At a recent Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee oversight hearing, the Biden administration’s top antitrust enforcers went far beyond asking Congress for more money to continue their hawkish enforcement game plan. DOJ’s assistant attorney general for antitrust, Jonathan Kanter, and FTC’s chair, Lina Khan, also asked Congress to pass legislation that would considerably reform existing antitrust laws. Unfortunately, the bills in consideration are subpar compared to what’s currently in the books.
In his oral and written testimony to the Senate, Kanter expressed his strong support for a number of bills currently being considered by Congress, including Senator Klobuchar and Senator Grassley’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act and the Open App Markets Act. But contrary to what Kanter suggests — that these bills would enable the agencies to better protect Americans from anticompetitive conduct — the pieces of legislation threaten to achieve the exact opposite and harm consumers.
Published in its entirety in Medium.