Originally published at the Washington Examiner. 

Most Americans do not think much about freight rail until shelves are empty, prices rise, or supply chains break. Yet railroads move the food we eat, the cars we drive, and the materials used to build homes and factories. When freight moves slowly or costs more, families pay more.

That is why the proposed merger between railroad companies Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern matters.

Union Pacific mainly operates in the western United States, while Norfolk Southern serves much of the East. A coast-to-coast shipment often must transfer between railroads near the middle of the country. Each handoff adds transaction costs of delays, paperwork, and uncertainty.

The merger would combine those networks into the first single-line transcontinental freight railroad, spanning roughly 50,000 route miles across 43 states and connecting more than 100 ports. Instead of changing carriers, many shipments could remain on one network from origin to destination.
​
The Surface Transportation Board accepted the amended merger application in May, beginning a demanding federal review. That scrutiny is appropriate. Regulators should examine service, safety, and competition. But they should not assume that a larger company automatically means a worse outcome. The right question is whether consumers are likely to benefit.

That is the consumer-welfare standard. Competition is bigger than any one deal. Regulators should consider prices, output, innovation, and choice rather than simply count the number of companies before and after a merger.

Economic research also cautions against treating every acquisition as harmful. A National Bureau of Economic Research study of power plant acquisitions found productivity gains of 2% to 5% after ownership changes. That finding does not prove this merger should be approved, but it shows why efficiencies must be weighed against possible harms.

The strongest case for the UP-NS merger begins with fewer handoffs. The companies estimate that single-line service could improve transit times by 24 to 48 hours on some routes and save shippers about $3.5 billion annually. Those are company projections and should be tested. But the economics are straightforward: fewer transfers can mean less waiting, lower inventory costs, and more reliable delivery.

The merger could also make rail more competitive with trucking. Critics focus on the reduced number of major railroads, but many shippers choose between rail and trucks. Trucks carry about two-thirds of domestic freight volume and remain essential for short routes and final delivery. Rail, however, can be much cheaper for long-distance, heavy freight. One industry comparison estimated costs near $70 per net ton by direct rail versus $215 by truck.

A more reliable coast-to-coast railroad could therefore strengthen competition across the broader freight market. It could also ease highway congestion while allowing trucks to focus on the routes they serve best. Rail, trucking, and ports are complements as much as competitors.

Private investment is another potential benefit. Freight railroads generally maintain their own infrastructure. The Association of American Railroads reports that the industry invests more than $23 billion annually and has reinvested roughly $840 billion since 1980. Meanwhile, state and local governments spent about $206 billion on highways and roads in 2021.

Trucking is indispensable, but it operates on infrastructure heavily supported by taxpayers. If private capital can modernize rail and attract freight without another federal spending program, regulators should count that as an economic benefit.

The merger still raises legitimate questions. Some shippers fear higher rates or reduced bargaining power. Labor groups may worry about jobs and safety. Rival railroads may object to competitive effects. Regulators should examine those concerns and impose narrowly tailored conditions when supported by evidence.

But they should protect competition, not competitors from competition.

America needs lower transportation costs, stronger supply chains, and more private investment. If this merger can move goods faster, expand viable shipping options, and improve rail’s ability to compete with trucking, it could benefit businesses and families far beyond the railroad industry.

The evidence should decide. If the promised gains are credible and competitive harms can be prevented, the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger would not threaten prosperity. It would be an opportunity to help America move again.

​Executive Summary
​Media Competition Is an Attention Market, Not a SiloMedia competition is no longer best understood as a contest among separate industries such as cable, broadcast, streaming, social video, gaming, podcasts, music, and news. Consumers do not live inside those regulatory boxes. They allocate scarce time across them. That means modern media is best understood as an attention market. This framing matters because antitrust debates too often begin with the wrong question. They ask whether one firm is “too big” or whether one deal sounds politically uncomfortable. The better question is whether consumers are likely to face higher prices, reduced output, lower quality, or slower innovation. That is the core of the consumer welfare standard, and it remains the best guardrail against turning antitrust into industrial policy.

News competes through search, social feeds, short-form clips, podcasts, newsletters, streaming channels, and direct subscriptions. The competitive field is no longer defined by ownership of a printing press or broadcast tower. Gaming, music, podcasts, and social chat are real attention rivals. They may not look like “television” to regulators, but consumers experience them as substitutes for leisure time. A household deciding between a soccer match, a game, a long podcast, or a documentary is still allocating scarce time. Streaming adoption and traditional pay-TV penetration figures reflect recent subscription data, which show high streaming penetration and declining pay-TV adoption.

Consumer Power Is Stronger Than Policymakers Often Admit
Consumer power in modern media comes from low switching costs, multi-homing, bundling, churn, ad-tier migration, and product iteration. Low switching costs are central. Consumers can add, cancel, downgrade, upgrade, or rotate among services. Even when a platform is popular, it must continue to earn attention. Popularity is not captivity. Multi-homing is normal. Consumers do not choose one media provider. They typically use several platforms across paid subscriptions, free ad-supported services, social video, podcasts, music, gaming, and news. This makes it harder to sustain durable harm because users can reduce engagement without exiting entirely.

The video market is mature and saturated. Recent streaming subscription data found that 91% of U.S. internet households subscribe to at least one streaming video service, while traditional pay TV has fallen to 41%. The same data describe consumers averaging nearly six video subscriptions and spending about $109 per month across video services. Consumer price sensitivity is also strong. The digital media consumer research cited earlier shows that consumers are increasingly adopting ad-supported tiers and remain frustrated by recurring price increases. These facts matter. A market where consumers churn, downgrade, use ad tiers, switch between homes, and substitute across formats is not a captive market. Firms may test prices, bundles, and ad loads, but consumers respond.
​

​Sam Peltzman’s political economy of regulation holds that regulators respond to political incentives rather than to consumer welfare. This matters in the media because the sector is politically salient. Politicians care deeply about speech, news, sports, cultural influence, and platform access. Hayek’s knowledge problem provides the deeper philosophical warning. Central planners lack the dispersed knowledge that market participants reveal through prices, experimentation, and consumer choice. Attempts to design market outcomes from above often fail because they cannot replicate market discovery. Ted Bolema’s recommendation that Congress clarify the role of the consumer welfare standard is useful here. His analysis of FTC policy argues that statutory clarity would reduce agency discretion and help prevent politicized enforcement.

The conclusion is direct: if policymakers want more media competition, they should reduce barriers to entry and expansion.

A Serious Pro-Competition Agenda Starts by Lowering Barriers
A serious pro-competition agenda should focus on two principles: disciplined antitrust and fewer government barriers.

1. Keep antitrust centered on consumer welfare. The standard should remain prices, output, quality, and innovation. If a merger or conduct harms consumers, challenge it. If not, do not use enforcement to preserve legacy firms or satisfy political pressure.
2. Treat the media as an attention market. Use broad evidence like the Communications Marketplace Report, cross-platform viewing measurement, and consumer behavior research. Do not define markets so narrowly that substitution disappears.
3. Apply error-cost humility. Fast-moving markets punish regulatory overconfidence. False positives can reduce investment, chill innovation, and entrench incumbents by raising compliance costs.
4. Prefer narrow remedies tied to demonstrable harms. Where harm exists, remedies should fix the harm, not create a permanent regulatory regime.
5. Reduce barriers to entry. Congress and state legislatures should review laws and rules that raise fixed costs for new distributors, creators, and platforms. More competition comes from easier entry, not more micromanagement.
6. Avoid industrial planning. Policymakers should not use antitrust to engineer the “right” number of media companies, protect favored content, or punish disfavored firms. That path undermines the competitive process.

Originally published on Substack.

Washington is doing that thing it always does: taking a useful policy tool and turning it into a political weapon. Antitrust used to be boring in the best way. It had a clear test, a clear purpose, and a clear restraint on government power.

Today, it’s being used like a Swiss Army knife for whatever grievance is trending, on the left and increasingly on the right. That’s bad economics, bad governance, and a great way to slow innovation at the exact moment America needs more of it.

This is the core warning in Innovation Over Intervention and it connects directly to a bigger point I’ve made elsewhere: winning the global technological race requires more competition and capacity at home, not more politicized control.

If antitrust is going to exist, it must be governed by the consumer welfare standard. Not political vibes. Not “bigness.” Not “bias.” Real evidence of consumer harm.

The only antitrust test that works

The consumer welfare standard asks four questions:

• Will it raise prices
• Reduce output or choice
• Lower quality
• Slow innovation

If the government can prove consumer harm, enforce the law. If not, get out of the way.

That standard is not a gift to big companies. It’s a restraint on government. It keeps antitrust from becoming economic central planning by lawsuit.

Antitrust is becoming a political multi-tool

The Federal Trade Commission filed an appeal in its Meta case. The point isn’t whether you like Meta. The point is the signal: structural theories and retroactive challenges remain a live strategy, which increases uncertainty for investors and competitors.

The Google search remedies fight keeps pushing antitrust toward industrial policy. DOJ is still emphasizing sweeping remedies in its remedies statement and case materials on the search case page. Even where unlawful conduct is proven, remedies still need to be tethered to consumer welfare, not “restructure the market because we can.”

And look how quickly competition policy gets pulled into cultural fights. The FTC’s debanking warning letters show how easily agencies drift into non-economic missions.

This is the bipartisan trap: the left wants to punish “big.” Parts of the right want to punish “bias.” Either way, antitrust becomes politics-first.

And politics-first antitrust is the opposite of competition.

What tech is actually doing for the U.S. economy

Now, the part Washington keeps skipping: the benefits.

America’s tech sector is driving a historically large private investment cycle in AI and data infrastructure. Projected hyperscaler spending is expected to reach roughly $610 billion in 2026 based on company guidance. Related reporting also describes the capex surge as a broad annual investment cycle across major firms.

This matters for competition because capital formation is the fuel for entry. When expected after-regulation returns fall, the first thing that dies is the marginal project. And the marginal project is often where the next competitor comes from.

Also, these firms are not just apps. They build physical assets in America. A clear example is Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite facility producing satellites for broadband connectivity. That’s advanced manufacturing and domestic capability.
Data centers and infrastructure investments are increasingly local growth stories too, like Amazon’s planned San Antonio data center and Meta’s boosted West Texas investment to $10 billion.

When policymakers treat profitability reduction as a goal, they are not just fighting “corporate power.” They are changing incentives to build and invest in America.

Your retirement account is in this debate

Americans own these companies through retirement accounts and broad index funds, whether they follow tech policy or not. The scale of retirement assets and equity exposure is visible in retirement market data and household exposure to equities in the Financial Accounts.

So when politicians talk about reducing profitability by force or breaking up firms for political reasons, it doesn’t just punish executives. It hits retirement savers and household wealth.

That should matter to anyone who claims to care about working families.

The biggest barrier to competition in AI is not “bigness.” It’s infrastructure.

Competition in AI is increasingly constrained by infrastructure: energy, transmission, interconnection, data centers, and permitting timelines.

The energy and AI analysis and the data center electricity demand overview emphasize rising electricity demand tied to AI and data centers.

So if Washington wants more competition, it should focus on building capacity and speeding permitting. That’s why actions on removing barriers to AI leadership and updating permitting technology matter, along with the permitting technology action plan.

You can sue your way to a headline. You cannot sue your way to a power plant.

Permitting reform is competition policy.

Why “monopoly” is often a government-made problem

In a free market, durable monopoly is rare because profits attract entry. Consumers substitute. Innovators leapfrog incumbents. Competition is a process, not a snapshot.

Durable monopoly usually requires barriers markets can’t break. And those barriers are often government-made: licensing, permitting, protected markets, trade barriers, and compliance regimes only incumbents can afford.

If policymakers want more competition, the honest agenda is lowering barriers to entry and trade, not punishing success.

For policymakers

Here’s the quick checklist:

• Use the consumer welfare standard as the only guardrail
• Demand evidence of consumer harm, not narratives about “power”
• Stop using antitrust to fight cultural disputes
• Treat permitting, energy, and transmission as pro-competition policy
• Remember that stable rules are part of winning the global technological race
• Remember: uncertainty is a barrier, and barriers are the oxygen of monopoly

Closing

If antitrust exists, it must be disciplined and boring. Consumer welfare. Evidence. Predictable rules.

Because monopoly is not defeated by breaking successful firms into smaller pieces. Monopoly is defeated by making it easy to compete.

That’s the American model. Let’s stop abandoning it.

America is once again at a familiar crossroads: innovation is moving fast—and policymakers are rushing to catch up.
The latest example is the growing push for age-verification mandates on app stores and social media platforms. Framed as a way to protect children, these proposals are gaining traction across states.

But beneath the surface, the tradeoffs are significant.

In this episode of This Week’s Economy, we explore how these policies could create serious privacy risks, restrict free speech, and reduce competition—while failing to address the root causes of youth mental health challenges.

Rather than expanding government control, the better path is clear: empower parents with tools, information, and flexibility to guide their children in a digital world.

That approach strengthens families without undermining the principles of a free society.
🎧 Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/B5SFgE3pxS0
📖 Get more insights: https://vanceginn.substack.com
​
Subscribe, share, and join the conversation about policies that truly let people prosper.

Originally published at National Review. 

The Federal Trade Commission’s recent appeal in its antitrust case against Meta and the government’s new appeal in the Google search case are not just legal headlines. They are signals to capital markets about how political the federal government wants antitrust policy to be.

If we keep pushing antitrust toward populist storytelling instead of consumer harm, we will get less investment, slower innovation, and weaker competition. Antitrust works best when it is boring. Not toothless, but disciplined.

The job of antitrust officials is simple: Police conduct that harms consumers. This narrow focus is defined as the consumer welfare standard, popularized in America by the conservative legal scholar Robert Bork. It asks whether a merger or business practice is likely to raise prices, reduce output, lower quality, or slow innovation. If it is, enforce the law. If not, the government should step back and allow the deal to move forward.

In the past few years, however, antitrust laws have been turned into a political Swiss Army knife. Under the Biden administration, Lina Khan’s FTC pushed a structural, populist approach that often treated “big” companies as inherently suspicious, even when consumer harm was difficult to prove. Now, some voices on the right — in and out of the Trump administration — are tempted to copy the same playbook for different reasons, using antitrust laws to punish perceived “bias” or to settle cultural grievances.

The Biden and Trump administrations may have different slogans, but they are making the same economic error. Look at the case record.

The FTC spent years trying to unwind Facebook-owner Meta’s acquisitions of social media services Instagram and WhatsApp. A federal judge rejected the agency’s claims, and now the FTC is continuing the fight with an appeal. This is what expansive antitrust enforcement looks like in practice: retroactive theory, long, dragged-out litigation, and a moving target in a market that changes faster than court calendars.

The FTC also tried to block Microsoft’s acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard. The agency’s case page shows just how far it went to block the deal. After losing in court, the FTC ultimately dropped its challenge. That episode did not prove that every corporate merger is fine. It proved something more basic — that speculative theories of future harm are not a substitute for evidence.

Then, there is the case of Amazon and iRobot. After regulators leaned hard to stop Amazon from buying the maker of Roomba vacuum cleaners, the deal collapsed, and the FTC issued a celebratory termination statement. Today, iRobot is bankrupt and owned by a Chinese manufacturer.

Whatever one thinks of these individual outcomes, the overarching lesson is that aggressive antitrust policy imposes real costs long before any consumer harm is shown. It changes company behavior, deters mutually beneficial deals, and raises the cost of capital.

All of this is happening while the U.S. is in the midst of a massive private build-out of AI and data infrastructure. Capital formation depends on expected after-regulation returns. But when Washington signals that success will be met with breakups, retroactive challenges, or vague “fairness” theories, investors price in regulatory risk. The predictable result is less investment and fewer upstart challengers, not more.

If policymakers want more competition, they should focus on what blocks new entrants. In many markets, the greatest barriers to entry are government bottlenecks: permitting delays, policy-induced energy constraints, and regulatory thickets that prevent new infrastructure from being built. Streamlining U.S. infrastructure construction would be more pro-competition than the loudest lawsuit.

I lay out this case in a report co-published with NetChoice, titled “Innovation over Intervention: Restoring First Principles to American Antitrust.” We conclude that the United States should reject the Biden-era populist approach to antitrust and resist any Trump-era effort to repeat the same mistakes under a different banner. Instead, antitrust cops should let profit and loss, free entry and exit, and private innovation do what they have always done best.

​The U.S. is a global leader in technology and innovation. That didn’t happen by chance. It happened because our economic institutions have historically emphasized decentralized decision-making, strong property rights, capital formation, and competition on the merits.

In recent years, antitrust enforcement has drifted away from economics and toward structural and precautionary theories that treat scale, integration, and market success as presumptive harms. Some of this shift mirrors Europe’s regulatory approach, and troublingly, the impulse to move in this direction is becoming bipartisan. The danger is that we abandon evidence-based competition policy, raise error costs, chill investment, and weaken long-run growth—at the very moment American firms are competing most intensely with China.
​
In This Week’s Economy, I explain how we got here, what’s at stake for America’s leading tech firms, and what policymakers should do to ensure we defend competition without undermining the innovation that keeps America ahead. Check out my latest report, co-published with NetChoice, on choosing Innovation over Interference.

Originally published on Substack.

Washington keeps treating “big” as a crime. That’s not antitrust. That’s jealousy with a subpoena.

The better approach is simple and American: judge company behavior by whether it hurts consumers. That is the consumer welfare standard, and it is the backbone of my new report co-published with NetChoice, Innovation Over Intervention.

If lawmakers stick to that standard, they protect people from real harm. If they abandon it, antitrust turns into a political weapon where the rules change depending on who is angry that week.

What the consumer welfare standard means, in plain English

The consumer welfare standard asks four basic questions:

• Will this make prices go up?
• Will it reduce output, meaning fewer choices or less availability?
• Will quality get worse?
• Will innovation slow down?

If the answer is “yes” and the evidence is real, then government might act. If the answer is “no,” government should get out of the way.

That is it. No guessing games about whether a company is “too big.” No punishing businesses for being successful. No using antitrust to settle political scores.

Why this matters now

Some people want to turn antitrust into a tool for controlling the economy.

Under the Biden administration, that mindset spread fast. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: a few voices on the right and in the Trump administration are tempted to copy it, just with different excuses.

That would be a mistake.

Why? Because when antitrust stops being about consumer harm, it stops being law enforcement and becomes economic central planning. And central planning always fails. It raises costs, slows growth, and creates more loopholes for the politically connected.

The biggest “monopolies” are usually built by government

If lawmakers want to find real monopoly power, they should not start with successful firms in competitive markets. They should start with government-created barriers that block entry and protect insiders.

When regulations are written in ways that only big, well-connected players can afford, that is not “competition.” That is regulatory capture. It is a rigged game.

The consumer welfare standard helps prevent that. It forces the government to prove real consumer harm instead of making up a story after the fact.

Why breakups and profit punishment backfire

Here is the part many people miss. Large tech companies are not just “apps.” They are building real stuff, hiring real people, and investing huge amounts of money into America’s future.

They are pouring capital into data centers, chips, cloud infrastructure, logistics, and AI. Those investments support construction jobs, engineering jobs, supplier networks, and local economies.

When government threatens to break companies apart or reduce their profitability on purpose, it is not “free.” It is a tax on investment.

And when investment falls, consumers lose. Prices rise. Quality drops. Innovation slows. The consumer welfare standard exists to prevent exactly that kind of policy failure.

What lawmakers should do

If you’re a policymaker or staffer, here is the simple checklist:

• Use the consumer welfare standard as the only test.
• Demand evidence of consumer harm, not theories about “bigness.”
• Stop using antitrust to micromanage markets.
• Focus on removing barriers to entry, especially permitting and infrastructure bottlenecks.
• Don’t import Europe’s regulate-first model. It produces compliance, not innovation.
• Don’t copy China’s state-control model. It produces political power, not prosperity or innovation.

Closing

The consumer welfare standard is not complicated, and that’s the point. It keeps antitrust from becoming a political playground. It protects consumers without choking off innovation.

America wins when markets decide. Consumers choose. Entrepreneurs take risks. Competitors challenge winners. And government steps in only when there is real consumer harm, backed by evidence.
​
That’s the American model. Let’s stop messing with it.

Originally posted on Substack. 

​A federal court just handed Meta a decisive win—and Washington a badly needed wake-up call.

By dismissing the FTC’s high-profile antitrust case, Judge James Boasberg didn’t simply reject one lawsuit. He exposed a deeper problem: too many in government and across the political spectrum believe competition can be engineered from above, rather than unleashed from below.

This ruling should be a turning point. If policymakers are serious about promoting vibrant, open markets, they must stop trying to centrally plan outcomes and start clearing away the political choke points that smother competition long before any tech company does.

​The FTC’s failed theory—that Meta still holds an illegal monopoly despite facing a swarm of rivals—was built on a narrow, static view of a dynamic market. The agency argued Facebook and Instagram are fundamentally different from TikTok because they revolve around “friends and family.” That argument collapsed the second the evidence hit the courtroom. As the judge noted plainly, TikTok “holds center stage as Meta’s fiercest rival.”

Consumers already made their choice. The government just didn’t like it.

It’s a pattern: where Washington sees monopolies, the real world shows competitive pressure pushing firms to evolve. Meta didn’t maintain dominance by freezing the market—it had to reinvent its platforms to keep up with short-form video, algorithmic feeds, and shifting consumer expectations. That’s why Americans now spend only a fraction of their Facebook time scrolling through updates from their actual friends. The product changed because the competition demanded it.

This is precisely why a healthy economy requires more market entry and less regulatory overreach, not the opposite. When the government defines markets however it chooses, rewrites history, and pursues lawsuits disconnected from consumer realities, the result is fewer new competitors—not more. Investors pull back. Startups get hemmed in. Acquisition pathways shrink. And the entire innovation ecosystem slows.

Some on the right have fallen for this too, using “monopoly” as a catch-all insult rather than a legally meaningful term. But once you anchor antitrust to actual metrics—prices, quality, innovation—Meta doesn’t fit. Its services are no charge. Its ads can be ignored. Its products face constant substitution threats. Its acquisitions (approved originally by the FTC) enhanced consumer value.

The court recognized that reality. And it’s a reminder that the consumer-welfare standard remains the only reliable compass in antitrust law. It measures harm the way economists do—not the way political movements do.

The alternative—the neo-Brandeisian approach championed by Chair Lina Khan—tries to punish companies for being large, effective, or popular. That theory collapses when confronted with actual evidence of competition, as Brian Albrecht pointed out in his analysis. But the danger isn’t just bad lawsuits. It’s the chilling effect on innovation, investment, and the next wave of startups wondering whether success will simply put a target on their backs.
​
If Washington truly wants to support competition, it should start by removing the barriers it created:

• Stop politicizing antitrust. Competition happens bottom-up, not by bureaucratic design.
• End selective favoritism and carveouts that tilt markets. Subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory privileges distort competition more than any merger does.
• Focus on voluntary exchange and consumer choice. Not on reshaping the economy according to ideological preferences.
• Preserve the consumer-welfare standard. It’s the guardrail that prevents politics from replacing economics.

Meta’s win doesn’t mean the tech sector is perfect. It means the real monopoly threat still comes from government—utilities, water districts, licensing boards, tax-favored entities, and agencies whose incentives align with control, not competition. Breaking that grip would do more for market dynamism than any forced corporate breakup dreamed up in D.C.

The path forward is straightforward: more competition driven by people, fewer decisions dictated by government. This ruling doesn’t end the antitrust debate—but it should reset it. And it’s long past time.

​Sources and further reading.
​
WSJ reporting on Meta’s court victory: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/meta-defeats-ftcs-antitrust-case-alleging-social-media-monopoly-504b2323

My X thread: https://x.com/vanceginn/status/1990878777795359214?s=46&t=Zv07DS2UC3mLPAOmcJxg_Q
​
Brian Albrecht’s X thread: https://x.com/briancalbrecht/status/1990866831553310762?s=46&t=Zv07DS2UC3mLPAOmcJxg_Q

NetChoice statement: https://x.com/netchoice/status/1990867855668068534?s=46&t=Zv07DS2UC3mLPAOmcJxg_Q

Originally posted on Substack. 

College sports aren’t just in the news for thrilling games anymore. They’re in the headlines for billion-dollar NIL payouts, booster-funded collectives, and Washington’s latest attempt to regulate it all through the SCORE Act. The proposal claims to protect student-athletes by creating national standards for Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. In reality, it hands the NCAA new antitrust protections and entrenches the very cartel that suppressed players for decades.

NIL: Freedom, but With Consequences

When the NCAA finally allowed NIL deals in July 2021, athletes gained the freedom to profit from their own names, images, and likenesses. That was what many consider to be a long-overdue correction to decades of “amateurism,” which funneled billions to universities and coaches while denying athletes similar funding.

But pair NIL with the transfer portal, and you get chaos. Players now bounce from school to school for the highest offer. The lifelong alma mater loyalty that once defined college football in Texas is evaporating. Fans (like me) used to watch Patrick Mahomes sling passes in Lubbock or Vince Young lead Texas to a national title, knowing those players were true fixtures. Today, rosters feel like revolving doors, more like NFL free agency than higher education.

And the money isn’t spread evenly. A Washington Post investigation of more than $125 million in NIL contracts found that over 80 percent of payouts went to men playing football and basketball, leaving Olympic sports and women’s teams largely sidelined.

What Athletes Already Received Before NIL

Let’s not pretend athletes were uncompensated before NIL. In reality, top Division I athletes were already receiving benefits that far exceeded what most academic high-achievers ever see.

• Full-ride scholarships at public four-year schools covered tuition, fees, room, board, and books—worth about $26,000–$30,000 annually for in-state students and $45,000–$50,000 for out-of-state. At private universities, the package could exceed $60,000 per year (College Board, Bankrate).
• Since 2015, “autonomy” conferences added cost-of-attendance stipends of $2,000–$6,000 in cash.
• Since 2014, athletes have had access to unlimited meals and snacks.
• Low-income players could qualify for federal Pell Grants of up to $7,395 annually.

By comparison, the average student who received grants or scholarships at a four-year college for academics received about $15,750 per year. Only 11% of students receive any scholarship at all, and fewer than 2% of high school athletes earn an athletic scholarship, with the average FBS football scholarship of about $36,000 per year.

Put it together, and a top football or basketball player at a place like UT, A&M, or Texas Tech—my own alma mater—could easily receive $30,000–$60,000+ annually in value. That’s often more than what top academic scholars get.

After NIL: A Billion-Dollar Marketplace

Once NIL was “legalized,” the floodgates opened. By 2023, athletes had signed nearly $1 billion worth of deals, with projections topping over $1.7 billion for 2024-25. At the University of Texas, the football team alone reported $20.8 million in NIL deals from 2021–2024, leading the nation. Texas A&M has become synonymous with massive booster-backed collectives. And at Texas Tech, Red Raider athletes are securing sponsorships through organized NIL programs.

As a Red Raider, I’m proud of the legacy of athletes like Patrick Mahomes, Wes Welker, Zach Thomas, Ronald Ross, Andre Emmett, Mac McClung, and many more. But I can’t ignore how quickly the system that built those traditions is being rewritten into a marketplace where loyalty is negotiable and education feels secondary.

The SCORE Act: Washington’s Wrong Fix

The SCORE Act would impose a federal NIL regime: agents registering with the NCAA, schools mandated to provide medical care and counseling, and universities forced to field at least 16 varsity teams. Most troubling, it gives the NCAA a sweeping antitrust exemption and allows it to cap revenue-sharing at about $20.5 million per school.

Texas Tech Regent Cody Campbell called out misleading ads claiming every Division I conference supports the bill. He’s right—many conferences oppose it, warning that it could harm women’s sports and smaller programs. His stance gained support from Texas Congressmen like Chip Roy and Wesley Hunt.

But the bigger issue is this: why should Congress reward the NCAA’s monopoly model with even more power, when it has already distorted the market for a century?

Education Is Still the Real Crisis

The United States doesn’t just face a sports debate—we face an education crisis. National test scores are sinking, and college student debt has climbed past $1.7 trillion. Yet in Texas, the highest-paid public employees aren’t professors—they’re football coaches. When athletics becomes the core business of government-funded universities, classrooms and research inevitably get crowded out.

This is classic economics. Subsidize demand through federal loans and grants, keep supply fixed, and costs rise. Layer on the billions funneled into athletics, and the price of higher education only climbs higher. Taxpayers and non-athlete students—who rarely see any benefit from NIL—are left paying the bill.

The Better Path for Higher Education in Texas & Beyond

Texas can set a different course. UT, A&M, and Texas Tech don’t need Washington’s bureaucracy to tell them how to run their programs. What they need is freedom and accountability.

• Put academics first by tying athletic eligibility to real progress in the classroom. For high school athletes, escrow large NIL deals until they turn 18.
• End subsidies that force taxpayers and students to bankroll athletic deficits. Publish athletic budgets in full.
• Separate the baskets by spinning off football and men’s basketball into privately funded entities. Treat them as professional sports businesses.
• Let markets work by protecting contracts and preventing fraud—without giving the NCAA new legal shields.

​Bottom Line

NIL was a step toward fairness, but it’s become gasoline on the fire of a broken, subsidized system. The SCORE Act would only make it worse, cementing NCAA power and fueling more spending while academics fall further behind.

We should lead with a better solution. Let athletes contract freely, but stop pretending multimillion-dollar sports programs belong inside taxpayer-funded universities. Put education back in the driver’s seat, privatize entertainment, and give families a real shot at affordable, quality schooling.

Because in the long run, strong schools and strong markets—not government mandates or subsidies—are what truly let people prosper.