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Tag: lina khan

  • Lina Khan Stays Remarkably on Message on ‘The Adam Friedland Show’

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    Former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan says she doesn’t have any desire to run for elected office, but she sure knows how to stay on message like a politician. During her appearance on “The Adam Friedland Show,” hosted by comedian and top candidate for “Joe Rogan of the Left” Adam Friedland, she was repeatedly tested to keep the thread of her anti-monopoly, anti-corruption ideology by silly asides and a series of dick jokes. She emerged unshaken.

    Early in the interview, Friedland observes that Khan, who is back in the news thanks to her role on incoming Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani’s transition team, has a hard time lying. Shortly after, she gave a pretty perfect example of her honesty. When Friedland asked if she was a popular girl in high school, Khan said, “No, I was a newspaper editor.” Relatable.

    Throughout the conversation, Khan kept an incredibly even keel. While she’d laugh at Friedland’s jokes, she’d almost immediately jump back on topic. That’s not to say she pulled her punches, though. For instance, she gave a pretty clear-eyed view of how we’re living in an era where, while history may not be directly repeating itself, it certainly seems to rhyme.

    “There were a lot of factors that facilitated the rise of Nazism. The US, after World War II, actually commissioned various studies to be like ‘What just happened and what factors contributed to it?’, including trying to figure out what was happening in the economy. They did actually find that growing consolidation across the German economy had basically facilitated the rise of Nazism,” she said. “You had more monopolization in certain types of rubber and steel, and generally speaking, there’s long been a recognition that concentrated economic power can go hand-in-hand with concentrated political power. I think that’s an insight that has been lost more recently, but we’re kind of being forced to reckon with again.”

    Friedland followed that exchange up by asking if, when Paramount completes its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Bari Weiss will become the modern-day Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany. Khan laughed but didn’t respond, because she’s a pro.

    Friedland did manage to get a handful of insights out of Khan that probably wouldn’t have come out in any other venue. For instance, Khan revealed that she does not have an Amazon Prime account and prefers to pick up her goods in person. He also got her to name a favorite Supreme Court justice, picking Louis Brandeis, best known for establishing the concept of the “right to privacy” and being an architect of what would become the Federal Trade Commission.

    Friedland also set Khan up for some extended answers on the work that she was doing at the FTC and hopes to continue doing outside of the agency. Asked what her biggest “dub” was while serving as FTC chair, Khan answered, “We were very focused on healthcare markets because people depend on healthcare, and one of the initiatives we did was really try to figure out why are drug prices so high. One reason they’re so high is because pharma companies use all sorts of patent tricks. So we called out those pharma tricks and three of the four big manufacturers of asthma inhalers dropped the price from hundreds of dollars to just $35. So there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who rely on inhalers who are paying less today.”

    While Khan has a reputation as being the cop on the block for Big Tech, she really hammered the healthcare industry over the course of the interview. Asked what industry “fucks people the most,” Khan responded, “Healthcare.” When Friendland followed up by asking, “They have the most blood on their hand?” she said, “Yes.” Later, she stated plainly, “There are people who have died because they can’t afford their medicines in this country.”

    She also drew a stark contrast between her approach to addressing corruption and the Trump administration’s take on it. “If you were breaking the law, but you were in a C-Suite, the government would go light on you. … I thought that was really problematic,” she said. “We were very clear that we were going to enforce the law in an even-handed way, no matter, kind of, what your political connections were. We just had to look at ‘Are you breaking the law or not?’ And I think that approach to enforcing the law upset some people.”

    Meanwhile, she said the Trump administration has seen “a real backsliding” when it comes to enforcement. “They’ve also shifted gears. They allowed this big merger to go through between these two ad agencies, and one of the conditions of that was basically that they had to buy ads from Elon Musk, more or less, on his platforms under the purview that they couldn’t discriminate on political grounds,” she said. “It does seem like they are more eager to use the law to advance their political grievances.”

    Friedland brought some ideas to Khan for future methods to identify corruption and collusion, should she ever end up back in the agency. For instance, he pitched her on a plan to show up to Burning Man and question executives while they’re rolling on Molly. “We didn’t have that good idea,” she said.

    While Khan maintained a professional demeanor throughout the interview, she also spoke pretty plainly about what she sees happening in America today. “I think people are realizing that a lot of things that are bad in their lives are driven by corporations that are breaking the law.” Asked if those corporations are buying influence in politics, she responded, “Perhaps,” with a smile. She also said, “Taking on corporate power when they are breaking the law is very popular,” which sure seems like she’s making an observation on what might appeal to the public when it comes to these issues.

    Despite that, Khan showed no real interest when asked if she had any ambitions for political office. She dismissed the idea of running for the Senate and said the Presidency was out because she wasn’t born in the US, leading Friedland to pitch her on becoming Queen of England and overseer of a flock of corgis. Still, she has ideas for how the government should operate, stating, “We do need a New Deal-style level of ambition” to address our current age of corruption.

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    AJ Dellinger

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  • Former FTC Chair Lina Khan will help Zohran Mamdani build his new administration

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    A familiar face will be helping Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani set up his new administration before he takes office in 2026. Lina Khan, former Federal Trade Commission Chair under President Joe Biden, has been officially announced as one of Mamdani’s transition co-chairs, alongside Grace Bonilla, Maria Torres-Springer and Melanie Hartzog.

    Mamdani’s platform is focused on affordability, with fighting corporate corruption a key way he hopes to lower prices for New Yorkers. Mamdani’s proposed policies include working to ban hidden fees and non-compete clauses, while funding challenges to utility company rate hikes. It’s not surprising that Khan and Mamdani would be aligned. As Chair, Khan is best known for trying to rebuild the FTC’s anti-monopolist backbone, but she was similarly interested in banning non-compete clauses and hidden junk fees. Khan has also publicly expressed her appreciation for the Mamdani campaign’s focus on small businesses in The New York Times Opinion section.

    “I think what we saw last night was New Yorkers not just electing a new mayor, but clearly rejecting a politics where outsized corporate power and money too often end up dictating our politics,” Khan said at a press conference announcing her new role. “And a clear mandate for change, where New Yorkers can get ahead and where all workers and small businesses can thrive, not just get by.”

    While Mamdani has served as a New York state assemblyman, his relative lack of experience has been used as a consistent criticism of his candidacy for mayor. Clearly, that didn’t matter to voters, but Mamdani’s chosen transition team members suggest he plans to surround himself with people who are experienced. In the case of Khan, that includes a transition co-chair who’s willing to be openly critical of corporate power. The Trump administration has effectively remade the FTC in its image, but there’s more than one place the influence of big businesses can be checked.

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  • Bob Woodward Tell-all: Trump & Putin still in contact, Dems Panic as Harris Media Blitz FLOPS

    Bob Woodward Tell-all: Trump & Putin still in contact, Dems Panic as Harris Media Blitz FLOPS

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    Bob Woodward Tell-all: Trump & Putin still in contact, Dems Panic as Harris Media Blitz FLOPS

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  • Jon Stewart Says Apple Asked Him Not To Have FTC Chair Lina Khan On ‘The Problem With Jon Stewart’

    Jon Stewart Says Apple Asked Him Not To Have FTC Chair Lina Khan On ‘The Problem With Jon Stewart’

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    Last month, the U.S. Justice Department and more than a dozen state attorneys general sued Apple, claiming that the tech giant has an illegal monopoly over the smartphone market and warning that Apple’s monopoly on smartphones could extend to other areas of the economy, including entertainment.

    Tonight on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart offered a view into his own tussle with Apple related to his Apple TV+ comedy show The Problem With Jon Stewart.

    “I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it,” the Daily Show host said to his guest, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, referencing the podcast that was an extension of the Apple show, which the tech giant canceled in October.

    “They literally said, ‘Please don’t talk to her,’” Stewart told Khan.

    The FTC chair has been outspoken about her concerns over what she sees are monopolistic practices by tech giants like Apple which, she told Stewart tonight, have stifled consumer choice.

    Stewart offered another example.

    “They wouldn’t let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI,” Stewart said, referring to a segment earlier in tonight’s show on what he termed “the false promise of A.I.”

    “Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?” he asked.

    “I think it just shows the danger of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision making in a small number of companies,” answered Khan.

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    tomt

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  • 5 takeaways from America’s landmark lawsuit against Amazon | CNN Business

    5 takeaways from America’s landmark lawsuit against Amazon | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    An antitrust lawsuit from 17 states and the Federal Trade Commission this week against Amazon represents the US government’s biggest regulatory challenge yet against the e-commerce juggernaut.

    The landmark case targets Amazon’s retail platform, alleging that it’s harmed shoppers and sellers alike on a massive scale.

    Through an alleged “self-reinforcing cycle of dominance and harm,” the plaintiffs claim, Amazon has run an illegal monopoly in ways that are “paying off for Amazon, but at great cost to tens of millions of American households and hundreds of thousands of sellers.”

    In response, Amazon has argued the case is “wrong on the facts and the law” and warned that a victory for the FTC would lead to slower shipping times or higher prices, including perhaps for Amazon’s Prime subscription service.

    Here are five of the biggest highlights and takeaways from the plaintiffs’ 172-page lawsuit.

    The plaintiffs’ central claim is that Amazon has used a variety of tactics to lure shoppers and sellers onto its platform and then to trap them there, preventing other online retailers like Walmart, Target or eBay from attracting those same consumers and vendors to their own sites.

    Walmart, Target and eBay are not parties to the suit.

    Not only has that lock-in effect hurt competition between the likes of Amazon and Walmart, the lawsuit claims, but it has also given Amazon confidence it can exploit its sellers and shoppers with impunity — allowing the company to extract ever more value from them without fear those people will leave for a rival platform.

    The complaint portrays Amazon as offering a kind of Faustian bargain — first enticing sellers with the ability to access tens of millions of potential customers and drawing in shoppers with low prices and numerous Prime benefits, such as Amazon Music and Prime Video, that other e-commerce platforms can’t hope to match.

    Then, in the plaintiffs’ narrative, Amazon takes advantage of sellers’ and shoppers’ dependence by increasing platform fees; bloating its search results with advertising that sellers are forced to buy if they want any hope of reaching shoppers; requiring sellers to use Amazon’s in-house fulfillment services if they want the best seller benefits, including the coveted “Prime” badge; and punishing sellers who try to sell their goods elsewhere online at a lower price than on Amazon.

    The overall result, the plaintiffs claim, is a worse experience for Amazon users and artificially high prices for everyone, including on non-Amazon platforms.

    “There are internet-wide effects here,” FTC Chair Lina Khan told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.

    Amazon has responded that the lawsuit “reveals the Commission’s fundamental misunderstanding of retail.” Amazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, wrote in a blog post that the company’s pricing programs for sellers are meant to “help them offer competitive prices,” that consumers “love Prime because it’s such a great experience,” and that the claim “that we somehow force sellers to use our optional services is simply not true.”

    A big, swirling question is whether Amazon could be broken up as a result of this suit.

    Officially, the FTC is saying that talk of a breakup is premature.

    “At this stage, the complaint is really focused on the issue of liability,” Khan said at an event hosted by Bloomberg News on Tuesday, hours after the lawsuit was filed.

    If the courts find that Amazon did violate the law, then there could be a separate remedies phase to consider potential penalties.

    A breakup is not off the table. The plaintiffs’ complaint, filed in Seattle federal court, suggests that any court order to address the issue could include “structural relief,” a legal term referring to a potential breakup of Amazon.

    Khan also left open the possibility that Amazon executives could be held personally liable and added to the case if there is sufficient evidence of their responsibility for Amazon’s alleged misconduct.

    “We want to make sure that we are bringing cases against the right defendants,” Khan said in response to a question from CNN about whether the FTC considered naming specific executives in Tuesday’s case. “If we think that there is a basis for doing so, we won’t hesitate to do that.”

    Those remarks echo what Khan has said elsewhere about her willingness to name individuals in FTC enforcement actions. Just this month, the FTC added three Amazon officials to a separate consumer protection case dealing with Amazon Prime.

    An entire section of the complaint is devoted to a mysterious algorithm Amazon has developed named Project Nessie. Virtually every detail surrounding Project Nessie is heavily redacted from the complaint, but what little is revealed about the program suggests it is an “algorithmic tool” and “pricing system” that has allegedly helped Amazon “extract” an undisclosed amount of “excess profit” from Amazon shoppers.

    Amazon did not respond to CNN’s questions about Project Nessie. And Project Nessie isn’t the only matter subject to redactions in the lawsuit; black bars obscuring key business numbers, executive testimony and other evidence are strewn throughout the complaint.

    In response to public questioning about the redactions, FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar said in a statement: “We share the frustration that much of the data and quotes by Amazon executives … is redacted,” and that “we do not believe that there are compelling reasons to keep much of this information secret from the public.”

    Farrar added that Amazon has a limited procedural window in which to file arguments for why many of the redacted details should remain sealed.

    Whether the FTC can prove in court that Amazon’s actions are illegal will hinge, to a large degree, on showing that Amazon has monopolized certain specific markets.

    The exercise is not as simple as pointing to Amazon’s sales figures or the percentage of online shopping that happens on Amazon’s platform. Instead, the plaintiffs have to show that Amazon is part of a well-defined geographic and economic market that it dominates.

    The complaint tries to define two such markets in the United States: a market the plaintiffs label as “online superstores” — essentially describing large retail websites that offer many different types of goods, with convenient search, checkout and shipping features for consumers — and a seller-focused “online marketplace services” market that grants third-party vendors access to customers, provides them with sales tools like data analytics and listing services, and a review or product ratings system, among other things.

    Expect Amazon to try to challenge how the plaintiffs draw their market boundaries. Zapolsky’s blog post argues that the plaintiffs have attempted to “gerrymander” their proposed markets to make it look like Amazon is more dominant than it is.

    Whether that argument succeeds will be up to the court, but it is clear the plaintiffs have carefully crafted their market definitions. For example, they claim that in this case, Amazon can’t be said to compete with online grocery delivery services such as FreshDirect or Instacart because of the unique and often hyper-local constraints of shipping perishable goods. The FTC also wants to exclude medium-sized or interest-specific retail sites that don’t offer a wide variety of products. Presumably this might exclude websites belonging to companies like the pet care retailer Chewy, or the electronics seller Best Buy.

    FreshDirect, Instacart, Chewy and Best Buy are not parties to the suit.

    Excluding those types of companies allows the plaintiffs to make claims such as that “Amazon’s share of the overall value of goods sold by online superstores is well above 60% — and rising.”

    Even as the lawsuit takes on some of the most important parts of Amazon’s retail business, there is much that the suit doesn’t cover.

    In recent years, critics of Amazon have lobbed a kitchen sink of antitrust allegations at the company, including that it snoops on seller data to figure out what products it should sell under its own brand; that the fact Amazon sells its own products alongside third-party sellers creates an anticompetitive conflict of interest; that Amazon has used predatory pricing to weaken rivals and to ultimately acquire them; and that Amazon wields enormous power in labor markets. Many of these observations were included as part of a 450-page congressional report that Khan helped author while working as a House Judiciary Committee staffer prior to being appointed to the FTC.

    Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has acknowledged in congressional testimony the possibility that employees may have inappropriately accessed seller data in violation of company policy, but Amazon has broadly disputed most of the other allegations.

    Virtually none of those claims, however, are reflected in this week’s lawsuit. The complaint does allege that Amazon biases its search results to rank its own products higher than those sold by third parties, but largely as a byproduct of Amazon’s main moves to protect its dominance.

    The complaint doesn’t articulate how regulators came to select some allegations and not others.

    When a reporter asked Khan to reflect on her past criticism of how narrowly courts have focused on the issue of consumer prices, in contrast to Tuesday’s Amazon suit that mentions the word “price” some 223 times, not including any redacted parts, Khan said her job was to present the case that stood the best chance of winning.

    “As enforcers, we want to both follow the facts where they take us and also look at how the law applies to the facts,” Khan said. “You want to bring the strongest case that you can.”

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  • FTC Issues Fines For Sassy Retail Employees Who Cut Declined Credit Cards In Half

    FTC Issues Fines For Sassy Retail Employees Who Cut Declined Credit Cards In Half

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    WASHINGTON—Cracking down on the common but unethical practice seemingly rampant in department stores, the Federal Trade Commission began issuing fines this week for any sassy retail employee who held up a customer’s declined credit card and cut it in half. “A lot of these snobbish retail employees seem to derive a sick pleasure out of dramatically snipping the credit card belonging to a self-described shopaholic in half, rather than the standard procedure of handing the card back and simply informing them it’s been declined,” said FTC chair Lina Khan, explaining that these workers got away with the practice for years by blaming the credit card companies, claiming “they told me to do that” on the phone when the shopper looked at them, shocked. “This has been happening since the early ’90s, and it’s time we took it seriously—that’s why there will now be a $200 minimum fine for any gum-smacking cashier with scissors in their hand, no exceptions. It’s not only about financial privacy concerns, we also want to cut down on the mental anguish that a consumer is put through when these rude sales associates inform them that they must go and have a little chat with their manager, which they proceed to do behind a nearby door with a little window, allowing them to look back at the customer and snicker within view. These people need to learn that just because you work at a mall, you do not get to be a smug mean girl and get away with it.” At press time, the FTC had issued a warning to American consumers to be especially wary of any retail employee possessing a vaguely French accent and dressed in all black.

    Economy Collapses After 10-Year-Old Boy Spends Entire U.S. GDP On Fortnite Skins

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  • Senator Ted Cruz slams US agency for ‘collusion’ with EU on Big Tech rules

    Senator Ted Cruz slams US agency for ‘collusion’ with EU on Big Tech rules

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    U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz called for details on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) work with its European counterparts in a letter to FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan on Tuesday.

    The conservative Texas lawmaker criticized Khan and other FTC staff for meeting with European Commission officials to discuss incoming EU rules designed to rein in Big Tech companies, which are largely U.S.-based.

    “It is one thing for the EU to target U.S. businesses,” the letter said, but “it is altogether unthinkable that an agency of the U.S. government would actively help the EU” on its digital platform regulation.

    The FTC’s “collusion with foreign governments not only undermines U.S. sovereignty and Congress’s constitutional lawmaking authority,” Cruz’s letter said, “but also damages the competitiveness of U.S. firms and could negatively affect the savings of millions of Americans who hold stock in those companies” through pension plans.

    The letter comes just as tech giants like Meta, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok are set to have to comply with the Commission’s Digital Services Act (DSA); they face steep fines if they don’t follow the DSA’s content-moderation rules, adopted in 2022.

    The Commission also plans to label companies with core digital services — such as Apple’s App Store and Google Search — as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Market Act (DMA), which is designed to make it harder for them to abuse their market dominance. Seven companies — including the U.S.-headquartered Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft — notified their own platform services to the Commission as potential gatekeepers in July.

    The senator said that the DMA and DSA “objectively discriminate against U.S. companies” through mandatory compliance costs. In the letter, Cruz asks for detailed information on the number of FTC officials who have been “sent to Europe since June 2021,” as well as their titles and monthly expenses.

    Cruz also asked for details on the Commission’s office in San Francisco, which opened last September, and the FTC officials who have met with their EU counterparts there.

    On a visit to the EU’s California office in June, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton rejected accusations that the bloc’s digital rulebooks target U.S.-based companies, calling the idea an “urban legend” and noting that non-U.S. companies must also comply with the rules.

    It follows a similar letter from Republican U.S. Representative James Comer, who’s the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, asking that communications between the FTC and Commission on the DMA be turned over to Congress.

    Clothilde Goujard contributed reporting.

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    Edith Hancock

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  • Former FTC chair urges agency not to tarnish a bipartisan legacy from Reagan to Obama: ‘We can’t ignore the last 40 years of antitrust based on protecting consumers’

    Former FTC chair urges agency not to tarnish a bipartisan legacy from Reagan to Obama: ‘We can’t ignore the last 40 years of antitrust based on protecting consumers’

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    Whether philosophers pursuing knowledge or statesmen seeking counsel for their troubles, many in ancient times traveled to the Oracle at Delphi, who besides her famous maxim “know thyself” also proclaimed “know what you have learned.” With U.S. antitrust law now in turmoil and searching for new wisdom, its own savants will soon issue their own Delphic edict: new merger guidelines.

    As Bruce Kobayashi and I show in a new study for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, far from following the advice of the ancient Oracle, the new guidelines risk ignoring lessons about sound antitrust policy that led to a bipartisan consensus for enforcing the antitrust laws.

    President Biden recently decried modern antitrust law and policy as a 40-year “experiment failed.” To correct these “mistakes,” the antitrust agencies plan to replace the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines (already withdrawn by the FTC) with a new enforcement approach. Although the precise nature–including the operational details–of the new guidelines remains unknown at the time of writing, the agencies have not only made their disdain for the last four decades known but also expressed their affinity for the pre-1980 merger law that modern guidelines long ago repudiated.

    This pre-1980s paradigm was characterized by both a desire to protect competitors and a myopic focus on market concentration as measured by market share. Multiple court decisions before the last 40 years implied that a merger lowering costs and prices would nevertheless be condemned if it offended the stated goal of decentralization. This populism supposedly drove the simple concentration doctrine that condemned mergers between competitors with combined market shares as low as 5%.

    In 1968, merger guidelines followed this faulty thinking. With a nod to the then-popular structuralist economics, in “highly concentrated” markets (defined as markets where the four largest firms had a combined share of at least 75%), mergers between firms each with at least a 4% market share would ordinarily be challenged. With a nod to the populists, the 1968 guidelines held that even in markets that were not “highly concentrated,” mergers between firms each with a 5% market share would ordinarily be challenged.

    It was not long before the structuralist economics and populism underlying the 1968 guidelines were exposed as baseless. Critics of structuralism demonstrated that this approach did not discern between competitive and anticompetitive outcomes. Put simply, firms with successful products, not just anti-competitive monopolists, often have high market shares! Indeed, economists also demonstrated empirically that smaller competitors in concentrated markets had no higher profits than smaller firms in unconcentrated industries, providing strong evidence that the large firms in concentrated industries were more profitable because they were more efficient–not because they were acting anticompetitively.

    Populism too was rejected–and by no less authorities than the Supreme Court and other of the nation’s leading jurists. Doubling down on its earlier wisdom that the antitrust laws are designed “to protect competition, not competitors,” the courts made clear that antitrust law prohibits business practices only when they harm consumers.

    As Judge Richard Posner, himself a leading antitrust expert, explained, “it was prudent for the [FTC], rather than resting on the very strict merger decisions of the 1960s, to inquire into the probability of harm to consumers.” Four years later, then-Judge Clarence Thomas, in an opinion joined by then-judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg before both judges joined the Supreme Court, quoted Judge Posner approvingly in rejecting a merger challenge by the Department of Justice.

    Consumer-focused antitrust thus became bipartisan. In the 1980s, guidelines from the Reagan administration repudiated populism by clarifying that only mergers resulting in harm to consumers were unlawful. Revised guidelines issued by the Bush and Clinton administrations heralded the end of structuralist economics by not only adopting the consumer welfare standard of the Reagan Guidelines but also formalizing the framework for evaluating the likely effects of a merger, including allowing merging parties to offer various defenses.

    Moreover, the Obama administration’s 2010 guidelines further deemphasized the use of structural screens and raised the market share thresholds for mergers to be found presumptively anticompetitive far above those of the Reagan guidelines. And, just as the critics of yesteryear failed to account for size driven by efficiency, so do critics of today’s bipartisan consensus when they fail to account for the many procompetitive deals that might have been rejected under the old approach.

    Beyond mergers, the FTC’s leaders find “monopoly” rife in the economy. To quote Larry Summers, Secretary of Treasury under President Clinton, whose warnings of impending inflation the Biden Administration ignored, this big is bad attitude is “presumptively problematic.” He fears a new era of “populist antitrust policy that will make the US economy, more inflationary, and less resilient.” Leading companies, including in the technology industries, have been built from the ground up in the United States rather than Europe or China largely because the American legal environment is stable, predictable, and uniquely hospitable to vigorous, paradigm-shattering competition by businesses, large and small.  

    Even successful companies can violate the antitrust law, of course.  The rules of the last 40 years lead to the breakup of AT&T and the prosecution of Microsoft. Those same rules are now being adjudicated involving Facebook and Google in cases filed at the end of the 40 years the Biden administration condemned.

    In another maxim featured at the entrance of the Temple of Apollo, the Delphic Oracle cautioned, “give a pledge and trouble is at hand.” Indeed, trouble is exactly what will result if the antitrust revolutionaries double down and reinstate the old failed merger policies. Those policies were rejected for sound reasons, often based on hard-won experience, as the case law they produced was incoherent, illogical, and most importantly, anti-consumer. Unfortunately, the current antitrust leadership seems intent on forcing the antitrust world and consumers to relearn those painful lessons.

    Timothy J. Muris is a George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law and a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. He is co-author of the study “Turning Back the Clock: Structural Presumptions in Merger Analyses and Revised Merger Guidelines,” published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

    The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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    Timothy J. Muris

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