#price-gouging-investigation

#price-gouging-investigation

"We appealed and appealed and lost every appeal. And then the case was ultimately dismissed."

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan stated that T-Mobile's 'Save Over $1,000' campaign constituted false advertising, likely causing irreparable harm to Verizon. He emphasized that truthful advertising serves the public interest.

The lawsuit alleges that both companies have 'steered skiers and snowboarders into expensive season-pass bundles' by making day tickets prohibitively expensive, a practice that violates antitrust laws.

Consumers increasingly rely on social-media personalities to recommend products and signal what to buy, avoid, and trust. This relationship rests on a fragile premise: that influencer opinions reflect genuine experience, not undisclosed commercial orchestration. While early regulatory attention focused on covert product promotion, a parallel practice has quietly taken hold. Brands are now deploying influencers to undermine competitors by casting doubt or discouraging purchase under the guise of independent opinion.

Grocery delivery firm Instacart has agreed to pay massive refunds after federal regulators exposed billing practices that have been draining customers' wallets for years. Instacart will hand over $60 million in customer refunds following a Federal Trade Commission settlement, marking one of the largest consumer protection payouts in the delivery industry's history. The San Francisco-based company allegedly misled millions of customers about "free delivery" while secretly charging mandatory service fees that can inflate orders by up to 15%, the FTC revealed.

The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad tech company. This ad tech company packages all the information they can gather about you into a "bid request" and broadcasts it to of potential advertisers.

The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve "forces" game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms. It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they've bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially "locking in" users to continue making purchases there.

Eligible consumers may receive the money in different ways: some will get paper checks mailed to the address linked to their Amazon account, while others will receive refunds through digital payment services, with amounts reflecting the disputed Prime fees. The FTC encourages people to act promptly once a payment arrives, since checks typically carry a limited window before they expire. Digital transfers may need to be accepted by a set deadline.

The crunch moment in Google's antitrust battles with the Justice Department over its ad tech stack looms ever closer, with Justice Leonie Brinkema expected to issue her remedies ruling by the close of Q1. While these deliberations take place in the chambers of a courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia, developments elsewhere underscore the political undercurrents at play, namely the push to limit Big Tech's power.

But for many hotels, visibility-and sometimes survival-comes at the expense of profits. That dynamic is now at the heart of Beijing's antitrust probe. Regulators allege Trip.com is abusing its market position, with analysts citing deflation across the sector as the government's main concern. Interviews with lodging operators, industry groups and travel consultants describe a system where constant price-cutting and opaque policies are eroding profitability, even as demand rebounds.

The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it will appeal the November ruling in favor of Meta in its antitrust case against the social media giant. The FTC said it continues to allege that, for more than a decade, Meta Platforms Inc. has "illegally maintained a monopoly" in social networking through anticompetitive conduct "by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp."

Walmart's slogan may be "Save Money, Live Better," but as a series of social media posts have revealed, the corporation has been overcharging shoppers for meat via rampant mislabelling. Customers have discovered that the weights listed on some of Walmart's meat packages are incorrect, and these weight discrepancies could indicate fraudulent overpricing and deceptive tactics to get customers to pay more for less food.

Gail Slater, the top antitrust enforcer at the Justice Department, announced Thursday that she has left her post, just weeks before the agency's next major tech monopoly trial against entertainment giant Live Nation is set to begin. "It is with great sadness and abiding hope that I leave my role as AAG for Antitrust today," Slater posted from her personal X account. Slater thanked the staff of the Antitrust Division and called the role "the honor of a lifetime." In a statement, Attorney General Pam Bondi thanked Slater for her service, but did not directly address questions about what precipitated her departure or who would take over as the acting leader of the Division.

The IRA requires drugmakers to sell selected patented drugs to the government for its Medicare Parts B & D programs at a stipulated "maximum fair price". If they don't agree to these prices, then they face tax penalties on sales of the drug exceeding their profits from it, or the exclusion of all their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid purchases. This would foreclose access to up to 160 million patients, accounting for around 40% of US prescription drug spending or 20% of global prescription drug spending.