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But Powell noted that the recent string of data is even “a little better than what we saw last year.” He described “a broader disinflation” in which prices are cooling across the board, most notably in housing, which makes up a major share of Americans’ budgets and took far longer to simmer down than expected.

“It’s a lot better,” Powell said. “Now, the job is not done. I want to stress that. And we’re committed to getting inflation sustainably down to 2 percent. But we need to take note of that progress.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said the central bank might cut interest rates as soon as September, signaling the fight against elevated inflation is close to over.

That timing would be especially fortunate for Vice President Kamala Harris.

In most respects, President Joseph R. Biden is a thoroughly conventional president — a leader deeply respectful of precedent, a man whose style and values are shaped by living through more than half of the 20th century even as he ends his career navigating the disruptive politics of the 21st.

By contrast, the great foil of his presidency — predecessor Donald Trump — is in style and contempt for precedent the most radical person ever to hold the office.

He tells Brownfield the current tone in Washington, D.C makes any progress a challenge. “With the Freedom Caucus antics and all of the other problems we’re all highly aware of, with those tight majorities there just isn’t going to be, I don’t believe, the time on the schedule or the right political environment for that bill to move in a responsible way across the House floor,” he says. “Never mind whatever is going on in the Senate.”

He says the November election could change that. “One thing we know about budget-hawks that won’t vote for anything with any kind of a dollar amount attached to it when a Democrat is President, is when a Republican becomes President, all of that goes out the window,” he says. “And they pass whatever they need to pass if their party leadership is moving that direction.”

“Better late than never” is a useful maxim in all of life and in politics as well. On Monday, Joe Biden caught the “better late than never” bug when he unveiled a series of proposals to reform the US supreme court.

Those proposals come more than two and a half years after the US president’s presidential commission on the supreme court issued its recommendations, and more than 40 years after Biden called former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to impose term limits on the court “boneheaded”.

The summer of reversals for President Joe Biden continued in dramatic form on Monday as he announced that he now supports sweeping Supreme Court reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Biden pushed 18-year term limits and a binding ethics code on Supreme Court justices — after a long career spent opposing such measures — as well as a constitutional amendment overturning the court’s recent decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution.

Is it too little too late?

This year, like last year, is a Farm Bill year and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver any Farm Bill.

The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics. Most Congressional Republicans aren’t interested in passing any bipartisan farm and food assistance bill when they believe a delay might deliver a GOP-controlled House, Senate and White House which then would write and pass a Farm Bill that might well resemble something out of the 1980s.

Chipmaker Nvidia is reportedly about to be charged with antitrust violations in France.

The French competition authority’s pending charges would follow a raid on Nvidia’s offices last year, Reuters reported Monday (July 1), citing sources familiar with the matter.

Microsoft's partnership with artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI and Google's move to install its AI service on Samsung phones are both getting European Union antitrust scrutiny, the bloc's competition chief said.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition commissioner, said officials had concluded that they couldn't review Microsoft's $13 billion in investments in OpenAI under merger rules but would send the companies follow-up questions under antitrust rules "to understand whether certain exclusivity clauses could have a negative effect on competitors."

Much ink has been spilled lamenting the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) marked shift away from its long-standing consumer welfare standard and toward a populist approach of targeting big business, notably tech companies. Less studied is what this means for the agency’s ability to accomplish its core mission: protecting the public from deceptive or unfair business practices and unfair methods of competition.

Under the direction of Chair Lina Khan, the FTC has abandoned its decades-long adherence to the consumer welfare standard of antitrust enforcement under which mergers, acquisitions and other business behaviors are subject to intervention only when they are likely to harm consumers. This standard necessarily imposes a narrow range of considerations on which regulators can focus and has served well to protect consumers from unfair business practices. Khan’s FTC instead has expanded its range of considerations to cover size, industry concentration and other ancillary factors. In doing so, the agency is pushing the bounds of its congressionally mandated scope and authority.

This development, however, is actually counterintuitive. Scholars and policymakers have long thought that concentrated market power and monopolies produce more innovation than competition. Consider that patent law—which is the primary body of law aimed at creating incentives for innovation—was traditionally thought to conflict with antitrust law. Known as the “the patent-antitrust paradox,” it was often said that antitrust is designed to prevent monopolies and other exclusionary practices while the patent system does the opposite, granting exclusionary rights and market power in the form of patents. Given this framework, it makes sense that scholars, courts, and government agencies have only recently considered antitrust and patent laws to be complementary policies for encouraging innovation.

Very little evidence, however, indicates that antitrust law affects the rate of innovation. There are three possibilities. Antitrust enforcement could strengthen incentives to innovate. It could, however, also diminish them: If firms believe that aggressive innovation is likely to draw unwanted attention from regulators, their motivation to invent new goods and methods could wane. And as a practical matter, the courts are probably ill equipped to create incentives for technological advancement. The third possibility is that innovation and antitrust have no causal relationship.

But while such acquisitions could have the effect of eliminating a potential threat to a large company down the road, taking too hard a stance against the practice could also stifle innovation, he said. When the rate at which companies are merging or making acquisitions is high, the chances a startup will get bought is also higher and the incentive for more entrepreneurs to launch one and begin to innovate follows suit.

“You’re trying to protect consumers by regulating, but then you can end up taxing innovation,” Van Reenen said. “The big companies say the reason we innovated so much is because of the rewards we expect to get, and if you basically start taking that away—taking away our intellectual property, it’s going to reduce our incentives to invest or for the next wave of entrepreneurs to come along.”

We have both been critical of social media from our respective political experiences. Critics on the right accuse social media of censoring conservative voices and a left-leaning bias; critics on the left accuse social media of permitting right-wing extremism to pervade its platforms. Big Tech has become a rare object of bipartisan demonization. Each for their own reasons, Democrats and Republicans have come together on Capitol Hill to craft legislation aimed at dismantling Big Tech.

There are legitimate concerns about Big Tech's practices. Some believe the only answer is antitrust legislation. This is the wrong answer. In addressing concerns around Big Tech, Congress must be careful not to use a saw when other more precise tools will do. Put another way, Congress must not lose sight of the reality that U.S.-based tech companies are today providing open platforms that promote freedom around the world. Despite the best efforts of closed societies such as Russia and China to keep their citizenry in the dark about their malign conduct, Western platforms are a valuable medium for truth in those societies.

Hovenkamp pointed out that Big Tech companies are “highly productive,” have growth rates that are three to four times as large as the growth rates of the overall economy, do “enormous amounts of research,” and are among the largest patent-receiving entities. The paper also cited the innovation spends of firms like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

“We should avoid the effort to try to break up Big Tech, because we have a very poor track record with respect to breakups,” Hovenkamp said. For instance, a breakup is an unwise antitrust remedy if it ends up transferring a monopoly to another company. “Should the remedy in the Google search case be to force Google to transfer [its] search [capabilities] to another buyer?” he asked. “Unless we can predict some other kind of pro-competitive consequence down the road, it really doesn’t make any sense to simply transfer a dominant product like a search engine and break it up.”

Breaking up monopolies draws populist cheer from some antitrust advocates, but that approach could cause more harm than good in the case of digital enterprises, according to Herbert Hovenkamp, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics, and professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School. A more flexible option to curb anticompetitive practices is to use injunctions, which “opens the path for more competitive choices,” he said.

Regulating Big Tech from an antitrust standpoint can be complicated and the nature of the business does not easily allow clarity on the underlying issues, Hovenkamp said recently on the Wharton Business Daily radio show that airs on SiriusXM. (Listen to the podcast.) It is best for regulators to take a cautious approach and avoid taking strong actions on markets they don’t understand well, he advised in a recent paper titled “Structural Antitrust Relief Against Digital Platforms.”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and DOJ’s antitrust actions against major tech firms like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta are predicated on the belief that breaking up these companies will benefit consumers and markets. However, the reality is that these companies have thrived because of consumer choices. No one forced users to prefer Google’s search engine, Amazon’s e-commerce platform, or Apple’s products; if the government breaks them apart, customers will put them back together.

The case against Live Nation is just as troubling. Live Nation has become the world’s leading provider of live concerts, ticket sales and related services. Its success stems from innovative integration across multiple business lines, a structure that its competitors want to replicate, according to the DOJ. The agency contends that this integration is hard to duplicate, so it stifles competition and innovation. Yet this very structure has driven substantial value for consumers and investors. The only beneficiaries of breaking up Live Nation would be those less effective competitors who struggle to match its innovations.

And while President Joe Biden appointed a team of aggressive antitrust regulators to top posts — including former Cicilline aide Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission — recent losses in the courtroom highlight the need to pass new legislation, argued Cicilline.

“In the end, the change of laws requires congressional action,” the Rhode Island Democrat said. “We’re battling some of the biggest, most powerful companies in the history of the world, and it’s going to require all of us to work together in a bipartisan way to get this done, particularly in Congress.”

The US’s anti-regulation stand extends to other facets of tech regulation, including data privacy. Even as most countries in the world have recently adopted data privacy laws, no comprehensive federal privacy law has emerged from Congress. Congress has also not updated its dated antitrust statutes that, according to many, are ill-suited to address the problems of today’s digital economy. Nor has Congress acted to regulate artificial intelligence, protect the rights of gig workers, or impose obligations on platforms to share revenue with creators of copyright protected content. This minimalist US legislative framework stands in stark contrast to the legislative activity of the EU, which has regulated extensively across these and many other domains of the digital economy, as discussed below. The US courts have also vigorously defended the unregulated tech economy, lending their legitimacy to the free-market ethos that underlies the US’s regulatory approach towards the digital economy.31

President Joseph Biden’s Administration is undertaking the most sweeping transformation of U.S. competition policy since Ronald Reagan became President in 1981.1 In July 2021, in remarks accompanying the issuance of an Executive Order on Promoting Competition Policy in the American Economy,2 President Biden presented his rationale for far-reaching change:

[O]ver time, we’ve lost the fundamental American idea that true capitalism depends on fair and open competition. Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition. We’re now forty years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power. And where—what have we gotten from it? Less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses. Too many Americans who feel left behind. Too many people who are poorer than their parents. I believe the experiment failed. We have to get back to an economy that grows from the bottom up and the middle out.3 President Biden committed his administration to employ a “whole of government” competition policy program that, among other measures, would apply existing antitrust tools more aggressively to control mergers and dominant firm conduct and enact new legislation to regulate Big Tech.4

Lina Khan knows what she can do and what she can’t do in her new job as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which along with the antitrust division of the Justice Department is responsible for ensuring fair competition in business. What she can do is enforce antitrust laws. What she can’t do is go beyond the laws as they are written. When I interviewed her and her Columbia Law School colleague Timothy Wu for a Bloomberg Businessweek article in October, Khan emailed me to say that “if the laws are misinterpreted by courts, Congress is the only actor that can fix their mistakes.” Not the FTC or Justice. That’s why President Biden’s appointment of Khan to head the FTC on June 15, just hours after she was confirmed by Congress as a commissioner, may be only the second most important development in antitrust over the past week. Even more important may be the five bills introduced on June 11 by House Democrats and Republicans that would, among other things, force Amazon.com, Apple, and other tech giants to sell or exit key businesses. The bills would toughen merger reviews for tech companies, prohibit them from offering certain products and services, and restrict how they treat other businesses that depend on their platforms. According to Bloomberg’s story on the legislation, one of the House bills, the “Ending Platform Monopolies Act,” would prohibit tech platforms from owning a business that competes with other products or services offered on the platform. Such a provision, if passed, would bar Amazon from selling its own branded products, Amazon Basics, for example, or Apple from offering Apple Music, or Google from providing specialized search services in travel, local businesses, and shopping. Taken as a whole, the legislation “would lead to the biggest reform of competition laws in the U.S. since the first antitrust statutes were passed in the late 19th century,” wrote my Bloomberg colleagues, David McLaughlin and Rebecca Kern. NetChoice, a trade organization for Big Tech, is arguing that Khan, 32, will politicize antitrust enforcement. “Our federal agencies, and the commissioners that serve them, should be neutral and impartial arbiters of economic analysis, rather than political bodies trying to change American law. Legislating and lawmaking is and must remain the duty of our congressional representatives, nowhere near the halls of our nation’s agencies. Sadly, the nomination of an activist to the Federal Trade Commission threatens its long-standing impartiality,” Carl Szabo, the group’s vice president and general counsel, wrote June 15. Khan would undoubtedly deny that she wants to change antitrust law at the FTC. Congress, though, certainly can. If the House bills get through Congress in anything like their current shape, the tools she’ll have to crack down on Big Tech will become far more powerful. It’s a good time to be Lina Khan.