New Paper: Antitrust Regulation is #NeverNeeded

My colleague Jessica Melugin and I, along with our former colleague Patrick Hedger, have a new paper out today, “Repeal #NeverNeeded Antitrust Laws that Hinder COVID-19 Response: Smokestack-Era Laws Favor Established Interests and Do Not Encourage Competition.” The tech companies that regulators are targeting have made a difficult pandemic easier to endure. Antitrust lawsuits would not help the COVID-19 response. Since the real cost of antitrust policy is its chilling effect on new innovations, ramping up antitrust enforcement would leave the country less resilient against the next crisis.

Amazon has made it easy for people to get no-contact deliveries of household supplies and groceries—and spurred competitive responses from Walmart, Target, and other retailers. Facebook makes it easy for people to stay in touch while staying socially distant. Google makes it easy to find information about the virus and stay up to date. As the paper concludes:

Antitrust investigations at the federal and state level should be suspended during the COVID-19 crisis and, ideally, abandoned permanently. The unintended consequences of market distortion and chilled innovation are the last thing consumers and businesses need right now—or ever. This is no time for politicians and government lawyers to promote their own careers through the posturing of antitrust enforcement. Consumer benefit and business resiliency must be preserved and antitrust enforcement must not be prioritized or expanded.

Read the whole thing here. For more on antitrust, see Wayne Crews’s and my paper “The Case against Antitrust Law” and CEI’s dedicated antitrust site, antitrust.cei.org.