Broad bipartisan support for big tech regulation, and Biden is already pushing this agenda, plan is a drop in the bucket, the courts are the ONLY thing holding him back

Concern over monopoly power has waxed and waned over time, among both policy makers and the public. At times, the decades-long trend of corporate consolidation has been celebrated. But misgivings about market power lingered even when they were politically unfashionable, and in the past decade they have come to the forefront. Antitrust enforcement and market power are popular topics in the media and in Washington, where trust-busting seems to be one of the few issues Democrats and Republicans agree on, including Senators Elizabeth Warren (Democrat of Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (Independent of Vermont) and Congressman Ken Buck (Republican of Colorado). In February, Buck and Congressman David Cicilline (Democrat of Rhode Island, who has since resigned from Congress) established the Congressional Antitrust Caucus, citing Big Tech as part of its raison d’être. An interventionist approach to ensuring competitive markets has become more obvious in the executive branch as well. Former president Donald Trump dipped a toe into the antitrust arena by signing the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act, passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis, into law in 2020. The law removed an exemption from federal antitrust laws for the health insurance industry that had been in place since 1945. A resurgence of antitrust In recent years, US policy makers, judges, and regulators have become more aggressive about making and pursuing claims of anticompetitive behavior or mergers. Under Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, antitrust authorities have continued to be markedly more aggressive in opposing mergers and accusing companies of wielding monopoly power. Their success in court has been mixed. In 2022, judges ruled against the Department of Justice in merger challenges involving U.S. Sugar, defense contractor Booz Allen, and UnitedHealth Group, and in February 2023, the Federal Trade Commission failed to stop the acquisition of VR company Within by Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The DOJ has also lost a string of cases in which it has accused employers of conspiring to fix wages.