Aurelien Portuese

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, called for a “new transatlantic agenda for global change.” Before such a needed partnership can be fruitful, the EU will need to make a number of changes.

From A&P in the 1920s to Sears Roebuck & Co. in the 1980s to Walmart in the 2000s—and now to Amazon—large, innovative retail companies are regularly subject to calls for break-ups. But the economy will lose if populism eventually triumphs.

In 1888, a political activist and author named Edward Bellamy published a classic book titled Looking Backward 2000-1887, in which he pictured a future—our present time—when technology companies administered the regulatory state would ensure people live in peaceful abundance. Today’s populists, including some top regulators, have revived Bellamy’s dystopian view.

At a time when leading U.S. companies are being unfairly raked over the coals for protectionist purposes by governments from Beijing to Brussels, the FTC should be pushing for legally binding global rules to bring coherence and order to international competition law.

“Anti-monopoly” is now the solution de jour for all that ails the U.S. economy, just as it was in the early New Deal. That latest example of this trend is the “Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act” (or “CALERA”), introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, in an effort to “better protect competition in the American economy.”

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law kicks off a series of hearings this week that should focus first and foremost on ensuring that antitrust fosters consumer welfare. They should evaluate large technology platforms on a single question: Is what they are doing good for average Americans, while not engaging in clearly anticompetitive conduct?

It may pave the way for other states follow, but Maryland’s digital tax will not prove to be a way out of the crisis. It will only make the crisis linger.

The DMA may prove to be most effective in building walls where consumer prices may increase, consumer quality decrease, and entrenched market positions’ overall contestability diminish rather than increase. The DMA may potentially harm gatekeepers, something EU policymakers indeed have in mind, since virtually all the gatekeepers as defined by the DMA are American. But it will certainly replace them with walls for consumers and innovation.

The Facebook lawsuit aimed at breaking up an innovative leader of social media arbitrarily favors internal growth over external growth, discretionarily disavows previous regulatory decrees with retroactive effects, and discards consumer preferences in order to impose the regulator’s preferences of a myriad of platforms forced to renege on the sought-after scalability of the platforms.

Is this really a privacy or an antitrust problem, or yet another example of a conflated, little understood issue?

The DOJ’s attempt to instill corporate selflessness by prohibiting favoritism is at odds with competition on the merits and the spirit of fundamental economic freedoms.

In a political weaponization of antitrust laws, the administration and its state AG allies decided to go to battle against Google over an issue the president thought was an obstacle to his re-election: the alleged collusion between big tech companies and the Democrats against himself.