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.

Originally published at The Center Square.

The proposed Charter-Cox merger isn't lighting up headlines — and that's exactly why it matters. In a Trump-era regulatory landscape that promises to let markets work, this deal is a quiet test of whether Washington will follow through.

It's not about whether this merger is flawless. It's about whether policymakers will finally stop punishing scale for its own sake and return to enforcing the law, not playing politics.

President Donald Trump's advisers have made the new direction clear. As Gail Slater put it in a recent interview, "If you're violating antitrust laws, we're going to take a hard look. If you're not… we're going to get the hell out of the way." That's the kind of plain talk—and plain policy — we need after four years of overreach under President Biden.

Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission abandoned the longstanding consumer welfare standard, which had guided antitrust enforcement for decades. That standard asks a simple question: Does a merger harm consumers by raising prices, lowering quality, or stifling innovation? If not, it should be allowed.

But Biden's FTC, led by Lina Khan, traded that economic clarity for an ideological crusade against "big." They filed lawsuits against companies not for hurting consumers, but simply for growing too large. The courts, to their credit, mostly weren't buying it. But the damage to investment and innovation was already done.

That's the environment the Charter-Cox deal is trying to emerge from. And it deserves a fair hearing — not a reflexive regulatory attack.

The companies aren't even direct competitors in most markets. According to their own FCC filing, 97 % of U.S. households would still have access to at least two fixed broadband providers after the merger. And that doesn't count new and expanding options like fixed wireless and satellite broadband, including services from Starlink and others.

This merger isn't about locking consumers into fewer choices—it's about finding efficiencies in an industry where scale matters.

Just look at what Charter is already doing. The company recently expanded gigabit broadband, mobile, TV, and voice services to more than 4,700 homes and businesses in Wexford County, Mich., as part of a growing network investment.

As the nation's top rural internet provider, Charter is now delivering high-speed internet to nearly 2 million new locations nationwide.

It's also worth remembering that many so-called "monopolies" in America aren't the result of market failure — they're created and protected by the government. Local franchise agreements, permitting delays, zoning rules, and licensing laws often serve as barriers to entry, artificially limiting competition. Then the same governments that build those walls point fingers at the companies forced to scale over them. That's not competition. That's regulatory capture.

The Biden administration leaned into that model, using federal power to micromanage market outcomes. The result? Slower growth, weaker productivity, and stalled investment. Real GDP growth under Biden averaged just 1.8 %, far below potential. Meanwhile, investors pulled back, and innovation slowed under the weight of legal uncertainty and politicized enforcement.

President Trump's first term showed a better path. By cutting red tape and lowering tax burdens, his administration helped deliver record income growth. In 2019, real median household income rose $4,400 — the largest annual increase ever recorded. That wasn't magic. It was the natural result of respecting voluntary exchange and allowing capital to flow to its highest use.

That's why this merger matters, even if it's not flashy. It's a chance to show that America is back to doing business again — on merit, not politics. No merger should get a free pass. But no merger should be blocked just because someone in Washington doesn't like big companies.

Antitrust enforcement should be based on clear rules, objective evidence, and actual consumer harm. Nothing more, nothing less.

So let the Charter-Cox merger rise or fall on its facts. But let's stop pretending that every deal is a danger, or that the government knows better than the millions of Americans making choices every day in the marketplace.
​
The real threat to competition isn't corporate scale. It's regulatory power. And the sooner we rein it in, the sooner we can get back to what works.

Overview
The Trump administration, supported by a Republican-led Congress, has a pivotal chance to reverse the damage inflicted by the Biden administration's misguided antitrust policies. This report outlines the path to unleashing America’s tech potential through innovation, competition, and free-market principles.

Key Points

• Restore the Consumer Welfare Standard: Antitrust enforcement should prioritize consumer benefits rather than penalizing success or favoring bureaucratic control.
• Boost Innovation and Investment: The U.S. tech sector leads global innovation with $450 billion in annual R&D investments, which drive advancements in AI, biotechnology, cybersecurity, and energy.
• Empower Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Platforms like Amazon and eBay provide tools for small businesses to reach global markets and fuel regional economic growth.
• Create High-Paying Jobs: The tech industry directly employs 9.4 million workers, with a ripple effect creating additional opportunities in manufacturing, logistics, and construction.
• Enhance National Security: U.S. leadership in AI and quantum computing is essential for maintaining a strategic edge against China and other global adversaries.
• Reject Regulatory Overreach: Excessive regulation under Biden stifled innovation and increased costs for consumers. Removing these barriers will restore competitive markets.
• Encourage Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A): Smart M&A policies enable technological breakthroughs and ensure the U.S. remains an innovation hub, unlike Biden-era policies that blocked critical deals.
• Protect Financial Security: The tech sector underpins the financial stability of millions of Americans, playing a vital role in retirement accounts and pension funds.
• Strengthen Global Competitiveness: By rejecting European-style overregulation and authoritarian state subsidies, the U.S. can maintain its technological dominance and foster free-market innovation.

Conclusion
​The report highlights a roadmap for the Trump administration and Congress to promote free-market policies, secure America’s technological leadership, and prioritize innovation and economic growth. Confirming regulatory leaders who support these principles is vital to achieving these goals.