WASHINGTON - Today, Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn testified at a U.S. Trade Representative public hearing on “Supply Chain Resilience.” 

In his testimony, Lynn drew from his two decades of reporting on how corporate control over our supply chains has resulted in regional concentration of production and dangerous supply chain choke points. He also presented a series of solutions to de-concentrate and dramatically strengthen our supply chains: 

• ·First, bright line rules are key. The only way to truly protect national security and good jobs and innovation and world peace is by breaking chokepoints and imposing easy-to-understand rules to prevent re-concentration.  

• Second, trade and industrial policy are subsets of competition policy. We must view them all as a single system of rules.  

• Third, we must target the biggest threats first. We must begin today to break the most dangerous chokepoints in chemicals, drugs, machine tools, materials, and other vital industries. 

• Fourth, communication platforms are infrastructure. We should treat dominant online platforms like Google and Twitter as we treated the essential communications platforms of the past, and apply common carrier style rules.  

• Fifth, we should be patient with our allies. From 2001 until 2021 the U.S. government bullied our closest partners on trade and competition policy. Usually, we were wrong. We still have much work to do to regain their trust.  

Read the full testimony here. 

In May 2022, Lynn delivered similar testimony and solutions during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on how extreme and growing market concentration chokes supply chains and worsens inflation.