Politics & Society 51 (2023), 3

The proponents of a “neo-Brandeisian” approach to antitrust took on leadership roles in the Joe Biden administration, including Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); Jonathan Kanter, head of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ); Tim Wu, special assistant for technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council; and Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Biden administration issued a sweeping executive order to bolster competition in the American economy.¹ The FTC and the DOJ launched a public inquiry into strengthening merger guidelines in January 2022, and the FTC issued a statement declaring that it would use its full statutory authority to combat anticompetitive behavior in November 2022.² Democrats in the US Congress sponsored a series of high-profile hearings on the power of big tech firms and proposed significant new antitrust legislation. Republicans called for more robust antitrust policy as well, although they tended to be more concerned about the power of the big tech firms to control social media and other sources of information than about their market power per se. The House of Representatives prepared legislation to limit the ability of dominant platform firms to favor their own products and services, and to require them to open their app stores to rival marketplaces. Yet the big tech firms and other incumbents fought back hard.