AAI President Diana Moss will testify on December 15, 2021 before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights. The hearing takes up the important topic: “The Impact of Consolidation and Monopoly Power on American Innovation” Her testimony will address the following major issues:
- Overwhelming economic and business evidence shows that competition spurs innovation. And because innovation drives economic productivity, competition is therefore essential for realizing economic growth in the U.S.
- Innovation competition is diminished by anticompetitive conduct and harmful consolidation, making antitrust enforcement and competition policy vital tools for promoting innovation.
- Weak antitrust enforcement and outdated standards put innovation competition at risk in a number of key areas, including: digital technology, pharmaceuticals, agricultural biotechnology, healthcare, and content and media.
- Policy priorities include: more standalone innovation competition cases, increasing the probability of success of such cases by discounting tenuous efficiencies claims in harmful mergers, and stronger standards for blocking harmful acquisitions of disruptive, innovative rivals.
AAI has been at the forefront of maintaining antitrust’s historic concern with concentration, monopolies, exclusionary conduct, and harmful vertical restraints. Courts and antitrust enforcers have significantly narrowed the scope of monopoly enforcement under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. AAI and its progressive approach is a long-standing counterweight that has become all the more important in light of the increasing market concentration and the dramatic growth of technology platform companies. AAI advocates for aggressive enforcement toward exclusionary conduct by dominant firms and a renewal of antitrust’s historic skepticism of durable monopolies. Learn more about AAI’s work on monopolies.
