Cite as: 504 U. S. 451 (1992)
Scalia, J., dissenting
may have had in the District Court. I would thus reverse the Ninth Circuit's judgment on the tying claim outright.
III
These considerations apply equally to respondents' § 2 claims. An antitrust defendant lacking relevant "market power" sufficient to permit invocation of the per se prohibition against tying a fortiori lacks the monopoly power that warrants heightened scrutiny of his allegedly exclusionary behavior. Without even so much as asking whether the purposes of § 2 are implicated here, the Court points to Kodak's control of "100% of the parts market and 80% to 95% of the service market," markets with "no readily available substitutes," ante, at 481, and finds that the proffer of such statistics is sufficient to fend off summary judgment. But this showing could easily be made, as I have explained, with respect to virtually any manufacturer of differentiated products requiring aftermarket support. By permitting antitrust plaintiffs to invoke § 2 simply upon the unexceptional demonstration that a manufacturer controls the supplies of its single-branded merchandise, the Court transforms § 2 from a specialized mechanism for responding to extraordinary agglomerations (or threatened agglomerations) of economic power to an all-purpose remedy against run-of-the-mill business torts.
In my view, if the interbrand market is vibrant, it is simply not necessary to enlist § 2's machinery to police a seller's intrabrand restraints. In such circumstances, the interbrand market functions as an infinitely more efficient and more precise corrective to such behavior, rewarding the seller whose intrabrand restraints enhance consumer welfare while punishing the seller whose control of the aftermarkets is viewed unfavorably by interbrand consumers. See Business Electronics Corp., supra, at 725; Continental T. V., Inc., supra, at 52, n. 19, 54. Because this case comes to us on the as-
503
Page: Index Previous 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007