Here's a new article from The New Republic released about the lawsuit situation. It talks more to an outsider looking in rather than anyone following this with some prior knowledge, so may be redundant for some, but I thought it was well written nonetheless.
https://newrepublic.com/article/175107/ ... i-fanatics
Here are a couple paragraphs I thought were worth quoting.
Not all of Fanatics’ planned innovations are necessarily friendly to collectors or customers in general, however. One of its planned changes is to more closely inject itself into the secondary market—the network of brick-and-mortar hobby stores and online marketplaces that allow collectors to easily buy and sell cards. For sports-cards and other similar trading-card communities, a producer like Panini only makes money when the cards are sold to the initial customer. Fanatics claimed in its lawsuit that its rival should have been trying to make money on subsequent trades and purchases as well.
Another proposed innovation on Fanatics’ part is to engage directly with what are known as “box breakers,” a popular and controversial new trend in the sports-card world. A “breaker” typically buys large amounts of unopened card packs and boxes and then opens them live on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Before the packs and boxes are opened, collectors can buy a portion of whatever comes out of them. The breaker then ships those cards directly to whoever wins them.
But box breaking is also uncomfortably similar to gambling. Most of a break’s participants will not break even—if they did, then the breaker would be better off opening the box themselves—and the livestreams often rely on a fear of missing out to lure in new customers. Panini has generally refused to sell products directly to breakers or incorporate them into its business model.
Fanatics, on the other hand, wants to make them a core feature of its new approach. “The emergence of breaking represents a remarkable shift in the way consumers engage with trading cards, transforming it into a shared, community experience,” the company claimed in its lawsuit. “It offers another layer of excitement to the hobby, akin to the thrill of opening a pack of cards, but amplified by the sense of anticipation shared with others.”
If Panini prevails in its lawsuit, Fanatics will have to disgorge itself of GCP and cease its alleged anticompetitive conduct. That will slow but not stop the firm from dominating the sports-card industry. (If Fanatics prevails on its claims, Panini will mainly have to pay it a lot of money.) And while sports cards are just a hobby, they may also become a textbook example of how one company can come to dominate an entire market—and then use that dominance to do whatever it wants to those who’ve invested so much time and effort into it. It would be a quintessentially American fate for a quintessentially American pastime.
Bottom line, we're moving from one monopoly to another. Time will tell which monopoly is "better", but in no world do I see a monopoly being good for the end consumer.
