COMMENTARY: Republicans Can and Should Lead the Next Great Antitrust Movement – By Craig Shirley (CNS News) / April 20 2021
The next great antitrust crusade is upon us, and it’s time Republicans and conservatives rolled up their sleeves and led the charge.
The need is dire and nothing less than the future of fair competition for small businesses hangs in the balance. Corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and of course Big Tech have for years now been choking the life out of smaller enterprises and innovation in this country, slowly eroding away the options for where Americans can buy goods. But to add insult to injury, the big players in our country have decided to adjust to the times and adopt woke, left-friendly policies that stifle one of our founding principles, the very idea of free speech.
We’ve seen it with the recent posturing of Delta and Coca-Cola over the new voting law in Georgia. We saw it with Facebook and Twitter removing news stories like the New York Post’s scoop on Hunter Biden back in the fall. Google has been doing it for years. I could go on, but the bottom line is these companies are exercising their enormous power to try and control what we think and say, and conservatives are just the ones to stop it.
Just this past week, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a bill entitled the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act. This welcome legislation would ban mergers and acquisitions with market capitalization that surpasses $100 billion, give the Federal Trade Commission new powers to stop “dominant digital firms” (e.g. Twitter or Facebook) from buying out potential competitors, and importantly updates the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts by establishing that direct evidence of anticompetitive behavior would be enough to support an antitrust claim. This in turn would theoretically allow dominant firms to be broken up without getting bogged down in arguments between economists.
