White House moves into antitrust

Obama economic advisers on Thursday sketched out new White House efforts to foster pro-consumer competition, a small-scale version of antitrust efforts aimed not just at big companies but at businesses insulated from competition one way or another. Federal agencies will be tasked with taking on those anti-competitive advantages in the months left of the Obama administration.

The purpose, said Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman, is to “promote competition and crack down on anti-competitive behavior” to lower prices for consumers and spur innovation in the private sector. In recent decades, he said in a call with reporters, there has been “more consolidation in the economy, more monopoly power in the economy, and this has played a detrimental role” for consumers.

To start, Obama is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to open up set-top cable boxes to competition. Claiming that consumers pay too much to lease the boxes because cable companies have boxed out competition for the hardware, the White House cited the FCC’s efforts in previous years to break up telephone monopolies in calling for competition among cable companies.

“That may sound like ancient history to you, but that’s the logic that animates what we’re doing now,” Furman said of the FCC’s past efforts to generate competition in building phones.

Obama also is issuing an executive order calling on agencies to look for ways to take similar actions within their jurisdictions.

Antitrust, a major political topic in past eras, has fallen out of the public agenda in recent years, with the major exception of the simmering populist movement against Wall Street banks. But some left-of-center policy thinkers, such as former labor secretary and Berkeley professor Robert Reich, have advocated a new focus on breaking up monopolies and increasing competition.