Putting American AI Innovation First in Antitrust
Last week, the White House released “America’s AI Action Plan,” which presents a largely positive vision for how the United States should lead the world in the development and deployment of the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies that will define the future. But the administration might consider communicating these priorities to their antitrust enforcement agencies, which are currently attempting to dismantle the very companies leading AI development in America.
Take the two fast-moving Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust lawsuits against Google, the first of which is set to have its remedy judgment handed down within the next month. Both cases seek punishments that greatly exceed the immediate anticompetitive practices for which Google is accused, including breaking up the company and forcibly granting rivals access to its data. The slower-moving antitrust case by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Meta likewise seeks to force the sale of Instagram and WhatsApp based on the idea that their acquisitions over a decade ago were anticompetitive. And the FTC’s major antitrust complaint against Amazon seeks punishments “including but not limited to structural relief” (i.e., breaking up the company). Apple faces a dubious DOJ antitrust case as well, while Microsoft is under antitrust investigation by the FTC.
These ongoing cases showcase an area of agreement between the Biden administration’s radical Neo-Brandeisian antitrust vision, led by former FTC Chair Lina Khan, and the vision of “America First Antitrust” laid out by current DOJ Antitrust Division lead Gina Slater and recently appointed FTC Commissioner Mark Meador. Both make clear that America First Antitrust holds one key point in common with the progressives they replaced: It’s just as important to protect consumers from concentration of power in the private sector as in the government. Or, as Meador stated more bluntly in his “Antitrust Policy for the Conservative” essay, “Big is bad.”
In fact, especially with respect to companies operating at the scale of the internet, not only is big not inherently bad, it’s frequently necessary. For example, the race to develop advanced machine learning technologies requires enormous quantities of data, compute power, and energy. Naturally, the companies with the most available capital are best positioned to build out the infrastructure needed to fuel this great AI innovation race. The top Big Tech firms have committed to investing $320 billion in AI development in 2025 alone. Large incumbent tech firms will be essential in providing an exit strategy for venture capital investment by acquiring startups, and Big Tech investments in rising AI companies may ironically help nurture the development of the disruptive products that may displace them.
We’ve seen past examples where antitrust enforcement boondoggles against dominant American tech firms led to foreign rivals eating our lunch. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation President Rob Atkinson warns that we should learn from Xerox, the U.S. pioneer in digital copying and scanning technologies, which was paralyzed by a long antitrust case and subsequent adverse judgment that caused its market share to evaporate in favor of Japanese companies. As Atkinson points out, while the case technically benefited U.S. consumers in the form of lower prices, it handed U.S. dominance in that market to a foreign competitor.
The America First Antitrust crowd must confront the fact that their own notions of what a perfectly competitive domestic market should look like need to take into account the competition of the U.S. tech sector against global rivals, especially China. This global competition not only has implications for national security, given the manifold military and security uses for AI, but also for the general ethics of AI design and deployment worldwide. Whether the AI technologies adopted across the developed world incorporate the Chinese government’s values of state censorship and social control will depend upon this AI race.
This is not to say that the leading tech firms should be altogether immune to antitrust scrutiny; merely that enforcement should focus on the redress of particular violations of antitrust law rather than a vague theory of protecting competitors from their “bigness” at the expense of consumer welfare and international competitiveness. If we are to realize AI as, in the words of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, “a cornerstone of American innovation, powering a new age of American leadership in science, technology, and global influence,” it’s time to move back toward an antitrust policy that truly puts America first.