J. GREGORY SIDAK, Founder and Chief Executive Officer

J. Gregory Sidak, founder and chief executive officer of Criterion Economics, has extensive experience integrating sophisticated economic, legal, and technical analysis to develop strategies to understand and influence public policy debates in Washington, Brussels, and other centers of government. He is an internationally recognized expert on antitrust, patents and intellectual property, mass media, network industries (telecommunications, the Internet, electricity, natural gas, transportation, and postal delivery), public utility regulation, state-owned enterprises, breach of contract, covenants not to compete, complex economic litigation, damages, injunctive relief, and constitutional protection of private property and economic activity. Sidak has been a consultant to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Republic of Mexico, and the Competition Bureau of Canada, and to some of the most respected companies in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He has testified as an expert witness in scores of proceedings before courts, regulatory commissions, international commercial arbitration panels, and committees of Congress.

Sidak has worked at the intersection of economics and law for three decades. At Stanford University, where he earned degrees in economics and law, he studied antitrust and regulation under Professor William F. Baxter in the years immediately before Baxter became head of the Antitrust Division and broke up the Bell System telephone monopoly. In 1981, Sidak became Judge Richard A. Posner’s first law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The Supreme Court first cited one of Sidak’s articles on antitrust three years later, when he was 28 years old. Since that time, Sidak has been one of the most prolific scholars on antitrust and economic regulation.

Sidak has published six books and more than 80 articles in scholarly journals and is ranked 8th among the top 1500 U.S. legal scholars by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in terms of the number of downloads of his writings. Those writings have been cited in additional decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as in decisions of the lower federal and state supreme courts (including the Microsoft antitrustdecision), state and federal regulatory commissions, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the European Commission. American jurists whose opinions have cited Sidak’s writings include Stephen Breyer, Frank Easterbrook, Douglas Ginsburg, Stephen Reinhardt, Laurence Silberman, David Souter, and Stephen Williams.

Sidak continues to dedicate substantial time to the production of rigorous scholarship that is immediately relevant to real-world problems concerning antitrust, regulation, intellectual property, and other public policies. In 2004, he co-founded the Journal of Competition Law & Economics, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Oxford University Press that has become the preeminent international journal on antitrust law. In November 2007, Sidak and Judge Robert H. Bork filed an amicus brief of antitrust scholars that successfully urged the Supreme Court to grant certiorari in Pacific Bell Telephone Co. v. linkLine Communications, Inc. to examine questions about the price squeeze theory of liability under section 2 of the Sherman Act, as well as the more fundamental question of whether the historic Alcoa monopolization decision of 1945 has been implicitly overruled by the Court’s consumer-oriented antitrust jurisprudence of the past three decades. The Antitrust Division cited Sidak twenty times in its September 2008 report Competition and Monopoly: Single-Firm Conduct Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

As an economic consultant, Sidak’s has served clients in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Disney, Exelon, Matsushita, Microsoft, National Association of Broadcasters, Newspaper Association of America, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, Panasonic, Qualcomm, the Republic of Mexico, Teléfonos de México, Telstra, United Parcel Service, Verizon, Vodafone, and VSNL (the Tata Group). Law firms with which Sidak has worked as a consultant include Allen & Overy, Arnold & Porter, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Hunton & Williams, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Linklaters, Malleson Stephen Jacques, Morrison & Foerster, Morgan Lewis, Paul Weiss, Sullivan & Cromwell, Vinson & Elkins, Wiley Rein, and WilmerHale.

Sidak’s engagements often have been the economic counterparts to a law firm’s “controversy practice,” in which an adverse development in litigation, regulation, or legislation fundamentally threatens a company’s competitive strategy or economic viability. Many of these controversies have been cases of first impression that subsequently generated landmark decisions. Sidak’s consulting engagements have included:

• liability and remedies questions in the Microsoft antitrust case
• numerous FCC and state public utilities commission dockets concerning implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996
• earlier antitrust proceedings to vacate portions of the AT&T antitrust divestiture decree
• numerous matters involving telecommunications deregulation, rate regulation, and restructuring in Europe, Asia, and Australia
• analysis of compensation owed to Cable & Wireless for the premature termination of its exclusive franchise for international calls in Hong Kong following the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China
• numerous spectrum auctions and related controversies in the United States and Europe
• a bench trial in federal court concerning a claim by Bell Atlantic for a tax refund for an investment credit in infrastructure
• a test case by U S West in the Court of Federal Claims to establish that regulated rates set by the Federal Communications Commission for unbundled network elements effected an uncompensated taking of private property
• antitrust and regulation testimony successfully opposing the proposed merger of direct broadcast satellite operators DirecTV and EchoStar
• the World Trade Organization’s arbitration of the U.S.-Mexico telecommunications dispute concerning international settlement rates for calls from the United States to Mexico
• stranded cost recovery proceedings and electricity restructurings in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and New Mexico
• the first complete acquisition of a U.S. telecommunications carrier (VoiceStream) by a foreign carrier (Deutsche Telekom)
• the European Commission’s predatory pricing case against Deutsche Post, at the time one of Europe’s largest state-owned enterprises
• many of the major telecommunications mergers in the United States since the mid-1990s
• an international arbitration in The Hague over a contractual dispute concerning obligations of India’s signatory to the Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) venture to make continuing investments in infrastructure to support the consortium’s submarine cable
• an international arbitration in London over interpretation of a covenant not to compete concerning a joint venture to provide cell phone service in eastern Europe
• the proposed merger of PECO Energy and PSEG
• competitive and regulatory implications of the WorldCom fraud and bankruptcy
• a fraud action against Salomon Smith Barney initiated by the largest individual outside shareholder of WorldCom
• a study for a group of incumbent network operations and equipment manufacturers of the effect of infrastructure competition on the rate of broadband penetration in Europe
• regulation of mobile termination rates
• analysis for several European incumbent telecommunications operators of regulators’ proposals to mandate the structural or functional separation of network operations from network services
• analysis of proposals to mandate “network neutrality” regulation of the Internet
• legislative and regulatory proceedings that changed the antitrust and regulatory scrutiny of the U.S. Postal Service, the largest state-owned enterprise in the United States
• a jury trial in California state court concerning an alleged tie-in by a local operating company of AT&T
• analysis of “patent holdup” and related antitrust issues in standards setting organizations (SSOs) in high-technology industries
• the implications upon remand of the Stores Block Decision by the Supreme Court of Canada concerning the private property rights of a public utility
• patent infringement and patent abuse proceedings in various international fora

In addition to performing these and other consulting engagements, Sidak served from 2002 to 2004 as a member of the U.S. Advisory Board for NTT DoCoMo, briefing the chairman and senior management on emerging regulatory and antitrust trends relevant to Japan’s largest wireless telecommunications company.

Sidak has made presentations on antitrust or regulatory matters to principals and staff at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, DG Competition, DG Information and Society, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Ofcom (United Kingdom), New York Attorney General, House Commerce Committee, Cofitel (Mexico), the Mexican Congress, the Mexican Ministry of Communications and Transport, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

From 1992 through 2005, Sidak was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), where he directed AEI’s Studies in Telecommunications Deregulation and held the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Chair in Law and Economics. From 1993 to 1999, Sidak was a Senior Lecturer at the Yale School of Management, where he taught courses on telecommunications regulation with Dean Paul W. MacAvoy. From 2005 to 2007, Sidak was a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he taught courses on antitrust law and telecommunications regulation.

Sidak has served in the federal government as both an economist and a lawyer. He was Deputy General Counsel of the Federal Communications Commission from 1987 to 1989, and Senior Counsel and Economist to the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President from 1986 to 1987. After leaving government, Sidak worked as an attorney in private practice with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. on antitrust cases and federal administrative, legislative, and appellate matters concerning telecommunications and other regulated industries. Early in his career, Sidak worked as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and as attorney with O’Melveny & Myers.

Sidak’s most influential books are Deregulatory Takings and the Regulatory Contract: The Competitive Transformation of Network Industries in the United States (Cambridge University Press 1997), with Daniel F. Spulber, and Toward Competition in Local Telephony (MIT Press 1994), with William J. Baumol. The Supreme Court has cited both books. His scholarly writings have appeared in many journals, including the American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, Columbia Law Review, Journal of Political Economy, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. His essays have appeared in many newspapers and business periodicals, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Sidak is frequently interviewed and quoted by newspapers, magazines, and news organizations such as the Asahi Shinbum, the BBC, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, Fox News, Forbes, La Reforma (Mexico City), the Los Angeles Times, the Mainichi newspapers, MSNBC, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Nihon Keizai Shinbum (the Nikkei), NPR’s All Things Considered, the Sankei Shinbum, and the Wall Street Journal.

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