What You Should be Reading: April 2025
Lazar Radic, Senior Scholar at ICLE, was mentioned in this Taxpayers Protection Alliance paper on what you should be reading: April 2025. Read the full story here.
International Center for Law & Economics: “Imaginary Consensus as a Legitimizing Philosophy of the New Antitrust Meta-Narrative”
Lazar Radic of the International Center for Law & Economics writes that the ongoing revolution in the land of competition policy began in error.
“The prevalent (or, at least, the loudest) grand antitrust narrative of today posits that so-called ‘digital markets’ present unique anticompetitive and evidentiary challenges that can only be adequately addressed through ex-ante rules or strong presumptions that mitigate (if not entirely overturn) the previous ‘dogmatic’ adherence to economic analysis,” Radic writes. “This story — a subplot in a broader fairy tale about the alleged unmitigated failure of antitrust in the ‘neoliberal era’ — functions as the lynchpin of a new antitrust ideology that seeks to redefine the role of competition and competition law in society.”
As the report describes, no international consensus — imagined by the competition-policy revolutionaries — has congealed with respect to how digital markets ought to be regulated. The theories behind Europe’s Digital Markets Act — a revolutionary law that abandons consumer welfare to give favors to uncompetitive rivals of big firms — have found little purchase in many countries. Moreover, digital markets remain competitive. Attempts to implement the new ideology — such as the Federal Trade Commission’s pursuit of Meta’s acquisition of an artificial intelligence startup — have faltered in court.
Radic outlines recent global trends masterfully, and in detail. For that alone, the report merits reading. But some of its best contents provide a larger view:
Grand narratives will always be compelling because they tap into popular themes and prejudices to offer simple stories about (and solutions to) complex phenomena. As narratives go, the new antitrust meta-narrative is particularly difficult to dispel, because it rides a generational populist anti-capitalist wave built on a shaky but attractive ideational foundation: “techno-feudalism,” “surveillance capitalism,” “neoliberalism,” etc. These are the bogeymen of our time, and “Big Tech” embodies them all.
Here, narrative appeal trumps facts and analysis. It doesn’t matter that those brandishing the term cannot even properly define what “neoliberalism” is. It doesn’t matter that, despite the supposed hegemony of neoliberalism, government spending as a percentage of GDP has exploded. It doesn’t matter that markets are shot-through with laws and regulation. It doesn’t matter that “killer acquisitions” constitute a minuscule portion of tech acquisitions.
Meta-narratives are big stories that rely on big, sweeping claims. What they offer is a story of heroes and villains; good vs. evil; the righteous vs the wicked. And in such a story, there is no place for nuance and no need for evidence.
Competition policy can be a dreary place. Merely patrolling the edge of markets for the occasional anticompetitive conduct cannot satisfy regulators who wish to rearrange entire markets to reflect their own conceptions of “fairness.” This impulse leads enforcers to preference competitors over true competition, innovation, and consumer welfare. It is no way to run a railroad — or to regulate digital markets.