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Contrary to common belief, large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers, such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, are not \"winner-take-all\" firms. They must compete on the merits or otherwise rely on exclusionary practices to attain or maintain dominance, and this gives antitrust policy a role. While regulation may be appropriate in a few areas such as for consumer privacy, antitrust's firm-specific approach is more adept at addressing most threats to platform competition. When platforms exert their market power over other firms, liability may be apt, but remedies present another puzzle. For the several pending antitrust complaints against Google and Facebook, for instance, what should be the remedy if there is a violation? Breaking up large firms that benefit from extensive economies of scale and scope will injure consumers and most input suppliers, including the employees who supply labor. In many situations, a better approach would be to restructure management rather than assets, which would leave the platform intact as a production entity but make decisionmaking more competitive. A second option to breaking up firms would be to require interoperability—and in the information context, mandate the pooling of valuable information. These measures could promote competition and simultaneously increase the value of positive network effects. Finally, this Article examines another aspect of platforms — their acquisitions. For the most salient category of platform acquisitions of nascent firms, the greatest threat to competition comes from platforms' acquisitions of complements or differentiated technologies. Current merger-enforcement tools are ill suited to analyze this new variation on competitive harm. New approaches are required.

A key feature of antitrust today is that the law is developed entirely through adjudication. Evidence suggests that this exclusive reliance on adjudication has failed to deliver a predictable, efficient, or participatory antitrust regime. Antitrust litigation and enforcement are protracted and expensive, requiring extensive discovery and costly expert analysis. In theory, this approach facilitates nuanced and fact-specific analysis of liability and well-tailored remedies. But in practice, the exclusive reliance on case-by-case adjudication has yielded a system of enforcement that generates ambiguity, drains resources, privileges incumbents, and deprives individuals and firms of any real opportunity to participate in the process of creating substantive antitrust rules. It is difficult to quantify this harm. This Essay argues that rulemaking under § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act should supplement antitrust adjudication, and that this institutional shift would lower enforcement costs, reduce ambiguity, and facilitate greater democratic participation. We build on existing scholarship to debunk the view that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not have competition rulemaking authority pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act conferring Chevron deference, and trace legislative history to underscore how Congress designed the FTC to play a unique institutional role. We close by outlining an initial set of factors that should weigh in favor of rulemaking: when there is significant learning from past enforcement and when private litigation would be unlikely. Finally, we pose questions in the context of the FTC's recent hearings to prompt further discussion on where this unused tool would be most useful.

America's failing antitrust system is, in large part, to blame for today's market power problem. Lax antitrust law and enforcement have allowed troubling trends like corporate consolidation to remain unchallenged, further embedding our skewed economy. In highly concentrated markets, individuals have limited choice and little power to pick their price, quality, or provider for the goods and services they need; workers are met with powerful employers and have little agency to shop around or bargain for competitive wages and benefits; and suppliers can't reach the market without paying powerful intermediaries or succumbing to acquisition. Our Essay offers an alternative to the courts' consumer welfare standard. Ambiguous and inadequate, the consumer welfare standard identifies threats to competition only by the potential consequences for consumers and ignores adverse effects on workers, suppliers, product quality, and innovation. Our effective competition standard would restore the primary aim of antitrust laws—namely, to promote competition wherever in the economy it has been compromised, including throughout supply chains and in the labor market. These changes are essential to protect competitive markets in the United States, as well as individuals and the economy at large, by deconcentrating private power.

In this paper, we discuss whether the consumer welfare (CW) standard needs to be replaced or revised in order for antitrust law to deal effectively with the economic challenges of the platform economy. We argue that both the general and platformspecific assaults on the CW standard are misguided, that the CW standard is capable of addressing the economic concerns that critics have raised, and that the proposed alternatives would make things worse—not better.

In this paper, we show that stable outcomes exist in matching environments with complementarities, such as social media platforms or markets for patent licenses. Our results apply to both nontransferable and transferable utility settings, and allow for multilateral agreements and those with externalities. In particular, we show that stable outcomes in these settings are characterized by the largest fixed point of a monotone operator, and so can be found using an algorithm; in the nontransferable utility case, this is a one-sided deferred acceptance algorithm, rather than a Gale–Shapley algorithm. We also give a monotone comparative statics result as well as a comparative static on the effect of bundling contracts together. These illustrate the impact of design decisions, such as increased privacy protections on social media, or the use of antitrust law to disallow patent pools, on stable outcomes.

In 'New York v Meta Platforms, Inc' the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit applied equitable laches to an antitrust lawsuit brought by 46 state attorneys general, holding that they had not brought their claims in their role as law enforcers. 'Meta Platforms' is the latest in a line of cases that has characterized antitrust actions by state attorneys general as non-public and non-governmental. But this characterization is in tension with the historical role of state attorneys general in enforcing the antitrust laws and undermines the original design of the federal antitrust statutes as supplements to state enforcement activities. This note argues that state antitrust enforcement is an insurance policy against federal underenforcement and a mechanism to reflect the popular will. The 'Meta Platforms' decision observed that the status of the states as plaintiffs independently factors into the court's laches analysis. This observation - which this note calls \"the states factor\" - suggests that all else equal, a suit brought by the states to vindicate a quasi-sovereign interest on behalf of its citizens is less likely to be stale than a similar one from a purely private actor. If courts afford limited weight to the \"states factor\" and run laches against elected antitrust enforcers, they make the federal statutes less efficient for their original purpose of supplementing state enforcement activity.

\"Horizontal shareholding\" occurs when one or more equity funds own shares of competitors operating in a concentrated product market. For example, the four largest mutual fund companies might be large shareholders of all the major United States air carriers. A growing body of empirical literature concludes that under these conditions market prices are higher than they would otherwise be. We consider how the antitrust laws might be applied to this practice, identifying a theory of harm and how it matches the law, examining the issues that courts are likely to encounter, and attempting to anticipate litigation problems. While the current literature on horizontal shareholding does not offer a single robust explanation of how the price increase mechanism works, we show that the \"effects\" test expressed in the Clayton Act does not require proof of the precise mechanism. Further, Section 7's \"solely for investment\" exception typically will not apply. We also briefly discuss special problems of private plaintiff challenges. Finally, we elaborate the two ways that efficiencies are relevant to analysis of such mergers.

Antitrust enforcement against anticompetitive platform most favored nations (MFN) provisions (also termed pricing parity provisions) can help protect competition in online markets. An online platform imposes a platform MFN when it requires that providers using its platform not offer their products or services at a lower price on other platforms. These contractual provisions may be employed by a variety of online platforms offering, for example, hotel and transportation bookings, consumer goods, digital goods, or handmade craft products. They have been the subject of antitrust enforcement in Europe but have drawn only limited antitrust scrutiny in the United States. Our Feature explains why MFNs employed by online platforms can harm competition by keeping prices high and discouraging the entry of new platform rivals, through both exclusionary and collusive mechanisms, notwithstanding the possibility that some MFNs may facilitate investment by limiting customer freeriding. We discuss ways by which government enforcers in the United States and private plaintiffs could potentially reach anticompetitive platform MFNs under the Sherman Act, and the litigation challenges such cases present.

Multisided platforms are ubiquitous in today's economy. Although newspapers demonstrate that the platform business model is scarcely new, recent economic analysis has explored more deeply the manner of its operation. Drawing upon these insights, we conclude that enforcers and courts should use a multiple-markets approach in which different groups of users on different sides of a platform belong in different product markets. This approach appropriately accounts for cross-market network effects without collapsing all of a platform's users into a single product market. Furthermore, we advocate the use of a separate-effects analysis, which rejects the view that anticompetitive conduct harming users on one side of a platform can be justified so long as that harm funds benefits for users on another side. Courts should consider the price structure of a platform, and not simply the net price, in assessing competitive effects. This approach in turn supports our final conclusion: that antitrust plaintiffs should not be required to prove as part of their prima facie case more than occurrence of competitive harm in a properly-defined market; thereafter, the burden to produce procompetitive justifications should shift to defendants.

This study examines how antitrust law adoptions affect horizontal merger and acquisition outcomes. Using the staggered introduction of competition laws in 20 countries, we find antitrust regulation decreases acquirers’ 5-day cumulative abnormal returns surrounding horizontal merger announcements. A decrease in deal value, target book assets, and industry peers’ announcement returns are consistent with the market power hypothesis. Exploiting antitrust law adoptions addresses a downward bias to an estimated effect of antitrust enforcement. The potential bias from heterogeneous treatment effects does not nullify our results. Overall, antitrust policies seem to deter post-merger monopolistic gains, potentially improving customer welfare.