The Trustbuster's Fatal Conceit
fter more than a yearlong investigation into America’s largest tech companies, Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and David Cicilline (D-R.I.) finally released the long-awaited House Judiciary’s Majority Staff Report on antitrust. Not surprisingly, the report calls for substantial new oversight and stringent antitrust enforcement by both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. While offering few new empirical demonstrations of economic harm, it calls for remaking the nation’s antitrust laws out of whole cloth. This includes abandoning the current consumer welfare standard in favor of sweeping new mandates, from structural separation to a revival of the essential facilities doctrine. Indeed, it appears that the committee has dusted off the industrial policy playbook abandoned years ago to reassert the government’s power over markets.
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