How Antitrust Policy Shapes Our Technology | This Week's Economy Ep. 153

​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.
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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.