The FTC and DOJ have the backing and resources to effectively break up big tech – congress ceded the fight to agencies proves governments pick battles

The bad news is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has done precisely what many long feared he would: While rhetorically supporting two bipartisan antitrust bills targeting Big Tech for months, he effectively killed the effort by never bringing the legislative package for a vote on the Senate floor in the final days of the congressional term. That much was clear this week, when House and Senate leaders introduced a $1.7 trillion end-of-the-year spending package that includes a suite of antitrust bills, but not the two that took direct aim at the tech behemoths: the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act (OAMA). The exclusion amounted to a betrayal in the eyes of antitrust advocates; Schumer had been promising his colleagues a vote on those bills since May. But not only did the New York Democrat block widely supported measures intended to rein in the likes of Google and Amazon, he actually dropped a separate provision that staffers and activists argue was to protect Google from a 2020 Texas lawsuit. Yet the trustbusters aren’t walking away empty-handed. As a consolation, Schumer put an extra $85 million into the nation’s two antitrust enforcement agencies: $50 million to the Federal Trade Commission and $35 million to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, according to multiple Hill sources familiar with the negotiations. Both of those agencies are led by anti-monopoly crusaders—Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DOJ. The majority leader also allowed an amendment to a measure in the omnibus that lets those agencies immediately collect higher fees from companies that need them to review proposed mergers, a move that is projected to help the FTC and DOJ collectively rake in roughly $1.4 billion over the next 10 years, according to a Congressional aide familiar with the process. That infusion of cash is no small matter for both agencies, which are starved of resources and are more often than not outgunned by the corporate giants they are up against in court, be they tech firms like Google or Facebook, pesticide manufacturers like Syngenta and Corteva, or the mega-ticket-selling platform Ticketmaster. Both the FTC and the DOJ have fewer lawyers now than they did in the 1980s, but are each ramping up antitrust enforcement at a time when the economy is more highly concentrated than at any point since the original Gilded Age. “This is clearly the beginning of this fight and not the end,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, who co-sponsored the Senate versions of AICOA and OAMA told reporters on Tuesday. “I will continue to work across the aisle to protect consumers and strengthen competition.” But to get such a bump in funding to help Khan and Kanter crack down on corporate concentration, the bipartisan antitrust coalition in Congress took a loss on their opportunity to change the rules of the game for Big Tech.