Antitrust Lawyer Blog
On April 19, 2018, Makan Delrahim, Assistant Attorney General of DOJ’s Antitrust Division delivered the keynote address at the at the University of Chicago’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. The focus of his remarks was “evidence-based enforcement.” He said that “an evidence-based approach requires enforcement built on credible evidence that a practice harms competition and the American consumer, or in the case of merger enforcement, that it creates an unacceptable risk of doing so.”
Delrahim noted that outside of flat out price fixing and naked restraints of trade, which are clearly illegal, “antitrust demands evidence of harm or likely harm to competition, often weighed against efficiencies or procompetitive justifications.” He added that “taking an evidence-based approach to antitrust law should not be mistaken for an unwillingness to bring enforcement actions.” He said that if there is clear evidence of harm, the antitrust enforcers should vigorously prosecute the antitrust laws. He noted that antitrust enforcers that failed to take action when they had credible evidence and accepted behavioral “band-aid” fixes to anticompetitive mergers should accept some blame. Delrahim noted that “the Microsoft case proved that an evidence-based antitrust enforcement approach can be flexible in its application to new types of assets and markets—in that case, the computer code and software markets.”
His message was that the U.S. and international antitrust agencies should not simply go to war with digital platform companies rather a more effective approach would be grounded in evidence. He added that “in certain platform markets involving network effects, there may be barriers to entry or a tendency toward a single firm emerging as the sole winner” and in those situations, “antitrust enforcers may need to take a close look to see whether competition is suffering and consumers are losing out on new innovations as a result of misdeeds by a monopoly incumbent.”