How ‘Big Is Bad’ Has Become a Big, Big Deal
A primer on legal scholars, such as Timothy Wu and Lina Khan, who supply the ideas for the new approach to anti-monopoly enforcement.
Move over, Chicago School, a more aggressive approach to antitrust theory is taking shape. The anti-monopoly ideas that are being developed in law school seminars pose a threat to some of the most valuable companies in the world, including tech giants Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. This comes at a time when even existing antitrust doctrines are being applied more aggressively by the authorities. The Department of Justice sued Alphabet’s Google under the Sherman Antitrust Act on Oct. 20, and the Federal Trade Commission is considering an antitrust suit against a Facebook Inc. as early as November.
Last week I interviewed two of the new antitrust school’s leading thinkers, Lina Khan and Timothy Wu, who’ve joined forces at Columbia University—an Ivy League school that has aspirations of being for the new antitrust movement what the University of Chicago was for the incumbent theory. (Disclosure: I wrote four freelance articles for the Columbia Law School alumni magazine, the most recent in 2012.)