It looks like the FTC is finally going to start doing its job

Friday’s Federal Trade Commission press release, “FTC restores rigorous enforcement of law banning unfair methods of competition”, may have gone largely unreported, but its potential impact and reach make it a landmark document.

In it, the state agency commits to fully applying antitrust law to protect free competition, reversing the trend of recent decades.

While the wording of the memo refers to changing the interpretation of Section Five of the FTC Act itself, regarding unfair or deceptive acts or practices — which in 2015 was reinterpreted to say that it would “apply Section Five using the ‘rule of reason’ test of the Sherman Act, which asks whether a given restraint of trade is ‘reasonable’ in economic terms,” — the reality is that antitrust law as we know it was weakened much earlier, as outlined by Robert Bork and his 1978 book “The anti-trust paradox”. In it, he argued that the important thing was not monopolies as such, but the “harm to the consumer” expressed in a simplistic way in terms of eventual price increases of the products or services affected. An interpretation that Big Tech exploited for example by simply providing free services.

The influence of Robert Bork, a fierce protector of big business who fought against the “collusion” he claimed unions, consumer associations…