The Washington Post devotes considerable space this morning to the fight between AT&T and the Department of Justice over the acquisition of T-Mobile.
The situation reminds me of a number of double-edged folk curses—such as: “May you live in interesting times,” and “May your prayers be answered”—because, for a decade, the telecom industry and its supporters have prayed to be relieved of FCC regulation on the ground that antitrust laws can be used to protect the public.
Some of us have been skeptical, holding to the view that antitrust theology (one hesitates to call it law) is mostly nonsense. In a 1999 article in Reason, I applauded Alan Greenspan’s conclusion:
The entire structure of the antitrust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance. It is the product: (a) of a gross misinterpretation of history; and (b) of rather naive, and certainly unrealistic, economic theories.
And:
Proponents of interventionist antitrust had an embarrassing lack of good examples. As [two leading scholars] point out, when you have a century of experience with a program and virtually every landmark case looks to have been a mistake, perhaps it is time to stop saying, “well, we’ll get it right next time,” and start rethinking the basic premises.
This anti-antitrust position does not mean that there is no role for government in protecting consumers or other businesses dependent on platform companies—there is. But antitrust is not it.
Now, all efforts to think about the real issues raised by the merger (if there are any—I am agnostic) will be diverted into a long war over a set of concepts whose main characteristics are their intellectual incoherence, inadequacy as a mechanism for dealing with industrial structure in the digital age, dedication to fees for the lawyers and economists who constitute the antitrust industry, and vulnerability to feral packs of state attorneys general.
Thanks, guys. Next time, don’t pray quite so fervently?
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