Bring Back Antitrust!

Microsoft's recent effort to ensnare Yahoo!--fended off in part by a cooperative venture between Yahoo! and its competitor Google--raises important but overlooked questions: What happened to antitrust? Can competitors today combine at will? Would Microsoft, whose grip on the desktop computer remains unshaken after a decade of antitrust litigation and court-ordered relief, have been allowed to acquire control of a new portal so that Internet users might remain in its thrall?

The answer to the "What happened to antitrust?" question lies in the echo of a similar one posed by historian Richard Hofstadter more than forty years ago: "What happened to the antitrust movement?" He pointed out that the political impulses animating antitrust in its first half-century faded as the United States became comfortable with big business. The last great antitrust crusader with political visibility, Thurman Arnold, turned antitrust over to postwar enforcers, who transformed it into a technical exercise managed by lawyers and economists. Hofstadter wrote, "Once the United States had an antitrust movement without antitrust prosecutions; in our time there have been antitrust prosecutions without an antitrust movement."

We now appear to have reached a time when we have neither an antitrust movement nor antitrust prosecutions. We have dropped "movement" from the question. It's "What happened to antitrust?"

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