ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE HUB: ALGORITHMS, COORDINATION AND THE CARTWRIGHT ACT

              In October 2025, California Assembly Bill 325 was signed into law, amending the Cartwright Act to more effectively address hub-and-spoke algorithmic price-fixing. As a growing number of companies come to rely on third-party algorithms as pricing becomes more dynamic and data-driven, antitrust law has failed to keep pace with algorithms’ capacity to facilitate coordinated pricing among competitors. Although scholars increasingly recognize the risks of algorithmic coordination, prevailing approaches continue to rely on traditional conceptions of agreement that inadequately capture how shared algorithms can generate supracompetitive prices. Under existing federal antitrust law, plaintiffs face substantial barriers in proving unlawful agreement in cases involving shared pricing algorithms, allowing potentially anticompetitive conduct to evade scrutiny.

This Note proposes a doctrinal shift that treats shared algorithmic pricing as evidence of coordinate conduct even absent explicit agreement. Drawing on two recent cases, In re RealPage, Inc. and Gibson v. Cendyn Group, LLC, it identifies key obstacles under current antitrust law and demonstrates how AB 325 mitigates them. It further argues for expanded use of both Section 2 of the Sherman Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act and advocates for federal legislation that could enable enforcement agencies to conduct algorithmic auditing. 

ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE HUB- ALGORITHMS, COORDINATION AND THE CARTWRIGHT ACT by Ryan Flanaga.

Download • 337KB