A Good Start

US government pressure on antitrust has led to resignations of board members because of antitrust concerns.

The term for this interlocking directorates, and the idea is that by sharing board members, competitors can more easily collude:

Seven directors on the boards of five companies have resigned because of the U.S. Justice Department's concerns over the directors holding similar board positions at rival companies, the department said on Wednesday.

Three directors resigned from the board of IT management software company SolarWinds Corp, one because the person was on the boards of both SolarWinds and rival Dynatrace  as a representative of the private equity company Thoma Bravo. Two others representing Thoma Bravo on the SolarWinds board also resigned, the department said.

SolarWinds said in a legal filing dated Oct. 14 that the three board members had decided to resign after receiving a letter from the Justice Department alleging that their board service broke antitrust law. The filing said that they "chose to resign rather than to contest the allegations."

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The U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division said in a statement that it planned to reinvigorate enforcement of rules that do not allow people to serve on the boards of companies that compete against each other.

"Competitors sharing officers or directors further concentrates power and creates the opportunity to exchange competitively sensitive information and facilitate coordination – all to the detriment of the economy and the American public," said Jonathan Kanter, head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, in a statement.

This has been the law for nearly a century, and it's nice that it is being enforced again.

I'd like to see it enforced strongly enough private equity and similar organizations off of boards of directors.