President Biden rejects the economics-driven antitrust policies of the past 40 years. Flanked by his White House competition adviser and his new FTC Chair in July 2021, he asserted that the "experiment failed" and promised to return to earlier antitrust traditions. This report shows those...

Antitrust populists increasingly call on the government to “break up big tech.” But antitrust enforcers would face heavy evidentiary burdens if they sought to break a company up on the premise that a long-consummated merger was unlawful from the outset and should have been blocked years ago....

The FTC has enjoyed great success for decades, and I address four topics here in this paper presented at the opening session of the FTC's “Hearing on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.” First, what durable success means for an agency like the FTC. Then, the vision I...

Critics from both the right and the left claim that modern antitrust doctrine, rooted in consumer welfare, is inadequate to handle the challenges of the twenty-first century economy. They express nostalgia for 1960s antitrust, when the field had no clear objectives and cases were decided on...

The antitrust agencies typically find customer reactions probative of the likely competitive effects of a merger. Thus, merger challenge data released by the FTC reveal that strong complaints from customers almost always lead to a government challenge. Nevertheless, some judges have been quite...

In 1979, the Supreme Court began departing from strict rule of reason/per se categorization and by 1999 the Court made clear that the rule of reason was a continuum. With the Court providing little guidance on the details of the conduct for which truncated analysis is warranted, the FTC has...

Since 1981, the FTC has attacked fraud systematically, successfully using the authority under Section 13(b) to obtain a permanent injunction “in proper cases” to freeze assets ex parte and to force disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. More recently, the Commission has asserted the authority to...

Plastic payment cards are one of the great innovations of the twentieth century. Like the microchip, the personal computer, and the cellular telephone, payment cards have become ubiquitous after only a few decades of use, transforming the way business is conducted. Yet, payment card companies...