ones T-Mobile offers. Those would appear to be the competitors, but BCBS appears to be the price leader. As a manager, ways to avoid antitrust lawsuits in the future it is important to utilize being a price leader appropriately and set acceptable prices and margins in the industry. Another way to conduct business is mutual forbearance, which is respect of rivals, and influencing certain markets, both of these examples lead to tactic collusion, Peng (2023, Pg. 366 & 369). Follow trade and antitrust laws, understand regulations in place and compliance, avoid price wars, by working together with competitors.

When looking up trust busting and antitrust, claims against, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, continuously come up as big tech companies that are under review. Ultimately the issue is the companies are becoming so big and heavilrelied upon it pushes out competitors. When I think about the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, and how AT&T was denied just over a decade ago, I am curious what the future will hold. I have been an employee with T-Mobile for almost 10 years, and have seen how as they grow bigger, new fees, prices, and policies are being put into place, and personally I believe the goal is to edge out competition. I would predict in the future there could very easily be an antitrust lawsuit against T-Mobile. I don't think that trust busting, and antitrust legislation is just political tools, I believe they are a means of protecting the greater good for businesses and consumers and are necessary.