A movement to put aside a half-century of jurisprudence in order to go after large technology companies is gaining steam, with potentially severe implications for American consumers. The call to break up Big Tech — an idea championed by former presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren — threatens to undermine the consumer welfare standard, a mainstay of antitrust law, in favor of a simplistic, misguided mantra: big is bad.
We’ve been there before. In the decades after the Sherman Act of 1890, the first federal antitrust law, courts struggled to interpret vague prohibitions against anti-competitive business practices.
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