Why this game is different
Monopolies have changed, along with what the biggest companies are buying. Google and Facebook don’t charge consumers money for their most popular services but instead collect vast reams of data on their users that they then use to help target online advertising. Amazon charges low prices, sometimes below what the goods cost to manufacture, but boasts of its top-notch customer service.
And by the time new contestants make their way to the game board, they often find that the big players already occupy the most lucrative squares.
The companies’ approaches have made them among the wealthiest corporations on Earth, with market values exceeding many nations’ economies, as well as a stranglehold on the consumer data that drives much of modern-day commerce.
Who’s playing the game now
The Traditionalists: “IT AIN’T BROKE”
This school of post-1970s thought was once the young upstart on the antitrust scene. Today it’s the ruling establishment. And its main yardstick for measuring a company’s effect on the markets is whether consumers pay high prices.
This idea, known as the consumer welfare standard, was created by Robert Bork, the conservative D.C. Circuit judge best known for his unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination battle during the Reagan administration.
Under this standard, the government should block corporate mergers that would lead to higher prices. But it should bless business deals that aim to increase efficiency, promote innovation or take other steps that would drive prices lower.
Based on this logic, federal enforcers and judges have OK’d mergers and buyouts that have shrunk the number of competitors in markets ranging from airlines and cellphone companies to cat food and caskets.
Under this view of the law, monopolies aren’t necessarily bad. Achieving a monopoly legally — and getting to charge high prices — is an important element of the free market because it encourages businesses to improve their products. While that might seem inconsistent with their intense focus on consumer prices, the Traditionalists almost always oppose government intervention in pricing decisions, preferring to let the market decide.
The law “seeks merely to prevent unlawful monopolization,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in a key 2004 court decision. “To safeguard the incentive to innovate, the possession of monopoly power will not be found unlawful unless it is accompanied by an element of anticompetitive conduct.”
Scalia’s admonition has translated into an oft-repeated motto: “Big isn’t bad. Big behaving badly is bad.”
For these Traditionalists, monopolies are often a sign of ingenuity and consumer preference. Antitrust enforcers and courts should avoid challenging businesses except in the most clear and egregious cases lest they stifle innovation.
People
Groups
Chamber of Commerce
Heritage Foundation
George Mason University Law School
Tech trade group NetChoice
Computer and Communications Industry Association
Companies
Google
Apple
Amazon
Facebook
The Reformers: “MEND IT, DON’T END IT”
Policymakers and lawmakers in the Reform school believe the system has become too tilted in favor of big companies. They want to change the antitrust laws to make it easier once again to challenge monopolies — though without radical changes to the existing order.
“Our enforcement tools are getting rusty,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wrote in a book published this year on the need for antitrust reform.
Klobuchar, the Senate’s top Democrat on antitrust, has introduced bills to change how courts interpret the law. Her Republican counterpart, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, has likewise made the case for tightening the standards for government reviews of mergers and making it harder for monopolists to excuse their problematic conduct.
The antitrust debate needs to focus less single-mindedly on prices, they argue.
“Modern antitrust enforcement, and judicial decision making has become obsessed with … [an] economic extravaganza,” Lee said at a September speech before the Federalist Society. But economists “will measure what is susceptible to measurement and will tend to forget what is not.”
Most people in the Reform camp, including Lee, still embrace the consumer welfare standard. But they say the courts should broaden it to look at how mergers or business conduct affect values like choice, product quality or privacy — arguing that the Traditionalists’ approach helped lead to the growth of the mammoth tech companies.
“The whole business model in Silicon Valley is built on the idea that this is untouchable by the competition laws,” said Rebecca Allensworth, an antitrust professor at Vanderbilt Law School who focuses on technology and competition.
The Reformers also advocate for keeping the enforcement-based antitrust system in which the Justice Department and FTC go to court against alleged monopolists — though they want tweaks to the laws to make it easier for the government to win.
“The tools aren’t broken,” Allensworth said. “We just haven’t been using them correctly.”
People
Groups
Public Knowledge
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth
American Antitrust Institute
Companies
Spotify
Match
Yelp
DuckDuckGo
The Anti-Monopolists: “BREAK THEM UP”
An even more aggressive Anti-Monopolist school of antitrust law has gained prominence under President Joe Biden, who picked two of its founders — Khan and new White House adviser Tim Wu — for top roles in the executive branch.
Admirers sometimes call these people the New Brandeis School, after former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Critics have derided them as “Hipster Antitrust.” Unlike both the Traditionalists and Reformers, this crowd argues that antitrust laws were enacted not solely to ensure fair markets but to prevent the consolidation of corporate power and protect democracy.
The Anti-Monopoly school grew as a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis and concerns about “too big to fail” banks. In their view, concentrated corporate power is always bad and the government should seek to break it up.
“Fair dealing in the marketplace is a political right,” said Matt Stoller, director of research for the advocacy group American Economic Liberties Project. The Anti-Monopoly movement seeks to “make sure that people have rights in the marketplace, that they can enter lines of trade and have fair dealings with buyers and sellers.”
