Introduction

On December 12, 2025, the California Law Revision Commission (the Commission) released its much anticipated Tentative Recommendation on Single Firm Conduct to the California Legislature (the Recommendation). The Recommendation offers proposed amendments to the Cartwright Act, California’s antitrust law, to include new liability for single firm conduct offenses. The Recommendation follows a multiyear review by the Commission, which included eight working groups that studied various aspects of antitrust law, including single firm conduct, with reports presented to the Commission in 2024. In connection with this process, the Commission received numerous detailed comments from stakeholders, many of which raised concerns about the potential effects of the proposed changes to California’s antitrust regime. In January of last year, the Commission began drafting proposed language to amend the Cartwright Act to cover single firm conduct, culminating in its Recommendation.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute that has been repeatedly recognized as the world’s leading think tank for science and technology policy. While ITIF commends the Commission for its extensive review of California’s antitrust laws, the Recommendation would, in several key respects, harm and upend the status quo. In particular, the Recommendation’s inclusion of a unilateral restraint of trade offense, treatment of efficiencies, de facto abandonment of the consumer welfare standard, and deviation from the federal legal rules for evaluating a variety of single firm practices risk creating an unadministrable enforcement regime that chills consumer welfare and innovation.

Read the comments. (PDF)