Former college football player on Supreme Court NCAA ruling, antitrust

Free subscriber-exclusive audiobook!“No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention”Get it now on Libro.fm using the button below.In a remarkable decision delivered on June 21, the Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on education-related benefits offered to college athletes by universities violated antitrust law — in essence dealing a huge blow to the model that has dominated college sports for over a century.While the ruling applies only to a narrow subset of benefits, it signals that time may be running out for some of the worst parts of the NCAA's grip on college sports.But beyond the implications for college athletics, the decision has huge implications for the US economy and America's corporate giants. Many of those teammates were Black, as noted more generally in the concurrence authored by Kavanaugh: "The student athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing."Given the revenues the NCAA rakes in, and the massive salaries paid to administrators across college athletics, applying antitrust regulation to the governing body that prevents athletes from earning income based on their likeness or athletic abilities is an obvious application of basic fairness.Dating back as far as the American Revolution, debates over the ability of businesses to gain control over markets have been a feature of this country's ideological battlegrounds.By the late 19th century, Ohio Republican Sen. John Sherman's anti-monopoly bill (focused on trusts, the legal entities that were then used to concentrate market power) passed the Senate 51-1.