Updating Antitrust Laws For Brand New Technologies.
2021-02-04 | Eddy Morgan
The Senate sees new legislation
getting to update antitrust laws
for brand new technologies. Senator and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Amy Klobuchar are introducing the Competition and
antitrust legislation Enforcement Reform Act today.
Sen. Klobuchar, who heads the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, is looking
to place new burdens on firms seeking
to accumulate competitors. An announcement of the bill revealed that it aims to "Shift the burden to the merging parties to prove their merger
won't violate the law."
The bill would also provide broad new legal authority and resources to the Justice Department's Antitrust Division
and therefore the Federal Trade Commission, the country's civil antitrust regulator, including annual budgets of $484,500,000 for the DoJ's antitrust and $651,000,000 for the FTC - increases of some $300 Mln each.
Within the FTC, the bill looks
to determine an "Office of the Competition Advocate,"
which might successively host
a new Data Center
that might collect data about mergers and acquisitions.
Just yesterday, Klobuchar's counterpart
within the House Antitrust Subcommittee, Representative David Cicilline, signaled interest in similar legislation. On his Facebook page, Cicilline
added: "Last year, the Antitrust Subcommittee conducted
the foremost sweeping congressional antitrust investigation of its kind
during a half-century.
I'm delighted that
I will be able to have
the chance to continue this work
alongside my outstanding colleagues on the subcommittee."
Cicilline was
pertaining to the subcommittee's October
report on antitrust among tech giants. Indeed,
it's been
an enormous year for scrutiny into anticompetitive practices at firms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The DoJ's antitrust division recently put a stop to Visa's acquisition of Plaid.
Though the text of Sen. Klobuchar's legislation doesn't single out tech, this has been
the world of
the foremost dramatic expansion of antitrust capabilities.
Regulators
are aggressively trying
to urge up
to hurry with the new technological requirements of investigations into firms who
could also be bullying competitors exclusively
within the digital realm, leaving little in the way of classic paper trails.
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