OpenMarket: Antitrust and Competition

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s motto used to be “Move fast and break things.” Now that his company is under increased political scrutiny—and facing calls for breakup from both right and left—he has changed his tune to “move slowly and establish rules.”

At a time when socialism seems determined to crawl back from the dustbin of history, it can be a challenge defending the moral legitimacy—and humanity—of a capitalist economy. Efforts like that of my colleagues Fred Smith and Ryan Young are certainly welcome, as is new research from academics like Prof. James Otteson. It’s especially nice, however, to also see individual businesspeople telling their own stories of hard work and success.

With major political figures proposing the forced breakup of some of the nation’s most successful companies, the once-arcane field of antitrust law is now at the top of the national conversation. A new video from the Competitive Enterprise Institute walks viewers through the history of economic monopolies and trustbusting and exposes the flawed logic underlying most calls for antitrust enforcement.

Are Tucker Carlson’s predictions of Google taking over the future keeping you up at night? Sooth yourself with the creative destruction described in “Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy” by George Gilder. The famous economist, writer, investor, and tech guru argues that Google’s days of aggregate and advertise success are numbered and goes into considerable depth about why.

If 2018 was a bad year for antitrust skeptics, 2019 promises to be worse. We must hope that the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice hold the line against the pressure, and refrain from unleashing the antitrust kraken.

There is a concerted effort from elements on both sides of the political aisle to use antitrust law to regulate and ultimately break apart Big Tech companies. This is a grave mistake, and would represent one of the largest and most visible government interventions into the economy we’ve seen in decades.

Columbia University professor Tim Wu is author of the new book The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, which calls for a more active approach to antitrust regulation (see also Richard Epstein’s review in The Wall Street Journal). Wu wants to see more “big cases” along the lines of previous lawsuits against Standard Oil, AT&T, and IBM. The last such case was against Microsoft, nearly two decades ago.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon surprised many on Monday when he announced he may halt the integration of CVS pharmacy’s assets with the nation’s third largest healthcare insurance company, Aetna. Usually the judicial review of a merger already approved by the Department of Justice is a mere formality, as evidenced by the fact that the companies went ahead and closed the $69 billion deal late last month, but at a hearing Monday, Judge Leon said he has concerns about the merger’s consequences for consumers.

My colleague Iain Murray has some excellent new content out today in the form of a Web Memo titled “How Antitrust Regulation Hinders Innovation and Competition: Framing a Broken Debate.” Iain briskly defines the three major perspectives on antitrust theory (interventionist, consumer welfare, and free market) and steers readers toward an appreciation that antitrust enforcement itself—along with similar economic regulations—are often the cause of, rather than solution to, consumer harm.

For the big technology firms, the midterm elections were never going to change much.  Whatever the result, they were going to face more scrutiny over the next year. The only difference is in what sort of scrutiny. If anything, the split in control of the chambers presents the worst of both worlds.