It has taken a little longer than I expected when I first began writing about driverless cars a decade ago, but autonomous vehicles are here and will eventually be ubiquitous. USA Today recently described how Robotaxis are taking hold, while the Financial Times has reported on how driverless trucks will revolutionize freight transportation.
The social and economic changes accompanying the spread of autonomous vehicles will be profound. These shifts will also raise important legal issues, one of which — currently receiving little attention — is antitrust. For more than a century, a fundamental objective of U.S. antitrust law has been to prevent competitors from coordinating or agreeing on prices or other key features of product offerings, in order to protect consumers. Despite harsh penalties for antitrust violations, misconduct remains pervasive. The powerful temptation for some competitors to coordinate, at the expense of their customers, may be amplified as the transportation and insurance industries are reshaped by the movement to autonomous vehicles.
For example, suppliers of driverless vehicles will inevitably need to discuss technological standards, about which some agreement will be necessary to efficiently advance widespread adoption. Such cooperation is commonplace with emerging technologies and generally benefits consumers. But there undoubtedly will be opportunities for suppliers to coordinate or agree in ways that harm customers. As the U.S. Supreme Court has warned, standard setting is "rife with opportunities for anticompetitive activity."
Similarly, in the auto insurance arena, the temptation to coordinate or form agreements detrimental to customers may be significant as the industry is forced to remake itself.
Autonomous vehicles should make us safer and will dramatically alter the way we organize our lives. But antitrust regulators should keep our long-standing competition laws firmly in mind as they monitor the business arrangements and transformations leading us to this new era. At the same time, companies participating in the creation of autonomous vehicle marketplaces ought to keep their eyes on antitrust laws to avoid future litigation and exposure to liability and damages.
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