Hadi Houalla

The EU Commission is charting the wrong course by investigating large American technology companies under the Digital Markets Act for competitive behavior like anti-steering rules.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is attempting to chip away at the alleged dominance of the so-called tech giants, but not for the better.

Turkey’s looming digital market regulation is yet another instance of EU anti-innovation policy being exported around the world.

In pursuing an anti-corporate agenda, antitrust enforcers jeopardize the very companies that made local markets competitive in the first place.

Mega firms have played an increasingly important role in creating new technology over the past two decades. An antitrust paradigm that ignores this would have the perverse effect of exporting American innovation to other countries with less regulatory interference.

There is no evidence that breaking up big online platforms will improve digital privacy, but there is overwhelming evidence that breaking up these services or restricting them from collecting user data will harm consumers and workers.

If enacted, the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill could ruin the UK’s ability to compete with other leading tech sectors.

With its provocative claim that America now has less economic competition than the EU, Thomas Philippon’s book The Great Reversal has become a bible for neo-Brandeisians. But reports of the death of competition in America are highly exaggerated: While U.S. antitrust remains effective, EU competition policy has failed to stimulate innovation, productivity, or growth.

Strengthening antitrust laws purely based on a big-is-bad ethos will not benefit consumers and, in many circumstances, will impede the most effective businesses from expanding.

This is no time to purposefully damage some of America’s most prominent and competitive businesses by focusing solely on domestic concentration. As American markets are increasingly exposed to competition from other countries, antitrust enforcers should not rely on these mismeasurements of market power.

Breaking up large corporations actually would not reduce lobbying. In fact, it would have quite the opposite effect.

The common refrain that big business wields disproportionate political power is overblown. Lobbying data indicates that large firms spend relatively less on lobbying than do smaller firms.