Bloomberg Law Op-ed: DOJ Threatens AI Innovation and Antitrust Law in RealPage Suit
- John Reeves
- May 9
- 2 min read
Op-ed in Bloomberg Law by Committee for Justice Senior Legal Fellow and Appellate Counsel John Reeves:
Former Missouri Assistant Attorney General John Reeves says DOJ’s suit against RealPage undermines the future of artificial intelligence and erodes antitrust law by misidentifying what counts as collusion.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes’ letter demanding Attorney General Pam Bondi to protect renters from market manipulation argues the Department of Justice should intervene in the housing pricing software market—the exact opposite of what the government should do when it comes to antitrust policy.
Imploring Bondi to continue litigating a premature lawsuit the Biden administration initiated against the artificial intelligence-driven company RealPage may be well-intentioned from a political perspective, but it represents a misunderstanding of sound antitrust enforcement.
It would be a welcome development for the Trump administration to drop the case.
Pursuing the RealPage case would risk making a historic misstep that transcends the particular facts. It could effectively criminalize the use of pricing algorithms across the entire economy, stifle AI development, and cast a chilling effect over innovation across numerous economic sectors. Legal practitioners committed to the rule of law and empirical evidence must view this case with profound skepticism.
The crux of the DOJ’s complaint alleges that landlords using RealPage’s YieldStar pricing software—which uses supply and demand and other market data to recommend real-time rental pricing changes—engages in unlawful collusion to inflate apartment rents, violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The DOJ claims that such conduct represents “tacit” collusion simply because competing landlords choose to use the same software program, even though they don’t communicate with each other.
Worryingly, the RealPage lawsuit isn’t an isolated incident but part of a broader regulatory pattern targeting algorithmic pricing…
