Nire Bryce

Reagan turned the country upside-down, in a very bad way. The "Reagan revolution" was indeed revolutionary (or, rather, counter-revolutionary), reversing a half-century of progress on social safety nets, workers' rights, and environmental protections.

[T]he most profound act of the Reagan revolution was a slow-burner that has quietly chugged along for four decades, profoundly reshaping American society and the world. It's a wonky, technical change, largely overlooked in our political discourse.

That change? The "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust enforcement.

Prior to Reagan, US antitrust enforcers relied upon a theory of "harmful dominance." [...]Harmful dominance is the theory that unaccountable power is dangerous – that giving corporate leaders control over the market lets them pervert the political process and inflict harms on the rest of us in ways that are hard to detect and even harder to prevent.

Reagan nuked "harmful dominance," replacing it with radical theories from one of Nixon's top crooks, Robert Bork, whose book THE ANTITRUST PARADOX advances a conspiracy theory about US antitrust – that the framers of these laws never meant to protect us from monopoly at all.
[...]
After 40 years of dominance, consumer welfare is dying. Biden's July 9 "Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy" is a terrifyingly technical, 72-point program for dismantling consumer welfare and reviving harmful dominance.

The Biden admin clearly consulted with public interest groups for these technical directives, people who are right at the coalface of the way that monopolies are destroying lives, who know exactly which levers to pull to shut it down.

This is especially true in tech, as I write in my latest piece for EFF's Deeplinks blog: "Party Like It’s 1979: The OG Antitrust Is Back, Baby!"

And because personnel are policy, I also discuss the revolution in anttitrust leadship that accompanied the executive order: Lina Khan running the FTC, Tim Wu in charge of White House tech competition, and Jonathan Kanter running antitrust for the DoJ.