WASHINGTON—Following House passage of the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act of 2022 (H.R.3843), the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the leading think tank for science and technology policy, released the following statement from Aurelien Portuese, director of ITIF’s Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy:
The goal of antitrust reform should be to advance a modern approach to competition policy that elevates innovation to become a central concern for enforcement. Most of the bills under consideration in this Congress would do the opposite: They would stifle innovation and skew the terms of competition.
The Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act was an exception in that it had the potential to improve the effectiveness of antitrust enforcement without imposing a costly new regulatory burden on innovative firms. Unfortunately, the filing-fee bill that ended up passing the House was at best incomplete, because it fails to provide congressional oversight to ensure increased human resources are dedicated to enforcement.
Title III of the final bill is particularly detrimental as it adopts the State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act, which fragments antitrust enforcement nationally by failing to limit the types of state enforcement actions that are exempt from being consolidated into multidistrict cases.
