On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act, legislation aimed at reigning in the power “mega-corporations” assert over purchases Americans make, the information they receive, and the speech they can engage in, according to his office’s press release. The bill reportedly seeks to curb market consolidation and enhance antitrust scrutiny within industries like tech, banking, and pharmaceuticals.
Speaking about the bill, Sen. Hawley remarked that “(w)hile Big Tech, Big Banks, Big Telecom, and Big Pharma gobbled up more companies and more market share, they gobbled up our freedom and competition. American consumers and workers have paid the price. Woke corporations want to run this country and Washington is happy to let them. It’s time to bust … them up and restore competition.”
According to the press release, the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act will ban all mergers and acquisitions by companies with market capitalizations in excess of $100 billion. The release pointed to several previous acquisitions made by Google and Facebook that would be disallowed under the proposed legislation.
The new law would also “prohibit dominant digital firms from privileging their own search results over those of competitors without explicit disclosure.” The release provided the example that “Google could not promote its own reviews over Yelp reviews without disclosing the affiliation up front.”
Next, the bill proposed reforms to the Sherman and Clayton Acts. The changes allegedly would clarify that direct evidence of anticompetitive conduct suffices to support an antitrust claim. This, Sen. Hawley explained, would allow oversight authorities to split up dominant firms, like Facebook, which the Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general targeted last December, and Google, which the Department of Justice and numerous states went after last October.
In addition, the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act would modify the standard for judicial evaluation of antitrust cases and bring vertical mergers within the ambit of laws. Finally, the release stated, the act would “(d)rastically increase antitrust penalties by requiring companies that lose federal antitrust suits to forfeit all their profits resulting from monopolistic conduct.”
