Back in the 1990s we in the Clinton administration put Breyer on the Supreme Court in the belief that the Court needed somebody who genuinely understood antitrust. But the Republican justices have given him zero deference, even though he knows the issues and they do not. And this is an increasing problem: Fiona Scott Morton: [There is a lot to fix in U.S. antitrust enforcement today(https://equitablegrowth.org/there-is-a-lot-to-fix-in-u-s-antitrust-enforcement-today/): "Last month’s court decision allowing AT&T Inc. to acquire Time Warner Inc. is an example of the inability of our current system of courts and enforcement.... Judge Richard Leon demonstrated a lack of understanding of the markets, the concept of vertical integration, corporate incentives, and the intellectual exercise of forecasting what the unified firm would do... a poor decision...
...The Supreme Court decision in Ohio v. American Express Company further weakens antitrust enforcement by complicating the analysis and raising the standard of proof for platform business cases. There are many other settings where consumers deserve similar efforts to protect competition and where the two federal antitrust agencies have yet to take enforcement steps.... [There] are low-risk and high-return cases for U.S. antitrust agencies to bring... [that] will require the agencies to look beyond old markets with lots of precedent, and instead analyze the products that consumers are now buying such as online hotel bookings, credit cards, technology standards, and mutual funds, or markets where consumers are selling such as labor markets. These are markets that do not have established jurisprudence or a recent history of enforcement.... More novel cases are harder to bring because an existing draft complaint is not already sitting in the files of the enforcement agencies...
#shouldread
#antitrust
#monopoly
#monopsony
