The 2010s revived antitrust as a contested public domain

Evidence

Antitrust has once again been thrust to the forefront of public conversation,” Lina Khan writes, documenting the birth of a wide-ranging campaign in the 2010s to revive antimonopoly actions in the wake of this rising market power. “Antitrust law has been transformed quickly from a relatively settled and sequestered domain of expertise to an area of active debate, with its future now something to be constructed rather than inherited.” Khan herself is perhaps the most influential scholar in this construction: her article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” pioneered new legal analysis on monopoly in the platform age, finding new forms of predatory practices. She was appointed chair of the Federal Trade ­Commission (FTC) in 2021, where she oversaw a new era of competition enforcement. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 107

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pro-corporate IP advocacy replaced competition discourse with protection and exclusion language — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 198