Professor Shubha Ghosh recently spoke with Legal Dive on the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case against RealPage. The DOJ has sued RealPage under the Sherman Antitrust Act for deploying an algorithm that helped rental property owners turn into price-fixing collaborators.
Ghosh notes that the Supreme Court has made it clear it distinguishes between anticompetitive behavior among companies and the tools they use to reach their pricing decisions. That means the DOJ must show “a physical agreement to price-fix” to prove a Sherman Act violation.
By focusing on the rental algorithm, Ghosh says, the agency appears to be sidestepping this essential requirement and instead is “creating an inference of an agreement from the use of the algorithm. This shift would undermine traditional antitrust safeguards for competition.”