This hasn't been decided yet.
If 10 companies uses ACME CO's proprietary funded algorithm for price discovery, are those 10 companies commiting price fixing or not?
They never explicitly chatted with each other to use ACME Co, yet they all profit from ACME Co's singular results.
Is this price fixing or not? We don't legally know yet.
Wikipedia had a blurb on algorithmic tacit collusion was previously noted:
>A few years ago, two companies were selling a textbook called The Making of a Fly. One of those sellers used an algorithm which essentially matched its rival’s price. That rival had an algorithm which always set a price 27% higher than the first. The result was that prices kept spiralling upwards, until finally someone noticed what was going on, and adjusted the price manually. By that time, the book was selling – or rather, not selling – for 23 million dollars a copy.
>The book "The Making of a Fly" by Peter Anthony Lawrence, written in 1992, briefly achieved a price of $23,698,655.93 on Amazon in 2011.[25] An OECD Competition Committee Roundtable "Algorithms and Collusion" took place in June 2017 in order to address the risk of possible anti-competitive behaviour by algorithms.[26]
> The software company actively "polices" landlords to ensure that they comply with the rent cost it generates, the lawsuit alleges. Failure to impose the RealPage rents could lead to landlords being expelled from the organization, according to the suit.
In a common sense, dictionary usage of the phrase, it is absolutely coordination.
It’s just openly and obviously collusion.
Antitrust enforcement in this country has completely collapsed for a generation and the plain meaning of laws has been ignored a lot. It’s pretty clear that’s what they’ve been counting on here.
Might work we’ll see.