Corbin Barthold invited me on Tech Freedom’s “Tech Policy Podcast” to discuss the history of antitrust and competition policy over the past half century. We covered a huge range of cases and controversies, including: the DOJ’s mega cases against IBM & AT&T, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video’s derailed merger, the Sirius-XM deal, the hysteria over the AOL-Time Warner merger, the evolution of competition in mobile markets, and how we finally ended that dreaded old MySpace monopoly!

What does the future hold for Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix? Do antitrust regulators at the DOJ or FTC have enough to mount a case against these firms? Which case is most likely to have legs?

Corbin and I also talked about the of progress more generally and the troubling rise of more and more Luddite thinking on both the left and right. I encourage you to give it a listen:

This is a compendium of readings on “ progress studies ,” or essays and books which generally make the case for technological innovation, dynamism, economic growth, and abundance. I will update this list as additional material of relevance is brought to my attention.   

[Last update: 10/11/22]

Recent Essays

• Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a16z.com, October 16, 2023.
• Will Rinehart, “The Abundance Agenda,” The Exformation Newsletter, October 15, 2022.
• Sarah Constantin, “Unblocking Abundance: A Model for Activism,” Rough Diamonds, October 10, 2022.
• Derek Thompson, “The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress,” The Atlantic, May 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Where is ‘Progress Studies’ Going?” Progress Forum, April 23, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “The Case for American Seriousness,” Common Sense, April 18, 2022.
• William Rinehart, “Vetocracy, the Costs of Vetos and Inaction,” Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, March 24, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “Forget about Left Wing and Right Wing. How about an Up Wing America?” Faster Please, March 23, 2022.
• John W. Lettieri & Kenan Fikri, “The Case for Economic Dynamism and Why it Matters for the American Worker,” Economic Innovation Group, March 2022.
• Adam Kovacevich, “Saying YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) to “Civic Innovation,” Chamber of Progress, March 21, 2022.
• Eli Dourado, “Remove Barriers to Productivity,” City Journal, March 18, 2022.
• “A Case for Innovation and Optimism,” (A conversation with Jason Crawford), Discourse, March 2, 2022.
• Noah Smith, “A New Industrialist Roundup,” Noahpinion, February 3, 2022.
• James Pethokoukis, “When Will the Next Big Thing Arrive?” Faster Please, February 3, 2022.
• Alec Stapp & Caleb Watney,  “ Progress is a Policy Choice ,” Institute for Progress, January 20, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “ How to Get the Future We Were Promised ,” Discourse, January 18, 2022.
• Katherine Boyle, “ Building American Dynamism ,” Future, January 14, 2022.  
• Derek Thompson, “ A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems ,” The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
• Jason Crawford, “Progress, Humanism, Agency: An Intellectual Core for the Progress Movement,” Roots of Progress, January 11, 2022.
• Adam Thierer, “Defending Innovation Against Attacks from All Sides,” Discourse, November 9, 2021.
• Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for More Energy,” October 7, 2021.
• Jason Crawford, “ We need a new philosophy of progress ,” The Roots of Progress, August 23, 2021.
• Gale Pooley & Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index 2021,” Human Progress, April 22, 2021.
• Noah Smith, “ Techno-optimism for the 2020s ,” December 3, 2020. 
• Ezra Klein, “ Why We Can’t Build ,” Vox, April 22, 2020.
• Marc Andreesen, “ It’s Time to Build ,” Future, April 18, 2020.
• Eli Dourado, “ How do we move the needle on progress ?” September 26, 2019.
• José Luis Ricón, “ About the ‘Progress’ in Progress Studies ” September 6, 2019.
• Will Rinehart, “ Progress Studies: Some Initial Thoughts ,” August 30, 2019.
• Adam Thierer, “ Is There a Science of Progress ?” AIER, August 8, 2019.
• Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, “ We Need a New Science of Progress ,” The Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
• Tyler Cowen, “ The Case for the Longer Term ,” Cato Unbound, January 9, 2019.
• Vinod Khosla, “ We Need Large Innovations ,” Medium, January 1, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ How Technology Expands the Horizons of Our Humanity ,” Medium, November 19, 2018. 
• Chelsea Follett, “Utopianism: One of the Biggest Obstacles to Progress,” Human Progress, August15, 2018.
• Eli Dourado, “ How Technological Innovation Can Massively Reduce the Cost of Living ,” PlainText, January 29, 2016.

Books

• J. Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car ? (Stripe Press, 2021).
• Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (New York: Harper, 2020).
• Andrew McAfee, More from Less (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
• Ronald Bailey & Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute, 2020).
• Arthur M. Diamond Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco, CA: Stripe Press, 2018).
• Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).
• Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
• Tim Harford, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
• Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
• Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom , 2nd ed. (Arlington, VA: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2016).
• Calestous Juma, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Joe Carlen, A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Robert Bryce, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
• Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).
• Larry Downes, The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces That Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
• Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
• Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).
• Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth , (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
• David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998).
• Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
• Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
• Nathan Rosenberg and L. E.. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
• Samuel C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976, 1994).

Here’s a new animated explainer video that I narrated for the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project. The 3-minute video discusses how earlier “tech giants” rose and fell as technological innovation and new competition sent them off to what the New York Times once appropriately called “The Hall of Fallen Giants.” It’s a continuing testament to the power of “creative destruction” to upend and reorder markets, even as many pundits insist that there’s no possibility change can happen.

This is an important lesson for us to remember today, as I noted in the recent editorial for The Hill about why, “Open-ended antitrust is an innovation killer“:

Those who worry about today’s largest tech giants becoming supposedly unassailable monopolies should consider how similar fears were expressed not so long ago about other tech titans, many of which we laugh about today. Just 14 years ago, headlines proclaimed that “MySpace Is a Natural Monopoly,” and asked, “Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?” We all know how that “monopoly” ceased to exist. At the same time, pundits insisted “Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone,” since “there is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.” The smartphone market of that era was viewed as completely under the control of BlackBerry, Palm, Motorola and Nokia. A few years prior to that, critics lambasted the merger of AOL and TimeWarner as a new corporate “Big Brother” that would decimate digital diversity and online competition.

Accordingly, policymakers should be humble and recognize that, “it’s better to let rivalry and innovation emerge organically,” and only bring in the wrecking ball of heavy-handed antitrust regulation as a last resort, I argued. Technological change and entrepreneurialism has a way of upending and reordering markets when we least expect it. Just ask all those members of the Hall of Fallen Giants.

I finally got around to reading this interesting little paper by Justus Haucap and Ulrich Heimeshoff published by the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics entitled, “Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay: Is the Internet Driving Competition or Market Monopolization?”  It offers a nice snapshot of the current state of play in several online sectors and surveys much of the relevant economic literature on the issue of antitrust and information technology markets. The authors also familiarize readers with the basic economic concepts that are hotly debated in the field of digital economics, including: network effects, switching costs, multi-homing, and economies of scale.

What I particularly like about their paper is that it struggles with the two competing narratives that dominate debates over digital age economics. Here’s how Haucap and Heimeshoff put it in the introduction:

On the one hand, it is rather obvious that many very successful Internet-based companies are nearly monopolists. Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Skype are typical examples for Internet firms who dominate their relevant markets and who leave only limited space for a relatively small competitive fringe. Furthermore, most of these providers do not generate content themselves, but “only” provide access to different content on the Internet. On the other hand, the crucial question from a competition policy perspective is not so much whether these firms have such a dominant position today, but rather why they have such a large market share and whether this is a temporary or non-temporary phenomenon. Do these Internet monopolies enjoy a dominant position because they are protected from competition though barriers to entry or do they just enjoy the profits of superior technology and innovation? Are we observing some sort of Schumpeterian competition where one temporary monopoly is followed by another, with innovation as the driving competitive force, or are we dealing with monopoly firms that mainly try to foreclose their markets through anticompetitive behavior?

Faithful readers know from my past rantings here on this blog, in Forbes columns, and in various working papers, that I am firmly in the latter (“Schumpeterian competition”) camp. For example, in a column on “‘Tech Titans’ and Schumpeter’s Vision,” I argued that:

Simply put, we now live in Joseph Schumpeter’s economy. The Austrian-born economist had the digital economy figured out seven decades ago. Cascading waves of continuous change, or what Schumpeter called the “perennial gales of creative destruction,” reverberate all around us in the tech economy. Innovative risk-takers are constantly shaking things up and displacing yesterday’s lumbering, lethargic giants. In markets built largely upon binary code, the pace and nature of change has become hyper-Schumpeterian: unrelenting and utterly unpredictable.

In another column (“The Rule Of Three: The Nature of Competition In The Digital Economy“), I explained the Schumpeterian paradigm in this fashion:

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter explained long ago that competition and technological innovation often spring from the quest for the prize of market power. “In capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not [perfect] competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization,” he argued. This is competition that “strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives. This kind of competition is as much more effective than the other,” he argued, because the “ever-present threat” of dynamic, disruptive change “disciplines before it attacks.”

In an online symposium on “Competition in Online Search” hosted by the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog, I documented the recent history of turbulent, Schumpeterian change in the digital economy. Some examples I offered by walking backward in time:

• Just five years ago, MySpace dominated social networking and had The Guardian wondering, “Will MySpace Ever Lose Its Monopoly?” A short time later, MySpace lost its early lead and became a major liability for owner Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace in 2005 only to sell it for $35 million in June 2011.
• Just six to eight years ago, the mobile landscape was ruled by Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Motorola. Palm is now all but dead and BlackBerry is trying to stay afloat while Nokia and Motorola had to cut deals with Microsoft and Google respectively in order to survive.
• Just 10 years ago, AOL’s hegemony in online services was thought to be unassailable, especially after its merger with Time Warner. But the merger quickly went off the rails and AOL’s online “dominance” quickly evaporated. Losses grew to over $100 billion and the entire deal unraveled within just a few years as AOL’s old dial-up, walled-garden business model had been completely superseded by broadband and the new Web 2.0 world.
• Just 12 years ago, Yahoo! and AltaVista were the go-to companies for online search. No one turns to them first today when they go looking for information online.
• And just 15 years ago, Microsoft was on everyone’s mind. Today, the firm is struggling to remain part of cocktail party chatter when the topic of modern Tech Titans is discussed. For example, a recent Fast Company cover story on “The Great Tech War of 2012” only mentioned Microsoft in passing. The rise of search, social media, and cloud computing represented disruptive shifts that Microsoft wasn’t prepared for, although the company continues to innovate and remain relevant.

From this evidence, I have argued that Schumpeter’s “gales of creative destruction” have rarely blown harder through any sector of our economy. Even when some “tech titans” rise to the top of the mountain and win the race for the prize of market power, their reign tends to be brief and is immediately challenged by others looking to knock them off their perch. This is also why it is so essential that policymakers not disrupt this Schumpeterian process with preemptive antitrust strikes or misguided regulatory interventions. The quest for the prize is what drives the most important forms of market competition and innovation. As Justice Scalia argued in a notable 2004 Supreme Court antitrust-related decision (Trinko): “the opportunity to charge monopoly prices—at least for a short period—is what attracts ‘business acumen’ in the first place; it induces risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth.”

Schumpeterian thinking remains as controversial today as it did during his lifetime, but I think it perfectly explains the cycles of competition and innovation we at see at work in the modern digital economy. So, what conclusion do Haucap and Heimeshoff come to in their paper?

It is not possible to generalize with respect to the degree of competition in online markets. While some markets tend to lean towards high concentration ratios, the strong market position of Google and Facebook do not necessarily need to be longlasting. . .  In the case of Facebook, multi-homing is not too costly so that there is scope for further competition. The entry of Google+ in 2011 is an interesting development for competition, but the further development remains to be seen. In contrast, eBay has managed to hold on to its dominant position in the market for private online auctions which is difficult to contest, as sellers’ reputations are not transferable across platforms. . . . . If direct and indirect network effects play an important role in a particular online market, it is not clear ex ante whether a monopoly or a dominant market position is actually good or bad from an efficiency perspective. While some authors . . . . argue for a stronger market regulation of eBay, there are also good and valid counter-arguments, based on innovation incentives. In fact, many online markets have been characterized by a large degree of Schumpeterian competition where one dominant player follows the other. A notable exception has only been eBay which has managed to hold on to its dominant position for more than a decade now. Still, a more interventionist approach beyond the application of general competition law rules appears not to be warranted so far.

The authors’ focus on eBay is interesting. As I noted on Twitter the other day, I would agree that eBay is a bit of anomaly when it comes to digital age competition. eBay is really only digital platform that’s been able to maintain lasting dominance in its field (online auctions). Over the past 12 years, it has not been significantly disrupted like other digital providers and platforms. But two caveats are in order here.

First, eBay actually does face credible competition at the margin for particular goods. For example, I am a car fanatic. I have moved 6 cars on eBay over the past decade. But I have also used Cars.com and AutoTrader.com to work deals or at least research cars I would later buy or sell on eBay. Likewise, I’m obsessed with consumer electronics, especially home theater gear. I can find plenty of great deals on eBay, but I also shop at dozens of other sites (some high-end retailers like Crutchfield; others are trading sites just for home theater stuff). And the same is true for many other types of products. There’s an endless assortment of places online to find apparel and media content, for example.  And heck, Amazon is a pretty big dog that eBay must contend with in several sub-markets. And there are plenty of other competitors that keep eBay’s market power in check despite its continued dominance of the “online auction” marketplace, however you choose to define it.

Second, even if you think eBay has serious dominance in its market, what of it? Haucap and Heimeshoff note that a few scholars have called for greater regulation of eBay, but there has never been a serious push by academics or policymakers to drop the antitrust hammer on eBay’s head. And the reason is simple: It is impossible to make a case that eBay is harming consumer welfare. In fact, eBay’s “market power” helps consumers by greatly diminishing search and transaction costs. How many of us want to go sign up for a dozen different sites when we hope to auction off our old comic book or baseball card collection? Not me. I know that eBay will guarantee me the best chance to maximize the profit margin on my old junk by bringing together the largest universe of potential buyers all in one spot.  If eBay ever tried to gouge users with outrageous listing fees or restrictive trading rules, I think we’d see other firms look to break into the market fairly quickly. The tough question is whether there would be any way to port over our reputational history / rankings to other sites.  Probably not, but I still don’t think that ends the threat of potential entry or innovation, especially at the margin for really popular goods.

Taken together, these two points make it clear that the online auction marketplace is what economists would call a “contestable market.” The looming threat of entry at the margin keeps eBay on its toes and their “market power” in check.

Anyway, I encourage you to read the Haucap and Heimeshoff paper. It’s quite interesting and I think they are right to conclude that “a more interventionist approach beyond the application of general competition law rules appears not to be warranted so far.” Finally, if you really enjoy this topic and want to read some of the best literature in the field, you might want to check out my list of “The 12 Best Papers on Antitrust & the Digital Economy” that I put together last Fall.

Additional Reading:

• “Antitrust & Innovation in the New Economy: The Problem with the Static Equilibrium Mindset” (Technology Liberation Front, Apr. 16, 2012)
• “The 12 Best Papers on Antitrust & the Digital Economy” (Technology Liberation Front, Sept. 6, 2012)
• “The Rule Of Three: The Nature of Competition In The Digital Economy” (Forbes, June 29, 2012)
• “‘Tech Titans’ and Schumpeter’s Vision” (Forbes, Aug. 22, 2011)
• “Bye Bye BlackBerry. How Long Will Apple Last?” (Forbes)
• “Smartphones & Schumpeter” (Technology Liberation Front, Apr. 12, 2012)
• “Uncreative Destruction: The Misguided War on Vertical Integration in the Information Economy” (Mecratus working paper; w/ Brent Skorup)
• “Competition in Online Search” (Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog symposium entry, May 21, 2012)
• “On Fast Firms, Slow Regulators, Antitrust & the Digital Economy” (Technology Liberation Front, July 6, 2012)
• “Gary Reback’s Antitrust Love Letter,” (Technology Liberation Front, Sept. 20, 2009.)
• “What is “Optimal Interoperability”? A Review of Palfrey & Gasser’s’“Interop,’” (Technology Liberation Front, June 11, 2012)
• “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 2 – Saving the Net From Its Supporters” (Technology Liberation Front, Feb. 1, 2011)
• “Thoughts on Tim Wu’s Master Switch, Part 2 (On “Cycles” & “Market Failure”)” (Technology Liberation Front, Oct. 26, 2010)

A reporter recently interviewed me for a story and asked a terrific question: Why is it that business model disruption and creative destruction seem to have sped up in recent times?  My guess — and excuse me if this seems too obvious — is that it must have something to do with the very nature of intangible, digital technologies of the new economy versus the tangible, analog technologies of the old economy. That is, in markets built largely upon binary code, the pace and nature of change becomes relentlessly hyper-Schumpeterian precisely because digital technologies and platforms are more easily disintermediated and leap-frogged than earlier tangible technologies and platforms were.  And so we get creative destruction on steroids.

Consider, for example, what constituted a “social networking site” in the old days versus today. Our old social networking sites and services in the past were town squares, parks, school parking lots, shopping malls, as well as media like newspapers, magazines, and even the mail. When we socially networked in those environments, we were creatures of our fixed, “real-space” environments as well as their many natural constraints. Disrupting, replacing, or even replicating those environments, technologies, or platforms was a monumental undertaking precisely because of the enormous costs associated with doing so.

Today, by contrast, our social networking spaces are increasingly intangible and digital. Disruption becomes much easier, and significantly cheaper, in a digital environment. This explains how the walled garden communities of the late 1990s (AOL, CompuServe, etc.) disappeared in less than a decade and gave way to sites like MySpace, which itself has already been disrupted by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, among others. And so the cycle continues, and it seems to be speeding up, probably because so much more of our modern economy is built on foundations of code.

This is not to say that every digital age giant will be easily displaced or disappear overnight. But the possibility of that happening has increased exponentially compared to the relative likelihood of the disruption of comparable platforms and technologies in the past.  The lesson here seems rather straightforward: tangibility matters.

[For further reading on this point, see “The Laws of Disruption” by Larry Downes and I also discussed some of these issues in my paper, “The Perils of Classifying Social Media Platforms as Public Utilities.”]

Is competition really a problem in the tech industry? That was the question the folks over at WebProNews asked me to come on their show and discuss this week. I offer my thoughts in the following 15-minute clip. Also, down below I have embedded a few of my recent relevant essays on this topic, a few of which I mentioned during the show.

• “On Fast Firms, Slow Regulators, Antitrust & the Digital Economy,” Technology Liberation Front, July 6, 2012
• “The Rule Of Three: The Nature of Competition In The Digital Economy,” Forbes, June 29, 2012.
• “Sunsetting Technology Regulation: Applying Moore’s Law to Washington,” Forbes, May 25, 2012.
• “Of “Tech Titans” and Schumpeter’s Vision,” Forbes, August 22, 2011.
• “Bye Bye BlackBerry. How Long Will Apple Last?” Forbes, April 1, 2012.
• “Gary Reback’s Antitrust Love Letter,” Technology Liberation Front, September 20, 2009.
• “What is “Optimal Interoperability”? A Review of Palfrey & Gasser’s’“Interop,’” Technology Liberation Front, June 11, 2012.

It won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange, when Libby Jacobsen tries to explain how traditional journalism still wants your money after all that it hasn’t done.

On the OpenMarket blog, she critiques a report released Monday calling for the traditional journalism industry to be propped up various ways. And she does so with gusto:

Outrageously, [former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr.] also wants to put telecoms on the hook for bailing out reporting, suggesting that the FCC collect fees from internet service providers to be used for a national “Fund for Local News.” He’s blind to the fact that telecoms and ISPs have done nothing but help disseminate news and information. There is more reporting, more information, more news available to us today than there ever has been in the history of civilization. It’s true that there’s a lot of garbage out there, but there’s a lot of very good online journalism as well. Nearly everything published online is subject to peer-review from a massive amount of people, and the success of sites like Wikipedia are proof that accountability, credibility, and accuracy matter just as much online as they do offline.

Have I said too much? There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you. But all you have to do is look at Libby’s post to know that every word is true.

(Just one thing, Libby. What happens when a bad pun ruins a perfectly good blog post?)

The recently proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal has rekindled the debate over what role, if any, antitrust regulators should play in the high-tech sector. Adam and Berin have argued that decades-old (sometimes centuries-old) antitrust laws simply cannot keep pace with the relentlessly fast-moving digital economy. And Farhad Manjoo of Slate has concluded that antitrust action against tech companies does more harm than good — even when the facts favor government intervention.

For more on this, check out this excellent column on the future of antitrust enforcement by L. Gordon Crovitz in today’s The Wall Street Journal which quotes my colleague (and fellow TLFer) Wayne Crews:

Markets were so much simpler in the 1890s, when Sen. John Sherman got almost unanimous support in Congress to go after the Standard Oil Co. of Ohio. The Sherman Act and later antitrust laws were supposed to protect consumer interests. That’s not so easy when regulators have to deal with industries as different as oil, with its cartels and long product cycles, and technology, where fast change is a constant necessity for survival… The bottom line is that by the time regulators can assess a technology market, the market has often moved on. Not long ago, Google was the upstart and the search leaders included names like AltaVista and Excite. “Regulatory intervention in the high-tech sector thwarts the natural evolution of the market,” argues Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Worse, it distorts the response of competitors. Antitrust investigations steer the market in unnatural directions, creating instabilities in entire industry sectors.”

Read the rest here.