Hunting the Big Five: Twenty-first Century Antitrust in Historical Perspective

Richard Langlois

No 2018-01, Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics

Abstract: Voices along the whole of the political spectrum are calling for heightened scrutiny of American information-technology companies, especially the Big Five of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. One of the principal themes of this uprising is that present-day antitrust policy, forged in the rusty era of steel, oil, and cars, is now obsolete. We are in the age of information, which ipso facto calls for new rules. A second animating theme is that the antitrust thinking of the Chicago School, which came to prominence in the last quarter of the last century, must be completely overthrown. Proponents of this new antitrust ground their arguments by returning to the historical roots of American antitrust policy. My contention, however, is that the new antitrust gets this history wrong. It both misconceives the nature of the competitive process and deliberately refuses to confront the political economy of antitrust. In so doing, it adopts some of the worst traits of the Chicago School it criticizes while manifesting few of that school’s many virtues.

Keywords: antitrust; platforms; telecommunications; broadcasting; net neutrality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L10 L40 L50 L96 N72 N82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2018-01, Revised 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-ict
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2018-01R.pdf Full text (revised version) (application/pdf)
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2018-01.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uct:uconnp:2018-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from University of Connecticut, Department of Economics University of Connecticut 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1063 Storrs, CT 06269-1063. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark McConnel ().