In a closely watched antitrust dispute, a federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against The Nielsen Company. The injunction temporarily halts Nielsen’s network policy and could prove to be a turning point for the audio measurement and ratings industry. The lawsuit, brought by Cumulus Media against Nielsen, alleges that Nielsen engaged in anticompetitive practices, specifically something called “tying.”
Tying Happens When Customers Are Forced to Buy Something They Don’t Want
In antitrust law, tying happens when a seller has significant market power related to a product. Customers love that product. They really want to buy it, and maybe they can’t get it anywhere else. Maybe their businesses will even be harmed if they don’t get it.
But to get customers to buy the product, the seller requires them to also buy a less desirable product. “Tying” occurs when customers are forced to buy the meh, less-desirable product in order to buy the great product they really want. The two products are tied together, more or less. You just can’t get what you want as a standalone product.
Tying can be illegal if it restricts competition, forces unwanted purchases, or locks out competitors in a tied market. Courts have historically analyzed tying under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which serves as the backbone of antitrust law in America. Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it illegal for a company to monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) any part of interstate commerce.
What Is Nielsen’s Network Policy?
In its antitrust suit, Cumulus claims that Nielsen is using a classic tying strategy. To start with, Nielsen is the only provider of full national radio ratings in the United States. Everyone knows the Nielsen name and respects its data, so much so that businesses like radio stations and advertising companies use Nielsen data to set advertising rates.
The lawsuit alleges that Nielsen did not allow its customers to buy only the specific Nielsen ratings products they wanted. For example, if your radio station needed to buy must-have national radio ratings data, they’d have to buy that data bundled together with local-market ratings or broader Nielsen measurement packages for every market where they had a radio station. If the radio station tried to get a quote for only the national ratings, they wouldn’t receive one, or they’d get one that was ten times the existing rate. The pricing effectively forced broadcasters to buy services they didn’t want.
Cumulus alleges that this substantially increased costs for radio stations and other businesses that were effectively coerced into becoming Nielsen subscribers and buying Nielsen products that weren’t aligned to their business needs in order to get the product they really wanted.
Nielsen disputes these claims. The company explains that its products are integrated to be useful to businesses and that consumers still have choices in the market. Nielsen says that it is the dominant media measurement company, but it’s not a monopoly power in the legal sense. The company argued that the case should be seen as nothing more than a pricing dispute.
The Ruling: What Judge Vargas Said
Judge Jeannette A. Vargas has served as a United States district judge for the United States Court for the Southern District of New York since 2024. She issued a 47-page Opinion and Order earlier this month, which was published with some redactions.
In her ruling, Judge Vargas detailed why Cumulus is likely to succeed on its antitrust claims, specifically under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. She said that the broadcaster demonstrated irreparable harm and a strong likelihood of success on its claims that Nielsen used monopoly power to tie national and local radio ratings products.
But the ruling is procedural, requiring Nielsen to pause for a short time while the case proceeds. It’s not a ruling on Nielsen’s ultimate liability, damages, or permanent remedies. Those things are yet to be decided.
Judge Vargas Is No Stranger to High-Profile Cases
Judge Vargas has also ruled on some other high-profile cases, including issuing an injunction prohibiting DOGE from accessing Treasury systems, which was dissolved a few months later after DOGE updated its training and vetting procedure.
She also granted the motion to dismiss in the defamation lawsuit Drake brought against Kendrick Lamar after the rappers exchanged aggressive diss tracks. Central to that lawsuit was the diss track “Not Like Us,” which broke records in 2024 for the most weeks at the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs Chart. Radio stations all over the U.S. played it nonstop, likely boosting their ratings. Wonder what the Nielsen market data says?
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