All of these questions have been raised in recent U.S. antitrust probes and lawsuits. The queries are unlikely to result in widespread improvements to the welfare of tech consumers—which, these days, includes just about everyone. Yet some of the country’s top prosecutors, pundits, bureaucrats, and elected officials have made them a priority, often in open defiance of a longstanding principle that says ordinary customers should be at the center of conversations about antitrust.
Under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a bipartisan brigade of policymakers, attorneys general, and activist experts has become committed to excoriating America’s most popular tech companies as evil monopolists, launching complicated claims against them in court, and working to change laws to make these endeavors go down more smoothly.
The motivation for this bipartisan push can be found in partisan politics. For progressive Democrats, it isn’t really about tech companies. For populist Republicans, it’s not really about monopoly power. Instead, in both cases, antitrust has become a broad cover for pursuing pre-existing political agendas. Antitrust law—long understood as a blunt instrument to be used sparingly in cases where consumer interests are in serious danger—is being revived and reimagined by today’s antitrust crusaders as a multitool for prosecuting the public case against Big Tech and taking big or influential companies down a peg.
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