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Daily Podcast for Sunday, December 15th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown. The Elizabeth Warren plan for antitrust

enforcement involves breaking up some big tech companies. Perhaps not surprisingly, her plan

looks a lot like European litigation over Microsoft. Perhaps not

surprisingly, her plan looks a lot like European litigation over Microsoft

bundling software not that long ago.

Firms with more than some threshold of revenue would be deemed in a sense

utilities. The rationale for such a vigorous

enforcement of antitrust is still unclear. Cato's Walter Olson comments.

Senator Warren is proposing a major expansion of antitrust and it would make it more European looking.

It would make it much more obtrusive and invasive as far as the kinds of business transactions that

it looked at. Currently there is a lot of government scrutiny of mergers, acquisitions, ways in which businesses

buy other businesses.

But for decades now, antitrust law in what was a bipartisan consensus has been mostly focused on the question of is

this practice harmful to consumers and the older question which was much talked about in the populist age where we got so much of the earlier history of antitrust is what about competitors?

What about stuff that they think is hurtful?

And so the first thing that Elizabeth Warren's plan would bring back is lots and lots of government

...