Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google face Congress this week over alleged consumer harm. But with antitrust regulation, policymakers do not merely push companies around; they also directly or indirectly dictate business models and can even inappropriately influence the trajectory of entire sectors.
There’s a contradiction in the Trump, and by extension Republican, deregulatory agenda that could inadvertently threaten the recovery of an already wavering economy.
That aberration is the continued reflexive embrace of antitrust regulation, an original sin of the administrative state with vast, potentially destructive societal costs.
With antitrust intervention, politicians and bureaucrats do not merely push companies around; they also directly or indirectly dictate business models and can even inappropriately influence the trajectory of entire economic sectors in non-market directions.
The big tech news this week is a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law.
Called « Online Platforms and Market Power: Examining the Dominance of Amazon
AMZN, Apple
AAPL, Facebook, and Google,
GOOGL » the hearing will feature the CEOs of each, appearing remotely: Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. This hearing is the committee’s sixth in a series.
Its bad news when both parties favor economic regulatory intervention and that the state we’re in now with antitrust. While international regulators and state attorneys general have their sights on these companies, all are targets of federal antitrust investigation by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in the Trump administration. (Attorney General Bob Barr, separately testifying in Judiciary this week, is taking a lead role.)
In a joint statement, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N. Y.) and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R. I.) said:
“Since last June, the Subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement. Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. «
The subcommittee will ultimately issue a report based on more than a year of information gathering, but will likely downplay letters forthe record and inconvenient testimony from antitrust skeptics. How do we know that? A headline on Drudge referred to an “APPLEFACEBOOKAMAZONGOOGLE Reckoning.” Other articles refer to the CEOs facing a « grilling. »
The very notion of monopoly power in intangible code, in ones and zeros, seems perverse, though. And here we observe not one “monopoly” but four companies (other giants could have also been invited to testify) vigorously competing against one anotherin various ways. That would seem to exemplify competition rather than the stifling of it with which big tech stands accused.
The chief internal contradiction of antitrust is that it decries bigness and excess power but then urges that the biggest and most powerful entity of all — the government wielding the life or death power over all the CEOs’ domains — impose a subjective remedy.
