Experts Say Congress’s New Antitrust Package is Philosophically Flawed and Politically Motivated

June 18, 2021—The package of five new antitrust bills introduced last Friday would “radically change how firms compete,” said a critic close to the technology industry.

The comments, by Aurelien Portuese, director of antitrust and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in an interview with Broadband Breakfast, represent a sharp critiques of the bills by legal experts and tech industry executives.

The bills would not achieve their stated goals, Portuese said. He says that they would stifle competition and lead to less, not more innovation.

Portuese said that, because the bills target companies above a certain market cap and would only apply to those companies, they would lead to “a two-level playing field” in which the laws would apply to certain companies and not to others.

“These bills allow practices for some companies while prohibiting the very same practices to their rivals, and conversely, would prohibit some practices to some companies while allowing them for rivals.”

Because the measures were drafted to target a specific companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, they were a form of “overt discrimination.”

Apple will be regulated by the new laws, but their competitor in the music streaming industry, Spotify, will not. This would give Spotify a competitive advantage over Apple.

Antitrust law should be used to foster innovation

Antitrust policy should be employed to foster as much innovation as possible, and not simply break up large firms into smaller ones, said David Teece, executive chairman of the Berkeley Research Group, to an online panel hosted by ITIF.

For his part, Portuese said that antitrust law is a “question of leadership, not of law.” Currently, there are three active legal cases employing antitrust philosophy involving Google, Facebook, and Apple, all of which, he said, are being prosecuted under the current antitrust law.

These current antitrust tools are sufficient, he said, and the lack of antitrust actions taken by past administrations is a problem of enforcement, and not the legal framework itself.

Lina Khan, a longstanding critic of Big Tech, was appointed chairwomen of the FTC on Tuesday. As chairwoman, she will have considerable leeway in directing how and what the FTC regulates. That could mean a major shift in the commission’s enforcement on antitrust.

Portuese also made the point that tech innovation requires large capital expenditures. By specifically targeting the U.S.’s top firms and breaking them up, the overall amount of innovation that occurs in the technology industry will diminished, he said.

Enforcement for political gain

Samuel Palmisano, the former CEO of technology company IBM, said that he sees the new antitrust legislative proposals as less about competition policy and more about politics.

“We see both the right and the left wanting to break up media and social platforms because they don’t like what’s being published, or not published,” Palmisano said at the ITIF event. “There can be a legitimate debate about media fairness or Section 230, but antitrust isn’t the tool for that debate.”

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled the last name of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, as “Kahn.” The story has been corrected, and Broadband Breakfast apologizes for the error.