Virginia Postrel, Columnist

U.S. Antitrust Law Is Not Broken

Democrats want to fix it for the wrong reasons.

September 29, 2017 at 3:29 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

When trust breaks.
Photographer: Thomas Trutschel /Photothek via Getty Images

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We’ve seen this movie before.

Upstarts seize new technological opportunity, overturning the old business order in the process. They’re celebrated as entrepreneurial heroes as they grow rich and self-important. Then public opinion sours on their success. Competitors complain they’re too powerful. The government brings antitrust action and threatens to break them up. Years of bureaucratic struggle ensue (cue the montage of lawyers with piles of paper, economists writing on whiteboards, and multiple presidential inaugurations). In the final act, a settlement is reached, but it’s largely irrelevant: While the lawyers were fighting, a new generation of upstarts overturned the business order once again.