Up First from NPR - NCAA Settlement, Louisiana Abortion Pills, Live Nation Antitrust Lawsuit

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The National Collegiate Athletics Association along with the nation's five biggest athletic conferences have agreed to settle antitrust lawsuits worth $2.8 billion. Louisiana lawmakers have voted to classify two drugs commonly used to induce abortions as dangerous and controlled substances. And the Justice Department sues Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster calling it an illegal monopoly. Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Elana Perl, Carrie Feibel, Emily Kopp, Lisa Thomson and Claudia Peschiutta. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Nina Kravinsky. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange. And our Executive Producer is Erika Aguilar. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

How will a multi-billion dollar settlement change college sports? The NCAA and big conferences agree to allow athletes to be paid. We'll hear why they did it and how the new rules will work. I'm Michelle Martin, that's Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News. Louisiana labels two drugs as dangerous controlled substances. It will be an important step to stop a dangerous industry that threatens the health of women. The drugs induce abortions, but women also use them in other ways. How do the new rules affect patients?

Also, musicians claim Live Nation ripped them off. If they want to charge us $250 for a stack of 10 clean towels, they can and have. The Justice Department accuses the company of a monopoly. Stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your day. Now Our Change will honour 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change,

this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. College athletics are about to change. The National Collegiate Athletics Association, the NCAA, agreed to settle a big lawsuit. So did the nation's five biggest athletic conferences. They will pay nearly $2.8 billion to settle antitrust suits by former student-athletes. If the agreement goes through, schools can pay their athletes directly.

Jesse Dougherty of the Washington Post has been covering this story, and he joins us very, very, very, very early. Good morning, sir. Good morning. Who gets the $2.8 billion? $2.8 billion is mostly going to past athletes, and among that group, it's mostly going to power conference football and men's basketball players. That's the biggest class there. They sued basically over the use of their name, image, and likeness in past television broadcasts and for not being compensated for that. So the damages are going back their way for being

on TV and playing their sports over the years. Okay. So you remind us about the name, image, and likeness rules, which have changed over the last several years. Now we have this finding as part of this lawsuit that colleges can just pay athletes? How does this transform college sports? Yeah, so now schools will pay athletes directly, which is a seismic shift in this landscape when you consider that for as long as the NCAA has been around, one of its sole purposes has been to make sure athletes do not get paid by the schools.

How it actually changes the games in practice when you're actually between the lines on the court or field, I'm not sure it will too much, but it will definitely change how athletic departments have to budget, how schools have to budget, how athletes get paid, and what kind of money they'll make on campus. So the changes are far-reaching, and we're still learning how it's going to look, and it remains to be seen exactly how that will scale, but it certainly changes the foundation of this whole thing. Yeah, I mean, one thing I'm curious about is the amount of money we're talking about. I grant that a lot of money is made by college sports.

I'm interested in how this will translate to athletes. Will they get paid millions of dollars as they would in pro leagues, or will it be more of a nominal payment? I mean, what's the sense? I would think of it more as a salary that's not sort of in those high, high professional numbers. So basically there's going to be a capped amount of revenue sharing per school. Right now, it seems like that's going to be around the $20 million range per year. But that's not just for a football roster. That's for a lot of athletes on campus. So for athletes to make in those six, seven

figures, like the big money that we're seeing right now, like with the NIL payments, that's going to take major endorsement deals, major deals with boosters potentially. This revenue sharing money will more just equalize the earnings across rosters and in some cases across athletic departments, depending on how it's implemented by schools. Oh, well, this raises a question for me. What happens with the lacrosse team or some team that doesn't have a lot of revenue coming in? Or what happens with the athletes at Morehead State University in Kentucky, where I went to college and it's not one of the big, big programs? That's a great question. For the lacrosse team, schools will decide how they actually balance their budgets. We don't know because it's not actually just going to be standard across the board. And then for the smaller schools,

this revenue sharing model will be optional. At the big schools, schools will opt into it because it will be required to remain competitive. But at the smaller, lower revenue levels, you'll see a lot of conferences in schools saying, you know, we're not going to do this and we're not going to take part in this revenue sharing model. Jesse Doherty, The Washington Post, all very clear. Thank you very much. Thank you. Louisiana lawmakers have voted to classify two drugs as dangerous controlled substances. They acted because one of the ways these drugs are used is to induce abortions, which Louisiana has banned in most cases. The new law is expected to make it harder to access and prescribe these pills, and it is the first of its kind in the country.

Rosemary Westwood at member station WWNO in New Orleans is with us now to tell us more about this. Good morning, Rosemary. Good morning, Michelle. So why this decision to reclassify these drugs as dangerous and controlled substances? State officials have been frustrated by residents who go online to order pills to induce an abortion. To crack down on that, they've opted for this designation to make them harder to get. The experts I've spoken with tell me that Louisiana has the right to designate a drug by making a general finding that it's a public health risk, as they've done here.

We don't know if this will be challenged in the courts, though. So some controlled substances are illegal, like heroin, and others have various medical uses but carry a risk of addiction. So drugs like Xanax and opioids and psychiatric meds. These are known as scheduled drugs or controlled substances, and so they're a little harder to get on purpose. Doctors need a special license to prescribe them, and they're tracked in state databases. And if you have these drugs without a prescription, you can face thousands of dollars in fines and jail time.

So what are state lawmakers saying about this move? And the reason I ask that is that these drugs would not seem to meet those two criteria. They are not addicting and they do have a legitimate medical use. So what are they saying about this? Well, Republicans and anti-abortion rights groups say this is necessary to keep women and girls safe, to discourage them from getting the pills mailed from out of state or passing them along to each other. The bill's sponsor was Republican State Senator Thomas Presley. It will be an important step to stop a dangerous industry that threatens the health of women. But remember, these medications are still legal for other uses. So doctors are worried that reclassifying them as controlled substances

is going to make these medications harder to get, and that could delay care. Say more about these other medical uses. Can you give some examples? Yeah, they're used every day in miscarriages, to treat hemorrhage after childbirth, to insert an IUD. And that's why almost 300 doctors across the state sent a letter pleading with legislators not to do this. Under this law, doctors will be tracked in a database every time they write a prescription for mifepristone or misoprostol. And pharmacists, I mean, in Louisiana, some have already been more hesitant to dispense these drugs. Dr. William Kershane is a pharmacist with Xavier University. He says these

pills are not like other Schedule IV drugs, like tramadol or Valium. The main difference is mifepristone and misoprostol, as you said, are not addictive. They are certainly outliers. They really don't have any relationship to the other drugs in Schedule IV. But he says Louisiana does have the power to reclassify the drugs in this way, which means that other states could potentially try to do this too. So what happens now? Well, this law will go into effect.

The governor still has to sign it, but he said he supports it. And it's not clear if it will stop pregnant women ordering the pills because they are specifically exempted from prosecution. Anyone else caught with these medications, though, without a valid prescription, could face up to 10 years in prison. That's Rosemary Westwood at WWNO in New Orleans.

Rosemary, thank you. You're welcome. The Justice Department says it's time for a breakup of Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation. Because baby, now we got bad blood. And you know you know about this story because of Taylor Swift, whose recent tour crashed the Ticketmaster website and drew attention to the company's ticket prices. Now the federal government, 29 states, and the District of Columbia are suing the company. They call it a monopoly.

NPR's Alina Selyuk is in our studios. It's a kind of live event. We tried to sell tickets, but the website crashed. Alina, good morning. Perfect. Good morning. So what makes this a monopoly? So the government says that Ticketmaster slash Live Nation has tentacles in every part of live entertainment. They sell tickets.

They promote shows. They own venues. They manage musical acts. They're essentially controlling which artists play on what dates at what venues under what terms and fees, and then also how people get tickets to those shows and what fees they have to pay. No other competitor comes anywhere close, and what the government argues says this leads to higher prices and generally a worse experience for both artists and fans. What's the evidence for that argument? So the lawsuit cites a number of concrete examples. A lot of them actually echo what we heard last year in a Senate hearing. For example, New York musician Clyde Lawrence testified that artists who want to perform at a Live Nation venue

have to hire Live Nation also as a promoter, which gives them little leverage. If they want to take 10% of the revenues and call it a facility fee, they can and have. And if they want to charge us $250 for a stack of 10 clean towels, they can and have. The government's case also argues that Live Nation regularly acquires potential competitors and that venue operators feel pressure to sign on to Ticketmaster because they are afraid to lose out on concert tours run by Live Nation. At the hearing, one venue owner pointed out that the company even profits from ticket sales to competition,

which is sort of like Pepsi earning money from people buying Coke. Wow. Just to be clear, in our live event here this morning, the towels are free. But what does the company say about this case? So Live Nation argues that all the typical frustrations about things like fees or availability of tickets, they would not be resolved by breaking up the company. It says that artists said the ticket prices before fees, that production costs are constantly going up, and that ticket scalpers are really the menace of the industry. The company overall argues the Justice Department is veering away from many of the same things they considered and accepted back in 2010 when the government originally approved the

merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Oh, so it was not so long ago that the Justice Department looked this over and said everything was cool. And they sort of put a lot of conditions on the deal that now they're sort of saying the conditions did not put enough guardrails around the deal. How strong is the government's case there? The onus is definitely on the government. It will take years to shake out. I do want to add that the Biden administration is pursuing a number of these big anti-monopoly cases against major corporations like Apple, Google, Amazon.

And this is a rare case where it's directly asking to break up the company. And it's asking for a jury trial, which is unusual for an antitrust case. It's quite dense. It's complicated. But there might be a Swifty in those 12. Exactly. Perhaps the government is counting on sort of jurors being more open to hearing hours of all that, given that we're all kind of familiar with Ticketmaster Live Nation, the murky, confusing world of tickets and fees. One of the senators last year actually made a glib comment that Ticketmaster accomplished a stunning achievement by totally unifying Republicans and Democrats in their frustration.

And Piazzolino-Zelyuk, thanks for the update. Thank you. And that's Up First for this Friday, May 24th. I'm Steve Inskeep. And I'm Michelle Martin. And don't forget, Up First airs on the weekend, too. Ayesha Roscoe and Scott Simon have the news. It will be here in this feed or wherever you get your podcasts.

Today's Up First was edited by Alana Pearl, Carrie Feibel, Emily Kopp, Lisa Thompson, and Claudia Piscuta. It was produced by Ziad Butch, Ben Abrams, and Nina Kravinsky. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent and our technical director. There she is, Carly Strange. Our executive producer is Erica Aguilar. Join us again on Monday.