The New Brandeis or neo-Brandeis movement is an antitrust academic and political movement in the United States which argues that excessively centralized private power is dangerous for economical, political and social reasons. [1] [2] Initially called hipster antitrust by its detractors, also referred to as the "Columbia school" or "Neo-Progressive antitrust," the movement advocates that United States antitrust law return to a broader concern with private power and its negative effects on market competition, income inequality, consumer rights, unemployment, and wage growth.
The movement draws inspiration from the anti-monopolist work of Louis Brandeis, an early 20th century United States Supreme Court Justice who called high economic concentration “the Curse of Bigness” and believed monopolies were inherently harmful to the welfare of workers and business innovation.
The New Brandeis movement opposes the school of thought in modern antitrust law that antitrust should center on customer welfare (as generally advocated by the Chicago school of economics). Instead, the New Brandeis movement advocates a broader antimonopoly approach that is concerned with private power, the structure of the economy and market conditions necessary to promote competition. [3] [4]
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The New Brandeis movement believes that centralized private power poses a danger to the economic and social conditions of democracy. [5] Neo-Brandeisians believe, for example, that monopoly power is ripe with potential for abuse. They have also argued that dominant tech platforms create high barriers for potential competitors and reduce bargaining power of individual merchants, content providers, and app developers. [6] The movement advocates for market structures that prevent anti-competitive practices and would increase scrutiny of mergers, including vertical mergers. Proponents believe antitrust laws should focus less on short-term price effects of mergers and more on improving the market conditions necessary to promote real competition. [5] [6] [7]
Individuals who have been described as being associated with the movement include Lina Khan, Tim Wu, Jonathan Kanter, and Barry Lynn. [8] [9] [10] Senators Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren have been described as allies of the movement, [11] [12] and have called on the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission to focus their enforcement efforts more on helping workers. [13] The movement has since been the subject of both academic conferences, [14] research papers, [15] and academic journals. [16]
Critics of the New Brandeis movement believe that promoting competition for its own sake causes inefficient producers to stay in business, preferring a litigation approach based on empirical evidence. [17] The term "hipster antitrust" originally began as a Twitter hashtag, and rose to prominence when Senator Orrin Hatch used the term during multiple speeches on the United States Senate floor. [18] [19] [20] [21] Matt Levine of Bloomberg News has written that the term hipster antitrust "appeals to nostalgia for old-fashioned antitrust enforcement". [22] Some proponents of the movement believe the term is pejorative. [23] The term was coined by Konstantin Medvedovsky,[ when? ] [24] an attorney at Dechert, and popularized by disgraced former Federal Trade Commissioner Joshua D. Wright. [25] [26]
As documented by historian Ellis Hawley, the first "NeoBrandeisian" movement arose in the late 1930s. [27] In reaction to the failures of the first New Deal a group headed by Harvard Professor Felix Frankfurter advanced ideas of economic decentralization and renewed antitrust enforcement. These ideas came to be influential during the late 1930s and onward, during the so-called "Second" New Deal. Prominent individuals associated with the movement included Robert H. Jackson, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, and Thurman Arnold.
From World War II until the 1970s, the Brandeisian view that high market concentration leads to anticompetitive behavior was sometimes called the Harvard School of thought because the view was primarily associated with Harvard University, including works by economists Edward Mason, Edward Chamberlain, and Joe Bain. In the early late 1970s, this view fell out of favor as the views of the Chicago School of thought rose, advocating a close attention to the short term effects of mergers on consumer prices. [17]
Lawrence Lessig wrote "The New Chicago School" article in 1998, challenging directly with analysis of network effects the orthodoxy of antitrust economics during the protracted US v Microsoft litigation of the late 1990s.[ citation needed ] Tim Wu continued his mentor's work with extensive analysis of net neutrality from 2003, to which Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Economides, both then at NYU, contributed.[ citation needed ] Continuing in the late 2010s, [28] the movement takes inspiration from former US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, who was a prominent anti-monopolist. [29] [30] Brandeis believed that antitrust action should prevent any one company from maintaining too much power over the economy because monopolies were harmful to innovation, business vitality, and the welfare of workers. [5] [17] He described "The Curse of Bigness," believing that large profitable firms use their money to influence politics and create further consolidation and dominance, once stating, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” [17] [31]
In the 2010s, the New Brandeis theory was popularized by legal scholars Lina Khan and Tim Wu, both of Columbia University. Khan published an article about the negative effects of monopoly power by the company Amazon. [17] The theory would heighten scrutiny of large company mergers. [32]
Wu published The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Golden Age in 2018, which criticized antitrust's drift from its historic origins, introduced Brandeis' life and ideals, and advocated a return a more decentralized economy. [33] In 2019 Khan, Wu and others released a "Utah Statement" written at anti-monopoly conference meant as a codification of the movements' main principles. [34] [35]
The movement was perceived to grow in influence during the Biden administration, as compared to the prior Trump and Obama presidencies. [8] [36] In 2020, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) was founded by several neo-Brandeisians to support regulatory efforts and research, led by Sarah Miller. [37] [38] The Wall Street Journal described the movement as "a new generation of trustbusters" in 2021, arguing that it represented a shift away from a singular focus on perceived consumer welfare that began with the Reagan administration and the ideas of Robert Bork. [6]
In 2021, the White House appointed Tim Wu, a prominent member of the movement at Columbia, to serve as special assistant to the President for Competition and Technology policy. [39] The President in July 2021 signed a new Executive Order of Competition, which called for a reinvigoration of competition policy across government. [40] Biden later nominated Jonathan Kanter, a neo-Brandeisian, to serve as assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. [41] [42] Kanter was confirmed by the United States Senate by a vote of 68–29 and took office in November 2021. [43] [44] Biden also nominated Lina Khan to be Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. [45] [46] On June 15, 2021, her nomination was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 69 to 28. [47] Khan was confirmed with bipartisan support. [48]
Since the appointment of Neo-Brandeisian "troika" of Tim Wu, Lina Khan, and Jonathan Kanter, [49] the U.S. government has reformed the review of mergers, [50] reinvigorated pro-competitive rulemakings in non-antitrust agencies, [51] blocked several high profile mergers like JetBlue/Spirit [52] , Penguin/S&S [53] [54] and Kroger/Albertsons [55] and taken tech platform Google to trial in the first major monopolization case of the 21st century. [56] The movement has also experienced some setbacks, including at least one loss against Facebook in court. [57]
In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of mostly federal laws that govern the conduct and organization of businesses in order to promote economic competition and prevent unjustified monopolies. The three main U.S. antitrust statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These acts serve three major functions. First, Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade. Second, Section 7 of the Clayton Act restricts the mergers and acquisitions of organizations that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. Third, Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits monopolization.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction over federal civil antitrust law enforcement with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. The agency is headquartered in the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, DC.
TimothyShiou-Ming Wu is a Taiwanese-American legal scholar who served as Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy at the United States from 2021 to 2023. He is also a professor of law at Columbia University and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is known legally and academically for significant contributions to antitrust and communications policy, coining the phrase "network neutrality" in his 2003 law journal article, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. In the late 2010s, Wu was a leading advocate for an antitrust lawsuit directed at the breakup of Facebook.
Christine A. Varney is an American antitrust attorney who served as the U.S. assistant attorney general of the Antitrust Division for the Obama administration and as a Federal Trade commissioner in the Clinton administration. Since August 2011, Varney has been a partner of the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where she chairs the antitrust department.
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William Evan Kovacic is an American legal scholar who served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from 2006 to 2011, including as its chairman from 2008 to 2009. He is a member of the Republican Party.
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Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, Inc. is an ongoing antitrust court case brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Facebook parent company Meta Platforms. The lawsuit alleges that Meta has accumulated monopoly power via anti-competitive mergers, with the suit centering on the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
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The State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act of 2021 is a proposed antitrust bill in the United States Congress. The legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives by Ken Buck (R-CO) as H.R. 3460 on May 21, 2021. Companion legislation was introduced in the Senate by Mike Lee (R-UT) as S. 1787 on May 24, 2021.
Executive Order 14036, titled Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy and sometimes referred to as the Executive Order on Competition, is the fifty-first executive order signed by U.S. President Joe Biden. Signed on July 9, 2021, the order serves to establish a "whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy" by encouraging stronger enforcement of antitrust law.
Federal Trade Commission, et al. v. Amazon.com, Inc. is a lawsuit brought against the multinational technology company and online retailer Amazon in 2023. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), joined by the attorneys general of seventeen U.S. states, alleges that Amazon holds and abuses an online retail monopoly.
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