The New Trustbusters Are Coming for Big Tech

The companies that make your life better are under attack from left and right.

- Thomas W. Hazlett

Jeff Bezos “Is worried about me,” grinned Donald Trump back in 2016 while discussing Amazon’s bald-headed billionaire. “He thinks I would go after him for antitrust, because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much.” President Trump has continued to threaten Amazon and other tech giants with the trust-busting lash. This year, on CNBC, he informatively announced his role model: “The European Union is suing them all of the time. Well, we should be doing this. They’re our companies.”

You will not be surprised to hear that Fox News talker Tucker Carlson agrees with Trump. But you might blink when told that he arrived at this agreement via a lecture delivered by Professor Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts senator has gained traction in a crowded Democratic presidential field by announcing pre-election antitrust verdicts to bust up Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook—no legal proceedings required.

Carlson sprinkles conservative holy water upon Warren’s Plan for Economic Patriotism, saying her “policy prescriptions make obvious sense.” Warren would treat the rise of big tech firms like an exploding offshore oil rig: an emergency to be met by capping, closing, and hosing down the fiery mess. Carlson gushes that Warren “sounds like Trump at his best.”

This bipartisan pot of pols and pundits is echoing a school of thought known as the “new structuralism.” But you’re more likely to hear its nickname: “hipster antitrust.” It claims a historical hero in the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and its manifesto is Lina Khan’s 2017 Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.”