You are here

Antitrust in the crosshairs: How necessary is it to reform competition policy?

Submitted by Stephen Dunne on March 29, 2021 - 1:00pm

Prof. Victor Menaldo on the Cultirico web site,

"A debate is raging over reforming American antitrust laws...At best, this means tweaking the current paradigm to accommodate outcomes besides price and innovation to help strengthen our economy and political system. At worst, this may mean going after big and successful firms for political reasons and then reverse-engineering a skin-deep justification for doing so. Modern antitrust is nested within a larger context of logic and evidence-based  policymaking. Neo-Brandeisian approaches, which aim to look at the effect of sectoral concentration and firm size on inequality and democracy, may not yet offer a suitable replacement.

As the debate about whether and how to go after Big Tech has heated up over the last few years, antitrust law and its ancillary regulations have been widely misunderstood, mischaracterized, and caricatured by politicians, pundits, and citizens. These misconceptions matter. Getting the facts right about what antitrust has and has not empowered digital platforms to do makes it more likely that reforms will be well-informed and judicious. As a first order concern, it’s not obvious that antitrust is actually a solution to the problems raised by its critics."

Please link here for the full article.

Share