President Joe Biden has set a course on antitrust and competition policy radically different from recent presidents of both parties. Through key appointments, most notably Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan and Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, Biden has returned U.S. antitrust to an activist posture not seen since the 1970s.

Khan and Kanter have taken an adversarial stance toward large firms, particularly Big Tech companies. They reject the late-1970s shift in antitrust from a presumption that “big is bad” to the consumer welfare standard, which sees market power as a problem only when consumers suffer price increases or other direct harms. In four years, they have filed antitrust suits against Amazon for online retail, Facebook for social networking, Apple for smartphones, and Google for online advertising. A fifth lawsuit against Google, for online search, was inherited from former President Donald Trump’s DOJ.