Antitrust Negative Supplement - Michigan 7 2024 BFHR

Neg – Antitrust 2 – BFHR
Thanks to Dylan Liu and Dhiya Hemchand for their hard work on this file. Email Kevin Hirn at khirn10@gmail.com with any questions or concerns.
Case
Solvency---Status Quo Solves
Combine this with Trump wins UQ.
Trump cuts back on antitrust policies.
Karma 24 [Rogé; July 12; staff writer at the Atlantic; The Atlantic, “Trump Isn’t Even Pretending Anymore,” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-pandering-corporate-america/678976/] jerchan
In 2016, Donald trump liked to talk tough about corporate America. On the campaign trail, he said that Amazon was “getting away with murder” by influencing federal tax policy and promised that, if elected, he was “not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.” Shortly before taking office, he accused pharmaceutical companies of—you guessed it—“getting away with murder” by charging exorbitant prices for prescription drugs.
That version of Trump sold himself as a populist outsider willing to take on not just the country’s political establishment but also its business elite. His victory proved that a Republican politician could win without pledging allegiance to the free-market dogmas that had dominated the party since Ronald Reagan. On economics, Trump seemed poised to radically remake the GOP’s ideological foundations.
Today, Trump is back at the helm of the Republican Party, but the anti-corporate rhetoric has disappeared. This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power: He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing CEOs. And instead of paying an electoral price for this reversal, the polls suggest that he’s winning over more voters—specifically, more working-class voters—than ever before. Trump’s first victory opened the door to an economically populist version of the GOP. His second could very well close it.
Central to trump’s 2016 pitch was that politicians on both sides of the aisle had been captured by wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists. “Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” he declared at his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. But he, Trump, would be different.
Throughout the campaign, Trump picked fights with American companies and CEOs. He called Ford Motor’s plan to relocate a car-assembly plant to Mexico “disgraceful.” He described AT&T’s attempt to buy Time Warner as “an example of the power structure I’m fighting” and said that he would block the deal if elected. He accused the pharmaceutical industry of ripping off the middle class and promised to “negotiate like crazy” to bring down prices. Trump even violated the most sacred of Republican shibboleths: He suggested that he would raise taxes on the wealthy. When he unveiled his tax plan, Trump declared that “it’s going to cost me a fortune” and later doubled down on the notion that it would increase taxes for the richest Americans. His proposal would not, in fact, have done that, and Trump later walked his claims back. But to even flirt with the idea marked a sharp break from other Republican politicians.
This approach was broadly understood as helping propel Trump to victory in both the Republican primary and the general election. A postelection analysis by the political scientist Lee Drutman found that Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in part by winning over many socially conservative but economically liberal voters who had previously voted for Democrats. In an election that was decided by about 80,000 votes in three states, that support might have been decisive.
Once in office, Trump slapped steep new tariffs on Chinese imports. His appointees filed antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta. But for the most part, Trump failed to deliver on his promised economic populism. He filled his Cabinet with former CEOs and Wall Street executives, rolled back dozens of regulations, and appointed hundreds of pro-business judges to the courts. His signature piece of legislation was a massive tax cut that primarily benefited corporations and the rich.
Even so, Trump had already inspired a small faction of Republicans to adopt a more anti-corporate, populist approach. Senator Josh Hawley has accused Big Tech companies of posing “the gravest threat to American liberty” in history and introduced legislation to break them up. Senator Marco Rubio has slammed Republican tax cuts (despite voting for them) and endorsed unionization of Amazon warehouses. Senator J. D. Vance worked with progressives such as Elizabeth Warren on bills that would rein in CEO pay and make it harder for companies to merge. Senator Todd Young has proposed legislation banning most noncompete agreements, which companies use to prevent their employees from leaving for jobs at a competitor. New think tanks and publications were founded to create the intellectual scaffolding for this new post-Trump conservative economics, and members of the conservative intelligentsia began publishing books that critiqued free-market capitalism.
This faction never represented anything close to a majority of the GOP, but at times it appeared to be the party’s future. Hawley, Vance, and Rubio came to be regarded as some of the party’s rising stars. (Indeed, Vance and Rubio are reportedly on Trump’s short list for running mate.) A new wave of Republican donors, most notably Peter Thiel, began funding candidates who embraced a more heterodox economic approach. And a belief took hold in some corners of the right that Trump’s first-term economic policies had been watered down by establishment figures including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. In a second term, the thinking went, Trump would be free to unleash his inner populist.
The 2024 campaign has made those hopes look naive. As the anti-monopoly advocate Matt Stoller recently pointed out, Trump has “mostly stopped challenging big corporations, except in cultural terms acceptable to Wall Street.” And even there, Trump seems less interested in attacking “woke capital” than the greater MAGA movement is. After his supporters began boycotting Budweiser for making a marketing deal with a transgender influencer, Trump pleaded with them on Truth Social to give the company a “second chance.” Perhaps not coincidentally, that entreaty came just before a campaign fundraiser hosted by a lobbyist for Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser’s parent company.
Trump has made many such reversals recently. After years of publicly feuding with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Trump opened up a steady line of communication with the world’s richest man, allegedly even discussing the possibility of an administration position. When Congress passed legislation to ban TikTok—something Trump himself had attempted to do while in office—the former president came out against the ban after meeting with one of the company’s biggest investors, Jeff Yass. (Trump denied discussing TikTok with Yass.) In 2021, Trump called bitcoin “a scam.” Now, after a recent meeting with bitcoin miners, he touts his support for the crypto industry, promising to defend it against “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin.” For his troubles, Trump received a $1 million campaign donation (in bitcoin, of course) from each of the crypto-loving Winklevoss twins.
On taxes, Trump has gone from promising to soak the rich to actively seducing them. “You’re rich as hell,” he told attendees at a Mar-a-Lago event late last year. “We’re gonna give you tax cuts.” He has campaigned not only on extending his 2017 tax-cut law, which is set to expire next year, but also on introducing further cuts for all earners, including specifically the “upper class” and “business class.” At a recent Business Roundtable event, Trump promised a room of 80 CEOs that he would further drop the corporate tax rate. He has even floated the idea of eliminating the federal income tax altogether. In April, Trump told oil executives and lobbyists that they should donate $1 billion to his campaign because of how much his deregulatory agenda would help their industry.
Granted, Trump has promised steep tariffs on foreign goods and proposed a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, neither of which corporate America is exactly thrilled about. But the enemy in his crosshairs is no longer big business: It’s environmentalists, China, and, as ever, illegal immigration, which Trump has labeled “an all-out war on the working-class minorities of our country.”
Trump’s new message strongly suggests that his second administration would be even more supportive of big business than his first. Corporate America knows it. In recent months, the Trump campaign has received a slate of endorsements from high-profile Wall Street executives and major donors, and experienced a surge in funding. Corporate leaders, many of whom vocally opposed Trump in 2016 and 2020, have been largely silent this time around; some, like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, have publicly praised Trump.
Trump’s changes to pro-business breaks antitrust laws.
Stoller ’24 [Matt; June 15; American political commentator, research director of the American Economic Liberties Project; BIG, “Why Has Trump Stopped Attacking Big Business?” https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-has-trump-stopped-attacking-big] jerchan
In the antitrust realm, the story is a bit more that Trump picked up on the anti-monopoly movement and used it for his own ends. For instance, Trump followed through on his campaign promise by bringing a merger challenge against the AT&T-Time Warner merger, though a judge ruled against him. He didn’t act on Amazon’s monopoly, but he did bring monopolization cases against Google and Facebook, the first cases against big tech in two decades. The administration also blocked Facebook’s attempted launch of its own currency Libra, and ended Amazon’s giant cloud contract with the Pentagon. Trump even promulgated rules against pharmacy benefit managers, and forced hospitals to reveal their price list publicly.
Yet, consolidation worsened, as most mergers went through unimpeded, from CVS-Aetna in health care to Disney-Fox in streaming to the Linde-Praxair industrial gas merger to the Northrop-Orbital merger that placed one corporation in charge of our nuclear arsenal. Trump Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim actually lobbied for the Sprint-T-Mobile deal, which has raised cell phone costs. Trump eliminated the antitrust agency for farmers, as seed and chemicals moved from the Big Six (Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Dow and DuPont) to the Big Four (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina-Syngenta, and BASF). We’re still living with Delrahim’s legacy; the rent-fixing cartel run by RealPage exists in part because the Antitrust Division allowed that company to buy out its competition in rent management software.
Ideologically, Trump’s Antitrust Division promoted private equity, allowed Facebook to get away with a fig leaf settlement on Cambridge Analytica, supported certain no poach agreements, and filed amicus briefs on behalf of Uber’s attempt to stop drivers from organizing. He adopted the deregulatory posture of the Bush era and shut down consumer protection in finance. And Trump himself helped bring U.S. drilling firms together with OPEC to increase oil prices in 2020. Then there are the hundreds of judges he put on the bench, who are often hostile to antitrust enforcement.
Case---5G Alt Causes
Spectrum allocation is a huge alt cause.
---has an adv cp at the end of the article.
Lewis and Johnson 23 (James Andrew, Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Clete, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 9/26/23, “Modernizing Spectrum Allocation to Ensure U.S. Security in the Twenty-First Century,” https://www.csis.org/analysis/modernizing-spectrum-allocation-ensure-us-security-twenty-first-century, dhiya)
The ubiquitous connectivity that 5G provides is central to twenty-first century national security. That makes adequate radio frequency spectrum for commercially licensed 5G use—particularly the mid-band spectrum that is ideal for high-capacity, wide-area 5G deployments—also central to national security. This licensed spectrum will constitute the backbone of the 5G future. Presently, the United States has a significant shortage of licensed mid-band spectrum allocated to 5G when compared to China and other countries, and China is projected to further widen that disparity in the coming years.
This growing spectrum gap threatens to harm the United States in global technology development and threatens the assurance of a robust, trusted supplier base for the future connected world. The mid-band spectrum gap is a significant national security problem, as it could facilitate China’s ambitions to shape twenty-first century technologies and to establish a dominant position in global networks. This dominance could enable military and strategic superiority. If China leads the 5G era, its state-supported “national champion” tech companies will play a dominant role, and in that scenario, there are no weapons systems, technology bans, or mitigation strategies that could defend U.S. and allied security interests.
This series has argued that the United States faces an urgent security need to reallocate spectrum for commercial 5G use. The federal government has worked closely with industry experts to do this before and now needs to do it again. The solution to the U.S. licensed spectrum shortage consists of four elements:
5G implementation fails without spectrum allocation.
Shane Tews 23 (Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute, 7/12/23, “The Crucial Role of Mid-Band Spectrum for 5G and 6G Networks,” https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/the-crucial-role-of-mid-band-spectrum-for-5g-and-6g-networks/, dhiya)
The Brattle Group’s report finds that “the US needs 400 megahertz of full power, licensed spectrum in the next five years to meet projected demand.” This disparity in the allocation of spectrum between licensed and unlicensed usage in the US is creating a lag in the planning for the timely availability of spectrum needed to power mobile services. The US government has assigned seven times more spectrum for Wi-Fi and unlicensed applications compared to supporting commercial networks. Additionally, if the US lags behind China in deploying advanced wireless networks and devices, there will be substantial economic ramifications.
Failing to rectify the current spectrum imbalance could have far-reaching implications for national security. As Clete Johnson from the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes in the first of a series of papers focusing on 5G and security, this disparity raises long-term concerns regarding capacity for data gathering and other national security and economic implications. The situation also warrants an examination of the consequences associated with China’s adoption of the 6 gigahertz spectrum for their mid-band needs.
US agencies should therefore prioritize the allocation of full power, licensed spectrum for 5G and 6G networks while also instating innovative approaches facilitating coexistence between incumbents and new market entrants within occupied spectrum bands. By fostering collaboration and finding common ground, we can ensure the successful development and deployment of future wireless technologies.
Case---SEPs bad for innovation
SEPs zero innovation.
David Katz 23 (Operating Partner at Radical Ventures Management Inc., 11/22/23, “Unfair Price Bias in Standard Essential Patents Needs to Stop,” https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/unfair-price-bias-in-standard-essential-patents-needs-to-stop, dhiya)
Companies that license standard essential patents, or SEPs, often engage in unfair price discrimination tactics.
SEPs are essential to products that adhere to certain technical standards such as cellular and Wi-Fi. Some products can include hundreds of standards, and some standards can involve thousands of patents.
While these standards had been used in a narrow range of devices—such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones—the internet means these standards are now used in a wide range of products, including crop-sensors, medical devices, autonomous vehicles, and industrial machinery.
Many companies seeking to aggressively monetize their SEPs engage in a form of price discrimination by demanding royalties based on the value of the licensee’s end-product or service.
This practice means two licensees may pay different fees for the same technology simply because one licensee’s product may yield a higher profit margin, cater to a more lucrative market, have more expensive components, or include many additional features beyond the standardized technology.
The technology claimed by a SEP is static; it doesn’t fluctuate with the licensee’s potential market success or the sector in which it’s implemented. The patents practiced in a 5G chipset cover the same technology regardless if the end product is a budget smartphone or a high-end autonomous vehicle.
What SEP monetizers do is no different than if mechanics started pricing their services based on how much income a vehicle generates for its owner. A ride-share driver would pay more for a brake job on the same car than a retiree who only drives to the grocery store and back. Intuitively, we understand this is unfair discrimination because the price is detached from the work.
Most leading standards organizations require participants to make contractual commitments to license their SEPs on terms that are fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory—or FRAND.
The FRAND commitment limits SEP holders to royalties commensurate with the incremental value provided by the patented technology, because once an industry adopts the standard, product manufacturers become locked in. They can’t walk away when faced with unreasonable demands.
Demanding higher fees based on use case doesn’t reflect additional value provided by the SEP holder, but rather an opportunistic strategy of price discrimination that’s inconsistent with the FRAND commitment.
Impeding Innovation
Violating FRAND commitments jeopardizes the delicate balance of innovation incentives. It risks entrenching market incumbents while deterring newcomers from investing in new applications of technology, wary that their success could unjustly inflate costs.
Discriminatory licensing is a “success penalty” that can deter firms from entering more profitable, expensive markets due to SEP costs. The knock-on effect is a potential slowdown in the pace of innovation, as companies may shy away from groundbreaking developments that would necessitate SEP usage, preferring safer, less costly ventures.
SEP monetizers that charge royalties based on use case are penalizing success and innovation in the implementers’ fields. SEP holders should indeed be fairly compensated for their innovations.
Advantage CP
Advantage CP---5G
Maintaining private development solves 5G.
Westling ’20 [Jeffrey; October 7; legal fellow in the Office of Commissioner Brendan Carr at the FCC; R Street, “The United States must allow private industry to lead 5G deployment,” https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/the-united-states-must-allow-private-industry-to-lead-5g-deployment/] jerchan
Fortunately, the FCC started making significant strides on this front by taking a strong, market oriented approach to 5G deployment in the United States with auctions of the 3.5 GHz CBRS and 3.7-4.2 GHz C-band this year. In the 3.1-3.55 GHz band, the Commission voted on a Report and Order which removes all non-Federal allocations from 3.3-3.55 GHz. With 100 MHz already identified by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) as a potential for sharing, the FCC will begin to open portions of the band on a licensed basis. While more work must be done, this additional capacity will further incentivize carrier

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