A renegade clique of Trump appointees is threatening to undermine the Trump agenda with overzealous antitrust enforcement.
Nine months into the second Trump presidency, some of the biggest Biden errors have been rolled back. The Trump agenda of low taxes, low regulation, energy dominance, and AI leadership is taking shape through legislative and executive action. The last thing America needs is a continuation of the Biden antitrust policy, which targeted the very tech companies investing in AI and energy abundance.
The far-left academics of the Biden administration attempted a “revolution” in antitrust by jettisoning the consumer harm standard, long the basis of American antitrust law. This standard holds that the government must prove that companies are not merely big or endowed with great market power, but that their actions actually harm consumers by restricting choice.
One of the best examples is Google’s search engine, which the Biden DOJ sought to break up in an antitrust suit. But Google is not without competitors – it displaced Yahoo as the world’s leading search engine and has been challenged by Bing for years. Google’s market dominance is not ill-gotten – it’s just that many choose to use Google instead of its competitors. Consumers are not harmed when making this choice.
Breaking up Google search would cause real harm to consumers. The government would effectively be telling consumers that they have made the wrong choice and that it must be corrected through force of law.
That breaking up Google’s various businesses would harm consumers is not even disputed by the government’s antitrust enforcers. Last week during the remedies trial to determine how Google’s ad tech business will be punished for being too successful, a government expert testifying on technical feasibility of remedies agreed that breaking up ad tech would lead to a “bumpier ride” for consumers. It is a matter of record that the government’s antitrust case, begun by Biden’s appointees but continued by Trump’s, would cause harm to consumers. They just care more about harming Google than they do about helping consumers.
Through their decentralized, individual choices, consumers have made it clear that they simply prefer Google search, which indicates that consumers are not being harmed by a monopoly. While he never won his confirmation battle to sit on the Supreme Court, Judge Robert Bork’s seminal book on the consumer harm standard and dogged advocacy won the war of ideas. Moving to the consumer harm standard was a good idea that should not be tossed aside lightly, especially by a Republican administration.
And yet not only have President Trump’s appointees refused to drop the most egregious Biden cases nine months in, but they have also opened new ones against other successful companies.
Amazon now faces an FTC lawsuit alleging anticompetitive practices by Prime. The government’s incoherent case alleges that Amazon somehow dupes people into signing up for Prime when they don’t want to (presumably because it is an option on their retail website), and that by saving their billing information for renewals they make it too difficult to unsubscribe. The government also seems to think that saving payment methods between purchases is an unfair barrier to competing retail sites where you must enter your billing information anew when you first use it.
Trump administration officials adopting this kind of thinking undermines the president’s economic agenda. The administration’s stated goal of 3 percent economic growth is only sustainable if the workforce grows or workers become more productive. Since the workforce is not growing significantly, we need productivity gains to hit this growth target. AI is the key to unlocking those gains.
This is to say nothing of the direct benefit AI investment will have for American workers. Data centers specifically take up many acres, so landowners will see a windfall in selling property to big data users. Thousands of construction workers will be needed to build them. Hundreds of highly skilled and highly paid engineers will be needed to keep them running, bringing a new middle class to many communities across America.
This is exactly what will happen in Madison County, Mississippi with Amazon Web Services’ new data and training centers. Two data center complexes will create at least 1,000 new, well-paying jobs.
And the immense amount of energy needed to power them will provide tens of thousands of new jobs in coal mines, oil rigs, nuclear plants, pipelines, and refinement facilities.
This is already transforming Pennsylvania, where AI demand has contributed to an ongoing natural gas boom in the western half of the state, which in turn builds pressure for more liquefaction plants in the eastern half and more traffic in the port of Philadelphia. Microsoft is even planning to bring small modular nuclear reactors back online in central PA.
The most recent estimate puts new jobs in real estate, construction, energy, and tech at 500,000 over the next five years.
With all these benefits within reach, President Trump’s DOJ and FTC employees need to drop the big is bad act. The very companies with the capital to fund this economic boom should not be broken up at the precise moment America needs them most.
