# American Column and Lumber v. United States (1921) **Decided:** December 19, 1921 · **6–3, Justice John Clarke** · 257 U.S. 377 The first Supreme Court ruling on **information exchange** as a form of collusion — the doctrine that governs algorithmic pricing a century later. ## The Open Competition Plan The American Hardwood Manufacturers' Association, representing roughly a third of national output, ran what its own architect called an "Open Competition Plan." Members filed daily reports of every sale with price and buyer, monthly production and inventory statements, and price lists, all circulated back to the membership with commentary from a central office, supplemented by regular meetings. No member was required to charge any particular price. Clarke was unpersuaded that the absence of a price agreement mattered: > "Genuine competitors do not make daily, weekly, and monthly reports of the minutest details of their business to their rivals, as the defendants did..." The plan was, he wrote, "simply an expansion of the gentleman's agreement of former days, skillfully devised to evade the law." ## The dissents that eventually won [[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr]] dissented alone: "I should have thought that the ideal of commerce was an intelligent interchange made with full knowledge of the facts as a basis for a forecast of the future." [[Louis Brandeis]], joined by McKenna, dissented at length — information exchange, he argued, substitutes "research and reasoning for gambling," and denying it to small producers simply hands the advantage to large integrated firms who generate the same data internally. Four years later the dissenters' position became the law. In [[Maple Flooring Association v. United States]] (1925) the Court held that an association may gather and circulate cost, price, inventory and freight statistics — and meet to discuss them — so long as there is no agreement on price or output. ## Why it still matters The two cases together define the seam antitrust has never closed: **the same data flow is lawful or unlawful depending on facts about intent and effect that are almost impossible to observe from outside.** That ambiguity was the legal architecture of Hoover-era associationalism in the 1920s, and it is exactly the question in the RealPage algorithmic rent-pricing case, whose November 2025 consent decree answered it with structural rules — no competitor non-public data at runtime, training data at least 12 months old, no price floors. See [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]].