Thank you for the question.
We feel that this is going to have a very negative effect, because the new definitions, as I said earlier, of per se illegal agreements could be prosecuted criminally without the undueness element. This essentially means that small-business people who don't have market power and who enter into competitive alliances for competitive reasons will be caught by the changes under the criminal conspiracy provisions that are being proposed.
If they are caught in this manner, they will change their strategies, and they will be afraid to enter into such ventures with other real estate brokers. The idea is to catch people here who would in fact be in situations where they are dominant and want to control markets. In this case, the assumption would be that you're possibly guilty just by trying to do this. There is no proof, no weight at all given to arguments within those two brokerages, which I've mentioned in our paper, that try to get together to compete within any given market in this country. Therefore if they can't do that, if they're afraid to be caught within this particular new legislation, they will obviously not compete in this fashion. That, in our opinion, is exactly the opposite of what competition policy is designed to do.