Some of Pam Bondi's key objectives as President Trump's new Attorney General will be clear and obvious, like getting to the bottom of the Trump-Russia hoax and punishing those criminally responsible. This is a job that Joe Biden's DOJ pointedly ignored, but which Bondi must take up with alacrity, because her boss, and the 77 million people who voted for him, will accept nothing less. Other tasks in the purview of the Department of Justice are much more ambiguous, and one of these is the enforcement of our antitrust, or anti-monopoly, laws.
Under the Biden regime, antitrust actions were pursued within a basically political and ideological framework. Companies were targeted for antitrust enforcement seemingly to “rattle their cages” and ensure fulsome and generous support of progressive causes and Democratic politicians (think: DEI and Biden himself), as as well as prompt and diligent acceptance of “advice” from Biden officials on varied topics, but especially matters of censorship and the deplatforming of (conservative) dissenters. Antitrust actions also served to underscore the (false) narratives on which the Biden regime depended, especially the notion that President Biden was in no way responsible for “Bidenflation”. We were told that it was pure coincidence that, at the same time inflation was surging, Joe Biden was spending money like a drunken sailor (apologies to actual drunken sailors, who will find this comparison insulting). Oh no, inflation was instead entirely the fault of greedy corporations. Which corporations were the greedy ones? Naturally, they were the ones that weren't toeing the Democratic Party line, or which might have been unacceptably hesitant in doing so.
A notable example of this type of abuse of the antitrust system was the Biden Administration's case against Visa, which was charged with inflating debit card fees and, consequently, the prices paid by consumers. The reality, of course, is that consumers today have many more options for making payments than they had a decade or two ago. There is thus plenty of competition in the industry, and any consumer or any business that wants to avoid the use of debit cards has ways and means to do so. Beating up on big banks and credit card companies is politically popular, especially on the Left, and it serves as a great distraction from record levels of inflation. Consequently, the Visa case, and others like it, proceeded despite their obvious flaws.
Under Gail Slater, Trump's new head of the antitrust division of the DOJ, bogus prosecutions like these should be a thing of the past. Now, of course, there's no runaway inflation to distract anyone from, and, even if there was, the new antitrust team wants to apply the law judiciously and sparingly, which may not always be popular, but is unquestionably the right thing to do.
Nevertheless, antitrust actions are unavoidable and necessary, in some cases, to protect the integrity of the market and the interests of consumers. One obvious instance would be the DOJ's ongoing antitrust case against Google, which a judge has found is abusing what amounts to a monopoly position in digital advertising, and the DOJ's proposed remedy is that Alphabet, which is Google's parent company, must sell off Chrome, the very popular browser that Google has tied into its search engine and many other Alphabet products and services. Hopefully, this will be the last word, and Alphabet will indeed be required to spin off Chrome. More must be done, however, because Google and many other Big Tech firms are essentially in monopoly positions, and those monopolies threaten not just consumers' pocketbooks, but arguably our liberties and our way of life. Why go this far? Because Big Tech firms, especially social media companies, effectively control large swaths of public discourse. Much like the three big television networks did several decades ago, they determine the kinds of speech that are permissible and how widely that speech can be disseminated. In fact, they literally determine who may speak and who may not. This is a dangerous amount of power for any one company, or a handful of companies, to hold.
Another good example would be YouTube, also an Alphabet property, which enjoys a virtual monopoly over video sharing. YouTube has thus become a menace not just to many content creators – making and then breaking them, if they fail to meet its “terms of service” – but to society as a whole, which is all too often in thrall to the whims of Big Tech executives and bureaucrats. Antitrust laws may not have been drafted with the intention of prohibiting social/cultural monopolies, as opposed to commercial ones, but the DOJ is already arguing that these traditional and more literal interpretations of the law don't go far enough. Gail Slater and her team should prioritize antitrust actions that not only expand consumer choice but also serve to defend our freedoms and the healthy pluralism on which democracy relies.
Administering our antitrust laws is by no means an easy task. It requires seasoned judgment, and more often than not, it means leaving the market alone, so that consumers can decide for themselves where to channel their purchases and which companies rise and which ones fall. In rare cases, however, there is a need for DOJ prosecutors to take up the mantle of antitrust enforcement and to hold corporations accountable for abusing their market dominance or undercutting our constitutional liberties. We have every indication that Gail Slater and her team know when it is time to act, and when it is time to be watchful and vigilant, but not overzealous in resorting to the long arm of the law.
What a refreshing change this makes from the bad old days of Joe Biden!
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmakers show on WLEA/WYSL.
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