Economists Urge Reversal of DirecTV/NFL Antitrust Complaints Dismissal

A lower court wrongly threw out consolidated complaints from sports bars and individual DirecTV subscribers suing the MVPD and NFL over DirecTV's Sunday Ticket programming (see 1707030002), 11 academia economists told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a docket 17-56119 amicus brief (in Pacer) Monday. They said the court's separation of the vertical DirecTV/NFL agreement from the horizontal individual team owner/NFL agreement is artificial and differs from standard industrial organization concepts. They said the rights pooling by individual owners and the subsequent sale of rights to DirecTV results in output far less than what team owners could achieve in other types of broadcast contracts. Signers included Dennis Coates of University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Craig Depken of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Rodney Fort of University of Michigan, Ira Horowitz and Roger Blair of University of Florida, Leo Kahane of Providence College, Allen Sanderson of University of Chicago and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College. Counsel for the appellees didn't comment Wednesday.