[A package of bills to improve antitrust enforcement passes the
House.]
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ANTITRUST ACTION MOVES FORWARD  
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David Dayen
September 30, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ A package of bills to improve antitrust enforcement passes the
House. _

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) speak at a hearing
of the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 7, 2022. The two have
recently collaborated on an antitrust bill that is likely to become
law., Michael Brochstein / SIPA USA

 

The House of Representatives took an uncharted step yesterday, passing
a package of three bills that would update America’s antitrust laws
for the first time in decades. It wasn’t the antitrust bill that
most people have been talking about, the one that would end Big Tech
platforms promoting their own products ahead of rivals. Chuck Schumer
hasn’t even brought that to the Senate for a vote. But this more
modest set of actions reveals the coalition that could push that bill
over the line soon. More importantly, it asserts Congress’ role in
antitrust, which for decades has been twisted and manipulated by the
courts.

The first of the three bills
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the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, which will give the Justice
Department’s antitrust division more funding to pursue cases by
increasing merger filing fees on large companies and reducing them for
small and medium-sized ones. Second is the State Antitrust Enforcement
Venue Act, which passed the Senate unanimously
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June, and would end the practice of state antitrust suits getting
merged with private suits and put into the Multidistrict Litigation
process, moving them away from where they were filed (often to venues
friendly to monopolists, like when Big Tech cases are consolidated in
the Northern District of California). This will not only enhance
state-level antitrust enforcement but speed up the cases as well.

Finally, there’s the Foreign Merger Subsidy Disclosure Act, which
would force any merging entities to disclose subsidies received from
the Chinese government. This is an odd choice for inclusion in this
package, but Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote it, and so it will likely
grab his vote should this get to the Senate.

_MORE FROM DAVID DAYEN_ [[link removed]]

The three bills got merged into a package that passed 242-184
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vote is interesting. There were 39 Republican yes votes and 16
Democratic no votes. Eleven of those 16 Democrats were from
California, following the lead of Zoe Lofgren, who represents Silicon
Valley and whose daughter works on Google’s legal team
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Lofgren spoke on the House floor yesterday, making the absurd yet
predictable argument
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the bill bans content moderation, a go-to claim for opponents of
stronger antitrust laws that attempts to split the left-right
coalition. It didn’t work here because it’s ridiculous to think
that a bill increasing filing fees and changing venues for antitrust
cases would somehow ban content moderation. The way she instinctively
reached for that argument as an all-purpose debate ender exposes the
hollowness of it when applied to other bills.

On the Republican side there were 39 yes votes, reflecting a kind of
power struggle within the GOP. There’s a staunchly pro-business side
that only wants to use opposition to monopolies, mostly Big Tech, as a
way to work the refs and get better treatment on social media. Rep.
Jim Jordan (R-OH) leads this crew. And then there’s the side that
looks at these issues more in the manner of actual populism,
recognizing that capitalism needs competition to survive. Based on
these numbers, that includes one-fifth of the House GOP caucus, which
isn’t much but enough to carry bills to victory under the current
partisan configuration.

This bill should have a relatively easy time passing the Senate in the
lame duck session. One of its main components already passed the
Senate unanimously, another was written by a Republican, and the
filing fee piece is a bipartisan Durbin-Grassley bill. It certainly
doesn’t go as far as the Big Tech self-preferencing bill; it
doesn’t address specific industries. But it would quietly, slowly,
make antitrust enforcement better, and in a small way discourage the
urge to concentrate among the biggest corporations. It’s worth
celebrating Congress’s return to the stage in setting the
competition rules.

_DAVID DAYEN is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is
the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power (2020)
and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall
Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud (2016), which earned the Studs and
Ida Terkel Prize. He was the winner of the 2021 Hillman Prize for
excellence in magazine journalism._

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* Congress
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* Anti-trust
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