American Antitrust Institute’s Unsure Trump Can Tackle Big Tech Issues

The American Antitrust Institute doesn’t have a lot of hope for the Trump Administration addressing concerns about whether Big Tech companies buying up potential competitors is an antitrust problem, reported John Eggerton.

Both the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have been looking into how Big Tech got that way, and whether any anticompetitive red flags were missed in the series of mergers, often with smaller start-ups fueled by venture capital, that allowed edge providers to become mammoth players in the US and world economy.  

In a new analysis, “Antitrust Enforcement and Competition Policy in the US,” which suggests the Trump Administration antitrust enforcement has been lax, the institute claimed the urge to break up or regulate Big Tech has been a reaction to Trump Administration antitrust inaction, and that without aggressive action using a variety of antitrust enforcement tools, neither Congress not the Administration are likely to address concerns about the size and power of Big Tech.

According to Eggerton, it suggests that had the Administration had a more balanced antitrust toolkit that included competition, regulatory, interoperability, and intellectual property policies, the blunter instrument of breakup might not take such a potentially “outsized” role to solving the “economic, social, and even political problems” the institute concedes are raised by digital tech companies. 

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