Biden likely to rein in mergers and crack down on big tech.
Since Joe Biden left office almost four years ago, antitrust enforcement has gone from a backwater of Democratic policymaking to a key tool for reshaping the U. S. economy.
That trend is expected to continue — and could even accelerate — under a Joe Biden administration, according to antitrust experts and those who advised his campaign on competition policy.
Biden will take office as progressives have come to see antitrust enforcement as a means for tackling the power of dominant companies and improving economic outcomes for workers. There’s mounting evidence that many industries have grown more concentrated, contributing to such economic woes as income inequality, declining business investment and stagnant wages.
The new consensus in the antitrust establishment that a tougher approach is needed sets the stage for Biden to take a harder line than Obama did, said Michael Kades, the director of markets and competition policy at the left- leaning Washington Center for Equitable Growth and a former lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission.
“The question isn’t whether a Biden administration will be more aggressive, but how much more aggressive,” said Kades.
Biden last week announced members of teams tasked with reviewing the work of federal agencies to
prepare the incoming administration. The Justice Department team includes Gene Kimmelman, a senior official in the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the Obama administration and now a senior adviser at tech policy organization Public Knowledge. Public Knowledge was a leading voice in arguing for the Justice Department to bring an antitrust case against Google.
Biden also named former FTC deputy counsel Heather Hippsley, a 35- year veteran of the agency, as lead for the FTC transition team.
Antitrust lawyers who advised the Biden campaign produced recommendations for the transition team that supported more robust enforcement, according to two people involved.
At the top of the to- do list will be the Justice Department’s monopoly case against Google for allegedly abusing its dominance in online search. Biden’s Justice Department will take over the lawsuit, which is in the early stages after it was filed in October.
Jennifer Rie, an antitrust analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said she expects the Biden administration will continue litigating the case, which she called a “solid lawsuit.” The case could potentially be broadened if state attorneys general file their own lawsuits against the company in the coming weeks and the complaints end up being consolidated, she said.
The Google case, the biggest monopoly action against a company in the U. S. in two decades, marked a sharp reversal in antitrust enforcement. Under Obama, FTC and Justice Department officials stopped a slew of mergers, but they didn’t bring any major monopoly cases.
To advocates of tougher enforcement, the Obama administration was seen as too cozy with Silicon Valley, allowing technology giants like Google and Facebook to vacuum up promising startups and solidify their grip over digital markets.
Since then, a movement has emerged to spotlight the power of dominant companies and push for more aggressive policing of their conduct. By last year, the antitrust landscape had shifted dramatically. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D- Mass., proposed a plan to break up tech giants while the Justice Department, the FTC and House Democrats opened investigations of the industry’s biggest companies.
In October, a House antitrust probe led by Rep. David Cicilline, D- R. I., produced a 449- page report that said dominant tech platforms had abused their power and called for a revamp of antitrust laws. That report could serve as an antitrust platform for the Democratic Party, said Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, which advocates for enforcement against dominant companies.
“This is a very different environment where everybody is saying we have a monopoly problem,” said Stoller. The Biden administration is “going to have to deal with it, and I think they’re open to dealing with it,” he said.
Last week, the European Union hit Amazon. com with a complaint accusing the online retailer of violating antitrust rules for using business data from independent sellers on its marketplace that could benefit the company’s own retail arm. The case echoes complaints from Warren and Cicilline, who say big tech companies like Amazon should be banned from running platforms that other businesses depend on and competing against those firms.
Biden, along with many lawmakers, may also push for changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the legal shield that protects tech companies from being held liable for their content. Members of both political parties have criticized the clause as one reason the social- media companies were able to usurp the role of traditional media and achieve dramatic growth.
But political differences could prevent a legislative solution: Republicans say Section 230 opened the door for digital platforms to suppress conservative opinions and want the tech companies to do less content moderation. Democrats say the legal shield has allowed the spread of extremist right- wing views and want more content policing.