POLITICO: The new rules of Monopoly

December 27, 2021 Media

The United States invented the concept of antitrust in the 1890s: laws designed to keep corporate titans from squashing their competition and saddling consumers with inflated prices.

But the realities of U.S. antitrust enforcement have evolved a lot in the past 40 years — and the modern world of monopoly is much different from the board game that has taught generations of Americans about concentrated wealth. Huge tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon occupy many of the squares, leaving their rivals scrambling for a foothold. For consumers, the price is often $0 — except for the hidden costs, like a loss of choice or privacy.

Now a new breed of antitrust activists say it’s time to rewrite the rules again. And some are questioning the whole premise of the game.

“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.”

The Anti-Monopolists argue that the U.S. should return to the earlier trust-busting approach it took before Bork’s ideas gained sway — essentially, to the tradition that existed before the Traditionalists. Some, like Sandeep Vaheesan of the anti-monopoly advocacy group Open Markets Institute, want to reinstate merger rules from 1968 that explicitly called for blocking deals if they would lead to market shares above a certain size.

Unlike the other two groups, the Anti-Monopoly school believes antitrust law should focus less on economics and adopt more bright-line rules that make clear what conduct and mergers are allowed. The use of economics is the Anti-Monopolists’ biggest area of divergence from the Reform approach, which Stoller referred to as “diet-Bork.”

The Reformers still “want to have economists run everything. They just want different economists,” said Stoller. But economics is “an elitist language to exclude normal people from politics.”

This group also supports moving beyond reliance on suits against individual monopolists. Instead, it favors having federal and state agencies write new rules to limit problematic behaviors — a priority that Khan has identified in her role as FTC chair.