Progressive Antitrust’s Remarkable Sense of Timing

April 15, 2024

One of the most remarkable accomplishments of this administration is the keen sense of timing it brings to its antitrust actions. Or, as they say in the comedy business, “Comedy is tragedy plus timing.”

The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan acted against Meta for being a monopolist at just the moment the platform began to face stiff competition for younger users, who began to migrate to more “hip” platforms. Then the FTC sued Amazon for being a monopolist just as it began to lose U.S. market share to two predatory Chinese online retailers, Temu and Shein.

Now the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division is pressing its case against Apple for being a monopolist just as the company is losing market share to Huawei and other Chinese cellphone manufacturers, while South Korean-based Samsung regains the top global spot.

Facing stiff competition from Asia, Apples iPhone shipments fell by 10 percent, or about 1.6 million units in the last quarter.

Time and again, we see progressive antitrust, often joined by protectionist EU regulators, out to cripple America’s leading technology companies in order to cede the market to China. You see much the same in the automotive sector, where environmental and ESG initiatives are forcing U.S. auto manufacturers to make expensive electric vehicles U.S. consumers don’t want, while China – loaded with a monopoly on rare earth minerals – eats up world demand for EVs with cheap, government-subsidized exports.

And to add to its comic-tragic sense of timing, the administration has jettisoned long-standing trade policy for an open internet just as the United States face intense competition from Russia and China. The official U.S. position is now to encourage the balkanization of the internet and support requests for U.S. tech companies to cough up their source codes to dictatorships.

A conspiracy-minded person might see all this as an elaborate, Manchurian-candidate like penetration of U.S. policy in order to degrade our country economically, militarily, and geopolitically. But conspiracy theorists underestimate the power of stupidity. These policies are just the results of a mindless adherence to faculty lounge ideology over economics and the national interest.