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a bureaucracy the seeds of which have been planted in every state. State legislators would struggle to slash funding from agencies that employ and generously pay thousands of their constituents. FTC outposts would tie middle America inextricably to big progressive government, remaking the heartland in Washington’s image. It would be anything but decentralization; Americans need policy makers to discipline the arrogance that prevails inside the Beltway, not spread it. It would be “Swamp 2.0”: just as deep and many times as wide.

Big Tech and Antitrust. The large internet platforms have transformed the U.S. economy, streamlining consumer purchases, networking billions of people, and altering long-established business practices. Despite their enormous size, they have avoided significant antitrust liability or prosecution. The reasons for this are not entirely clear.

It may be because these platforms have been incredibly innovative and have generated tremendous efficiencies for our society, with little to no evidence of traditional consumer harm in the form of higher prices, reduced output, or a lack of innovation. Also, Americans report a high level of satisfaction in and trust regarding these companies.

The less friendly regulatory environment in the European Union would make a good case study in expansive antitrust law. The continent boasts not one of the top 10 global tech companies, while the U.S. can claim eight.” Some claim that the recent drop in value of former leader and current antitrust target Meta, along with the rise of new competitors such as Zoom and Chinese-dominated TikTok, indicates that competitive forces are healthy and at work benefiting consumers in the tech space.

On the other hand, the platforms challenge traditional economic thinking because arguably the firm structure they employ is radically different, and they create different competition dynamics. First, there is some evidence that the major internet platforms have market power, resulting in increased prices for advertisers, costs that very well could be passed onto consumers. For instance, numerous government studies have found evidence of market power.”* And while some data show declining advertising costs, they also show increasing prices in this decade.**

Second, while consumers may report that they like social media, hedonics tells a different story, suggesting that social media and other online activities diminish human happiness. This evidence, while mixed at first,?°> appears to have become quite solid: Social media makes Americans less happy.”°

Third, internet platforms have not created consumer price increases, but of course they provide free services—and this creates a challenge for antitrust regulation. For decades, antitrust economics has been focused on a paradigm in which firm and consumer behavior are modeled as functions of price and output as the primary variables. It may very well be that these models do not fully capture the effect of technologies that enable increasing returns to scale based on data, such