(2024-02-07) Stoller Congressional Republicans To Defund The Antitrust Division

Matt Stoller: Congressional Republicans to Defund the Antitrust Division? Only, now there are a few problems.

because the House and Senate have to combine their bills in a negotiated settlement, which means that Jim Jordan and the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, will be sitting down with Senate leaders and White House negotiators and fighting over thousands of different budget priorities across the whole of government, only one of which is to raise or cut the budget for the Antitrust Division.

Congress passed important bipartisan antitrust reform legislation, which included a boost to division resources so it could bring cases like that against Apple, as well as others, like one against Ticketmaster

since the turn against antitrust in the 1980s, Congress has been cutting the funding of the Antitrust Division, such that it has 230 fewer employees today than it did in 1979, despite a much larger economy

The first and most important is House Republican Jim Jordan, who is using the old tried and true method of attacking a popular policy without doing it directly. He’s trying to cut funding to the Antitrust Division

But if this money isn’t restored, then the Department of Justice Antitrust Division will once again have to make ugly choices about which antitrust cases to pick

It’s been fairly obvious for years that dominant firms are using this political moment to play a wait-and-see game, reducing acquisition activity to avoid scrutiny but not changing their fundamentally extractive behavior.

a cut of 14%, which inflation-adjusted would bring it back to below what it was the first year that Biden took office. So that’s problem one.

The second problem is more of a miscommunication or error than anything else

It’s pretty obvious what Apple is doing. It makes great products, it doesn’t need to block rivals to make money, but it does so anyway. Why? Well, it doesn’t fear the government. And that’s been a smart calculation. So far, Apple alone among big tech firms has escaped legal action by the government

the Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards. Apple spent a billion dollars in legal costs in 2017, five times the amount the entire Antitrust Division spent on everything.

Apple’s attitude is pervasive in every sector of the economy, from big tech to pharmaceutical firms to Ticketmaster to meatpackers to dialysis. These firms’ executives aren’t just trying to protect what they have, they are offended that anyone might see their behavior as unlawful.

Generally speaking antitrust is popular, because while people appreciate big firms that do useful things, they also dislike extractive bad behavior.

At the beginning of the year, the New York Times reported the Antitrust Division is getting ready to file a complaint against Apple, a three trillion dollar corporation

There are possible suits against rent-fixing software firm RealPage, Visa, UnitedHealth Group, Ticketmaster and hospital giant University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And of course, there are the existing suits, most notably the multiple cases against Google that are being litigated this year.

Apple, for instance, has long been thwarting rivals from accessing the Apple ecosystem