Antitrust Is the God That Fails and Fails

Justice’s Google case may finally bring home trustbusting’s irrelevance in today’s economy

By Holman W. Jenkins. Excerpts:

"Two Brookings Institution-affiliated economists asked 20 years ago whether antitrust improved consumer welfare. “The empirical record . . . is weak,” they said,"

"The government says Google controls 90% of the market for search but it means the market for Google-like search. How much economically meaningful search now actually takes place on Amazon, Walmart.com, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, AutoTrader, eBay, IMDB, Metacritic, etc.? A lot.

But the Biden administration apparently learned one thing from the failed Microsoft case of the 2000s and the failed IBM case of the 1970s, both of which fizzled from technological and economic irrelevance. It brings cases now only after they are already technologically and economically irrelevant.

Social-media companies are monetizing gobs of internal information that Google and other search engines can’t reach; streaming giants like Netflix are all-in on targeted advertising. Amazon will likely generate $70 billion in digital ad revenue next year, increasingly in the same league as Google and Facebook.

Including Google and Facebook, the vilified tech giants invest billions to challenge each other’s turf and improve the products they frequently give away free to the public. This isn’t how monopolists are supposed to behave."

"The Justice Department claims Google illegally maintains its monopoly by paying Apple $20 billion annually to be its default iPhone search engine. Yet in illuminating international studies, whenever Apple users have been required to choose, they overwhelmingly choose Google anyway. This suggests Google is essentially paying Apple protection money for market share it would have in the absence of Apple’s own market power, but never mind."

"But an antitrust so removed from reality is also an antitrust that’s helpless in the real world to produce benefits for society.

The proof is a shocking record of court defeats, from the Trump administration’s failed 2017 attack on the AT&T-Time Warner merger to a series of Biden humiliations involving Microsoft, Facebook-parent Meta, game makers, defense contractors and health insurers."