Five Steps Would Help U.S. Protect Democracy and Rebuild Our Security and Prosperity

WASHINGTON – On Thursday, Barry Lynn, executive director of Open Markets Institute, provided testimony at the “Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century: The Case for Antitrust Reform” hearing for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, chaired by Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

This hearing represents the next step in the growing push for a fundamental shift in competition policy that will reform the American political economy.

In his testimony, Lynn presented “the five must-dos” for protecting all people in this country from dangerous corporate concentration of power both in the U.S. and abroad:

1. Admit, acknowledge and expose the ways in which monopoly threatens democracy

2. Master and readopt the original purposes of competition policy

3. Utilize non-discrimination rules and bright-line rules—the two main tools of anti-monopoly

4. Create a coherent U.S. competition policy, by reintegrating antitrust with trade policy, patent policy, corporate governance policy, and national security industrial policy

5. Embrace and act on the political, economic, and intellectual opportunity before us.

Just three years ago, this Subcommittee held a hearing on the wisdom of focusing foremost on efficiency in enforcing antitrust law. Most who testified that day denied that America faces any monopoly problem at all. Today, by contrast, the great majority of Americans want some sort of action against bigness.

Enforcers and legislators are rising to the challenge. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have brought lawsuits against Google and Facebook. And in one of the most democratic anti-monopoly actions in American history, the attorneys general from 49 states, Puerto Rico, D.C., and Guam have launched investigations of Google and Facebook, and many of those states have joined to file three additional far-reaching lawsuits.

Lynn makes the case that now is the time for both the Biden Administration and Congress to really accelerate all efforts both to battle monopoly, and to rebuild open and competitive markets.

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Read Lynn’s full testimony here.

And read Lynn’s article on how Biden can use competition policy to transform America here.