For most of the twentieth century, American antitrust law operated under a single organizing question: does this merger or practice raise consumer prices? If the answer was no, regulators generally stood aside. That narrow frame — known as the consumer welfare standard — was formalized in the 1970s by legal scholar Robert Bork, and it displaced an older, richer tradition of antitrust thought that worried as much about concentrated power over workers, suppliers, and democratic institutions as it did about the price of groceries. The new antitrust movement is a sustained intellectual and political effort to retire the Borkian frame and restore the older one — or to build something newer still.
The movement gained coherent shape roughly between 2010 and 2018, when a cohort of legal scholars, economists, and advocates began publishing work showing that market concentration had increased sharply across dozens of American industries over the preceding three decades: airlines, hospitals, broadband, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, meat processing, and digital platforms. The evidence was not merely academic. Concentration correlated with declining business dynamism, stagnant wages in affected labor markets, rising markups, and diminished innovation outside incumbent firms. The movement gave these findings a prosecutorial edge.
Lina Khan's 2017 Yale Law Journal article on Amazon crystallized the new approach for a broad audience. Khan argued that the consumer welfare standard was structurally blind to the competitive harms posed by platform businesses that could operate at a loss in one market to eliminate rivals and then extract rents in adjacent markets. The article drew heavily on the older Brandeisian tradition — Louis Brandeis, future Supreme Court justice, had spent decades before his appointment arguing that bigness itself was a political and economic problem regardless of its immediate effect on prices. Khan's work made that tradition legible to a generation that had grown up in the Borkian consensus.
The movement spanned legal theory, empirical economics, and direct political mobilization. On the economic side, researchers documented monopsony power — the ability of dominant employers to hold down wages — in healthcare, meatpacking, and tech. They showed that merger activity often destroyed rather than created efficiency. On the political side, advocates pushed for legislative action through the Open Markets Institute and similar organizations, arguing that concentrated markets hollowed out the middle class and undermined democratic self-governance. The argument was explicitly about design: concentrated markets are not natural outcomes but the product of regulatory choices that can be reversed.
The institutional culmination of the movement's first phase came during the Biden administration, when Khan was appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter became assistant attorney general for antitrust. Both were movement figures who had written extensively on the inadequacy of the consumer welfare standard. Both pursued aggressive enforcement agendas — challenging mergers that would have sailed through in prior administrations, bringing cases against Meta, Google, and Amazon, and attempting to use Section 5 of the FTC Act to address conduct that fell outside traditional Sherman Act categories.
Results were mixed. Courts trained on Borkian precedent proved resistant to novel theories. Several high-profile merger challenges failed at trial. But the movement succeeded in shifting the terms of debate. Law schools redesigned curricula. Corporate lawyers began advising clients that deals once considered routine faced new scrutiny. International antitrust authorities in the EU, UK, and Japan moved in parallel, suggesting that the consumer welfare standard's dominance was a specifically American deviation rather than an economic law.
The deeper claim of the new antitrust movement is a claim about stewardship: that competitive markets require active, ongoing institutional maintenance; that they do not emerge spontaneously and sustain themselves without governance; and that the design of market rules is inherently a political choice with distributional consequences. This is Law 4 expressed at civilizational scale — the recognition that economic structures are artifacts, that artifacts require architects, and that the architects bear responsibility for what they build.