Here’s something that caught my eye this morning. The Obama Administration is planning to tighten its enforcement of anti-trust laws:
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s top antitrust official this week plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share.
The new enforcement policy would reverse the Bush administration’s approach, which strongly favored defendants against antitrust claims. It would restore a policy that led to the landmark antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft and Intel in the 1990s.
The head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Christine A. Varney, is to announce the policy reversal in a speech she will give on Monday before the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy research organization. She will deliver the same speech on Tuesday to the United States Chamber of Commerce.
I’m completely in favor of such a move and, indeed, I think that the approach used under the Clinton Administration against, for example, Microsoft was too tepid.
However, considering that the management of Microsoft, Intel, and Google all supported Obama’s candidacy and election I can’t help but wonder if they’re experiencing buyer’s remorse.
