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Antitrust

Antitrust Blowback

The New York Times spent the spring and summer brazenly promoting antitrust enforcement against its own enemies, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, even though those companies are hardly in the first rank of firms in need of the antitrust hammer. (Telecoms, anyone?) All three are implicated in a decline in writer earnings, thanks to the competition the three have brought to the newspaper and publishing industries, and the Times seemed to want to put a stop to that.

But now the Times is shocked to find that the Trump Administration is engaging in a “cruel parody of antitrust enforcement” in its investigation into the car companies that have worked with California to improve emissions standards. The Administration’s apparent view that the car companies are guilty of collusion is, according to the Times, “[a] nakedly political abuse of authority.” That’s rich given the Times’s own apparent efforts to exploit the antitrust laws for private gain.

Where, incidentally, was the Times’s charge of foul motives when the Trump Administration opened antitrust investigations into Google, Facebook, and Amazon this summer? Absent, of course. The Times celebrated the opening of those investigations knowing full well that President Trump harbors animus toward each of those three liberal corporate bastions, and indeed knowing that the only antitrust case in which the Trump Administration had shown any interest so far was the politically-motivated attack on a merger involving Trump enemy CNN.