The Obama Administration's intention to expand antitrust enforcement appears to be continuing apace, as a number of reports are describing the opening of a new investigation, one that targets a variety of high-tech companies in California's Bay Area. This time around, however, the target isn't anticompetitive behavior in the consumer market. Instead, the Department of Justice has apparently opened an investigation of whether the companies are colluding in the process of hiring, distorting the market for their employees by forging agreements not to recruit from other, similar ventures.

In recent years, there have been a number of high-profile fights involving companies that have lured away an employee of a competing firm. In the cases that have made their way to court, such as Google-Microsoft and Apple-IBM, the employee was subject to a noncompete contract clause, and the legal battle focused on whether the work for the employee's new company actually involved competing with their former one. All of the companies listed as targets of the new investigation, however, are based in California—that state's Supreme Court declared that noncompete clauses violated state employment law, and were void within its boundaries.

All of the reports of the matter appear to trace back to two sets of sources; some spoke to The Washington Post, while others talked to a subscription site run by TheDeal.com. They could, in fact, have been the same sources speaking twice, since the stories seem to have complete agreement regarding the details of the investigation. Several major high-tech companies are said to be involved, including Apple, Google, and Yahoo, although the source indicated that the inquiry would be "industry wide."

The odd man out in the investigation is Genentech. Prior to a recent agreement that will see it folded into the pharmaceutical giant Roche, Genentech was one of the largest publicly traded biotechnology companies. The biotech job market in the Bay Area tends to be very fluid, with many employees moving around as a steady stream of startups either fold or get purchased by larger concerns. Unlike the other firms, which could largely forge agreements among themselves, there's no obvious candidate for Genentech to to have colluded with, which does suggest that the inquiry will ultimately spread well beyond the Bay Area.

In any case, the investigation is likely to be a challenging one. It's pretty unlikely that any agreements of the sort were ever formally committed to paper, which would mean that any legal action that resulted would ultimately rely on retained emails or personal testimony. Cases of that sort have been successfully pursued, but they tend to be more challenging, since it can be difficult to establish whether an employee's words reflected official company policy.

One possibility is that the DOJ isn't pursuing the investigation with the expectation that it will ultimately lead to legal action. The administration could simply intend to signal to companies that it is watching, and count on the threat that a business' hiring practices would be subject to extended legal oversight to be sufficient to restrain anticompetitive practices.