New Brandeis movement

The movement draws inspiration from the anti-monopolist work of Louis Brandeis, an early 20th century United States Supreme Court Justice who called high economic concentration “the Curse of Bigness” and believed monopolies were inherently harmful to the welfare of workers and business innovation.

They have also argued that dominant tech platforms create high barriers for potential competitors and reduce bargaining power of individual merchants, content providers, and app developers.

[8][9][10] Senators Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren have been described as allies of the movement,[11][12] and have called on the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission to focus their enforcement efforts more on helping workers.

[16] Critics of the New Brandeis movement believe that promoting competition for its own sake causes inefficient producers to stay in business, preferring a litigation approach based on empirical evidence.

[17] Lawrence Lessig wrote "The New Chicago School" article in 1998, challenging directly with analysis of network effects the orthodoxy of antitrust economics during the protracted US v Microsoft litigation of the late 1990s.

[citation needed] Tim Wu continued his mentor's work with extensive analysis of net neutrality from 2003, to which Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Economides, both then at NYU, contributed.

[29][30] Brandeis believed that antitrust action should prevent any one company from maintaining too much power over the economy because monopolies were harmful to innovation, business vitality, and the welfare of workers.

[5][17] He described "The Curse of Bigness," believing that large profitable firms use their money to influence politics and create further consolidation and dominance, once stating, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”[17][31] In the 2010s, the New Brandeis theory was popularized by legal scholars Lina Khan and Tim Wu, both of Columbia University.

[37][38] The Wall Street Journal described the movement as "a new generation of trustbusters" in 2021, arguing that it represented a shift away from a singular focus on perceived consumer welfare that began with the Reagan administration and the ideas of Robert Bork.