Why Joe Biden’s trustbusters have fallen short of their ambitions
Activision, a gaming firm, arguing it could suppress competition in the video-game market. A hearing was set to begin on June 22nd—a very public test of whether Ms Khan is choosing the right deals to contest. Lacking a federal privacy law or new antitrust legislation, which Congress has not approved, Ms Khan has persevered alone.
But in some instances she has “sued on the grounds not of what’s currently illegal but what’s undesirable", says Matt Perault, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That could backfire. “When you start losing cases, you set back the cause," says Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary.
The administration’s mixed record reveals three things it missed as it set out to attack corporate concentration. First, there is a problem of competing goals. The court is “extraordinarily friendly to large corporate interest", points out Nancy Rose of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, yet Mr Biden has not made it a priority to appoint judges with expertise in antitrust, pushing instead to diversify the bench by race and background.
“It mystifies me that there hasn’t been more effort to go to school on a strategy that [President Ronald] Reagan used very successfully," which was nominating like-minded judges on antitrust, says Bill Kovacic of George Washington University Law School, a former FTC chair. To shore up the stability of the financial system, meanwhile, big banks have been allowed to merge with smaller, failed ones: an administration that has tried to fight consolidation has thus enabled it. The second problem is that the person with vision for a movement may not be the best person to lead it.
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