Good Luck Mr. President….
The odds are vastly stacked against U…..
While I would be first on line to applaud this effort to break down the dominance of big business and tech companies ?
The reality is those organizations/industries have gotten to where they are with help from the American government ….
Tax laws favor them…
Business laws favor them….
The court’s favor them….
Campaign fundraising favors them…
Lawmakers who write the laws favor them…
The US Economy favors them….
US dominate in certain industries favors them…
President Biden has assembled the most aggressive antitrust team in decades, stacking his administration with three legal crusaders as it prepares to take on corporate consolidation and market power with efforts that could include blocking mergers and breaking up big companies.
Mr. Biden’s decision this past week to name Jonathan Kanter to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division is the latest sign of his willingness to clash with corporate America to promote more competition in the tech industry and across the economy. Mr. Kanter has spent years as a lawyer fighting behemoths like Facebook and Google on behalf of rival companies.
If confirmed by the Senate, he will join Lina Khan, who helped reframe the academic debate over antitrust and now leads the Federal Trade Commission, and Tim Wu, a longtime proponent of breaking up Facebook and other large companies who is now the special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy.
The appointments show both the Democratic Party’s renewed antitrust activism and the Biden administration’s growing concern that the concentration of power in technology, as well as other industries like pharmaceuticals, agriculture, health care and finance, has hurt consumers and workers and stunted economic growth….
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The administration has quietly supported legislation working its way through the House, but it has not yet sought to lead a congressional antitrust push in the way Mr. Biden has on infrastructure, child care and other components of his $4 trillion economic agenda….
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White House officials argue that putting tough-minded regulators in powerful positions can allow them to succeed with antitrust efforts in a way that President Donald J. Trump, who also issued an executive order on competition and talked of breaking up tech and hospital mergers, did not.
“We are hopeful,” said Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute and a proponent of stronger competition enforcement. “But when the rubber meets the road, they are going to have to juggle an aggressive agenda with the realities of courts, Congress and pressure from the outside.”…
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The approach contrasts sharply with the view of regulators during the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden was vice president.
The number of merged hospitals quadrupled during President Barack Obama’s first term, leaving millions of patients with fewer choices and higher prices for medical care.
In 2011, regulators approved Comcast’s merger with NBCUniversal — combining a powerful cable and internet provider with a media giant — with conditions that the company’s own executive vice president, David Cohen, dismissed as not “particularly restrictive.”
Only one of three Democrats at the Federal Communications Commission opposed the deal, and Christine Varney, the head of antitrust at the Justice Department, said the merger would “bring new and innovative products to the marketplace, providing consumers with more programming choices.”…
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Courts have become increasingly conservative in antitrust cases, adhering more strongly to the belief that higher prices are the strongest sign of competition violations.
Administration officials acknowledge that challenge and say they are scrutinizing the antitrust views of prospective judicial nominees, in hopes of bending the courts toward a more sympathetic view of government efforts to block mergers and break up monopolies….