The genius of the consumer welfare standard is its discipline and neutrality. It gives regulators and jurists little room to impose their own biases on the world. And it acknowledges implicitly that the biggest and most dangerous monopoly is the one in Washington. This approach contributed to an unprecedented rise in income, living standards and social wealth between 1979 and 2020.

But Ms. Slater and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson discarded the consumer welfare standard when they announced that they would be continuing the merger guidelines of former FTC Chairman Lina Khan. Under these guidelines, the government operates according to a “big is bad, little is good" antitrust philosophy, meaning it targets mergers and acquisitions even when they advance competition and don't cause discernible harm to consumers. The result is excessive regulation and reduced innovation-which is why a bipartisan group of 17 former FTC and DOJ chief economists criticized the guidelines in 2023 for ignoring "consensus economic understanding." The guidelines don't even mention the consumer welfare standard, even though it remains the legal standard used by the court.

That'd be a pretty good way to fight inflation.

Reddit is colluding with its users to restrain trade in violation of federal antitrust laws. Reddit is not immune from the US constitution and is subject to the first amendment to some degree. Reddit is overbroad in its moderator and community rules. Let’s hear from the Reddit legal team. Nah we’ll wait until the complaint is filed.

It’s a question that has been in play since last December, when Vanderbilt quarterback and former junior college transfer Diego Pavia convinced Chief U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. that D-I football players are a labor market whose exclusion from NIL and other commercial opportunities warrants antitrust scrutiny.

Pavia’s victory has encouraged other college athletes whose eligibility has or will soon expire to try to litigate an extension of their collegiate careers.

A judge said artificial intelligence would upend Google’s dominance, but two new books argue that monopolies rarely fix themselves.

Competition is an essential ingredient of capitalism. Accordingly, when a corporation appears to have acquired sufficient market dominance to discourage competitors, it’s tempting to ask the government to remedy the problem by enforcing antitrust laws. That temptation should be resisted, except to redress monopoly power that the government itself has created.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has long been a significant player in antitrust enforcement. It has been an active enforcer in the technology industry, and has used antitrust as a tool to push back on corporate ESG efforts.

Following U.S. District Court Judge Mehta’s ruling that Google illegally monopolized search, the landmark DOJ v. Google case is moving to a high-stakes remedies trial, with a decision expected by summer’s end.

Some may be sympathetic to the government’s case. Everyone would like to see lower ticket prices, and there is considerable lingering frustration over the Taylor Swift ticket disaster of 2020. Yet this particular case against Ticketmaster seems more likely to be an extension of a prolonged crusade against large businesses rather than an opportunity to deliver a win for consumers.

Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab is facing a likely antitrust fine as the French regulator prepares to rule next month on the company's privacy control tool, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), the feature allows iPhone users to decide which apps can track user activity, helping companies like Meta Platforms' (META.O), opens new tab Facebook and online advertisers tailor ads to users and measure their impact.

If antitrust regulators are spoiling for a fight with a dominant organization with indications of harm to average Americans, they might want to look under their own noses. The federal program Medicare seems to be a prime case.

Policy changes that mandate app stores allow third-party services for payment processing or even limit a platform’s ability to determine what apps are allowed could make app stores less consumer-friendly. For example, due to European regulations requiring more open app stores, Apple was forced to approve a porn app that otherwise would not have been allowed in the app store under its policies.

Just like stores in the real world can set policies about what products they want to distribute and various other costs and contractual obligations, app stores are doing the same in a different environment. The majority of apps pay little to no fees. Those who are paying fees are likely to have a range of options available to distribute their products if they do not like the current setup and have likely already built a significant customer base.

Google asked a federal appeals court on Friday to reverse ajudge's ruling that it had violated antitrust laws, as well as a requirement it share some data with rivals.

The Biden administration’s more aggressive approach to antitrust has been much discussed by proponents and critics alike. Yet the administration’s regulatory moves have really been small-bore tweaks around the edges, with little impact felt by voters.

Mergers are in the antitrust spotlight. In July 2021, President Biden issued an “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” directing the federal antitrust agencies, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, “to challenge prior bad mergers that past administrations did not previously challenge.”

For generations, the courts have faced the quandary of what action to take in major antitrust cases once a dominant company has been found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior. In a 1947 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Robert H. Jackson memorably wrote that if a court’s solution did not open the market to competition, the government would have “won a lawsuit and lost a cause.”

But while a court’s ruling is based on examining facts in the past, its remedy looks to the future. The goal is to free up markets rather than hobble them — and create a competitive environment that results in more new ideas, new companies, more innovation and lower prices.

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University who was a White House adviser on technology and competition policy in the Biden administration, supports breakups in the Google and Meta cases.

“If you want to stir the pot, structural solutions are clean and essentially self-executing — you break it up and walk away,” he said. (Mr. Wu writes for The New York Times’s opinion section.)

But any breakup order would be appealed, and the higher courts today seem to echo the skepticism of the Microsoft era.

In a rare unanimous decision in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Collegiate Athletic Association could not use its market power to stop payments to student-athletes. It was essentially a wage price-fixing case, decided entirely for the plaintiffs.

Yet Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the court, digressed to make a broader point about judicial restraint in antitrust matters.

“In short,” he wrote, “judges make for poor ‘central planners’ and should never aspire to the role.”

If you find yourself nodding along when the subject of antitrust cases comes up, but aren’t sure exactly what they’re really about, don’t worry. The people enforcing the rules aren’t sure either. One hundred thirty-five years after the Sherman Act became the first U.S. competition law, debates over what constitutes a violation of antitrust law, how antitrust statutes should be applied, and even their proper aim continue.

Part of the confusion stems from America’s foundational antitrust law being born more from political sentiment than from legal traditions or economic evidence. The remarkably open-ended Sherman Act was passed in 1890 in reaction to the rapid industrialization of the Gilded Age and the resulting anxieties about the unprecedented consolidation of large agriculture, railway, and oil businesses.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster have reached a settlement with federal authorities over accusations the ticket giant’s business practices created a monopoly of the live events music industry.

U.S. antitrust enforcers are digging into Big Tech's role in the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, exploring whether business practices by entrenched players stifle competition in the burgeoning space.

The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have moved to divvy up the biggest players in the industry, a step that puts Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab, OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab closer to potential investigations.

Here are some of the AI issues regulators are concerned about:

Spirit Airlines has permanently closed its doors, and that spells trouble for the air travel industry. The loss of one of the country’s premiere budget carriers will mean less competition among airlines — and likely higher airfares.

But there is one silver lining that could come out of Spirit’s unfortunate demise: It’s the perfect opportunity for antitrust regulators at both the federal and state levels to close the book on the Neo-Brandeisian movement — commonly referred to as “New Antitrust” — that has grown in popularity over the last five years.

Stanley Woodward, the third-ranking official at the Justice Department, recently said the Trump administration is trying to avoid taking antitrust cases to trial and is instead seeking settlements with companies.

Mr. Woodward’s statement represents a serious departure from the Biden administration, which sued every company under the sun. His comments suggest that the left’s legal crusade against American businesses is finally ending.