Eleanor M. Fox and Harry First warn that global strategies and political pressures are undercutting the neutral, rule-of-law competition system.
This article is part of a symposium exploring the role of big business in a globalized economy. In an era of intensifying global competition, can states pursue policies and regulations to disperse market power and prevent consolidation at home without forfeiting international competitiveness? How can the U.S. government regulate Big Tech and other big businesses at home without hamstringing their ability to compete on the global stage? How can the EU build its own Big Tech giants without undermining its pioneering digital protections for users and society and permitting the harms that can come from market concentration? You can read the contributions from Xavier Vives, Eleanor Fox and Harry First (writing together), Cristina Caffarra, Laura Phillips Sawyer, and Beatriz Kira as they are published here.
For much of the last decade, a bipartisan coalition of policymakers (re)embraced the perspective that markets are too concentrated, that business has too much power, and that antitrust should be used more aggressively to control it.
But at the same time, a countervailing trend has prioritized macroeconomic, nationalistic, and even personal politics, positioning antitrust as a handmaiden to the “higher” national goal of winning in the global marketplace. Antitrust—it is said—can stand in the way of what is good for a country in its aspirations for growth and global competitiveness. The new impetus leans towards preferring bigness and market power to competition, towards clearing mergers that should not be cleared, and towards winking at abuses of power or ordering remedies not likely to change the status quo.
The foundational premise of this new geopolitics is the assumption or belief of a significant tension between antitrust and what is good for the country in global markets. Antitrust lawyers like to say this tension is imagined: competition, not bigness, is the best tool to nurture growth and competitiveness, unleash innovation, and invite investment. But what if the tension is real and substantial? What if appropriate antitrust enforcement is in fact a barrier to growth and global competitiveness? Should the antitrust community do more than simply repeat the mantra that good antitrust is good national economic policy? This article explores these questions, as well as the closely related phenomena of hegemonic nationalism and personal political gain.
Part I of this article will trace the context in which macro goals and geopolitical positioning have entered the conversation of antitrust, focusing on the European Union and United Kingdom, where the issue has taken prominence. Part II will explore how these arguments are surfacing in the United States, with attention to politicization. Part III explores their impact on the integrity of the antitrust system.
Part I: Context of the Issue
The contemporary debate on antitrust and geopolitics has emerged most prominently in the EU and the U.K. In both jurisdictions, political leaders have asked the competition authorities to apply their competition laws so as to further macro goals of growth, investment and competitiveness. For these politicians, the macro goals are superior to antitrust’s concern for keeping markets open and competitive and suggest a lid on antitrust enforcement.
In the EU, a key document advancing these macro concerns is the 2024 report by former European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi: “The Future of European Competitiveness.” The Report observes that Europe has fallen behind much of the world (particularly the U.S. and China) in productivity, growth, standards of living, and innovation. Europe has largely missed out on the digital revolution. It needs to catch up: “First—and most importantly—Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies.”
The Report identifies numerous reforms that could help Europe strengthen its economic profile. These include reducing regulatory fragmentation, repealing excessive regulations, speeding up and simplifying regulatory processes, and supporting research and development. As for competition law, the Report asks, “whether vigorous competition policy conflicts with European companies’ need for sufficient scale to compete with Chinese and American superstar companies.” It states that “the lack of innovation in Europe is sometimes blamed on competition enforcement,” especially merger enforcement. “Although stronger competition will in theory generally both lower prices and foster innovation, there are cases where it can be harmful to innovation.”
The Report calls for competition authorities to consider wider geographic market definitions and put more emphasis on innovation and growth. It includes an innovation defense to mergers, which would allow pooling of resources to gain scale, and calls for “extended assessment timelines” to predict mergers’ effects on consumer prices, quality, and innovation, and welcomes investment commitments. The report calls for sympathy toward telecom mergers in particular, given the geographic fragmentation of EU markets, similarly extolling investment commitments. Even so, the Report acknowledges that economies of scale and network effects can create significant entry barriers, suppressing incentives to innovate, and it rejects the creation of national champions “that can stifle competition and innovation.”
The Draghi Report influenced the European Commission president’s 2024 mission letter to then incoming Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera. The president instructed Ribera that:
Europe needs a new approach to competition policy—one that is more supportive of companies scaling up in global markets, allows European businesses and consumers to reap all the benefits of effective competition and is better geared to our common goals [including decarbonization, resilience in the face of threats to the supply chain, and unfair subsidies].
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) is taking the Draghi recommendations to heart. Launching a review of the EU competition merger guidelines, it has issued background papers on topics including efficiencies, innovation and competitiveness, and has commissioned an economic study on the dynamic effects of mergers. The inquiries suggest that DG COMP is seeking a better understanding of how competitiveness, innovation, and scale can contribute to both good competition policy and the macro objectives of the Draghi Report.
Meanwhile, in the U.K., the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) came under scrutiny, apparently for prohibitions of international mergers and a threatened prohibition of a domestic telecom merger. In one case of a merger of two U.S. firms, the CMA resisted settlement on the basis of behavioral conditions that DG COMP had already accepted. The U.K. government criticized the CMA’s aggressive outreach and linked CMA’s enforcement path with slowing investment in the U.K. Government officials questioned CMA’s CEO Marcus Bokkerink about his commitment to the U.K. growth agenda. He extolled competition and answered that competition drives growth. That was the wrong answer. Bokkerink was forced to resign. The Guardian reported:
It is understood that Bokkerink’s departure is meant to send a pro-growth signal to businesses, as [Chancellor of the Exchequer] Reeves and [Business Secretary] Reynolds attend Davos to meet global business leaders. . . . The CMA was among regulators put on notice in October [2024], when [Prime Minister] Keir Starmer used a speech at the government’s investment summit to promise that he would “rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment” and ensure every regulator in the UK “takes growth as seriously as this room does.”
Each year the U.K.’s Department of Business & Trade publishes guidance to the CMA in the form of a document called the Strategic Steer (the Steer). The 2025 Steer begins: “The primary mission of this government is economic growth…Investment is a critical driver of growth, and the government expects the CMA’s approach to clearly, and unambiguously, reflect the need to enhance the attractiveness of the U.K. as a destination for international investment.”
The government announced its growth priority some months before publication of the 2025 Steer. In 2024, the CMA was investigating the proposed combination of Vodafone and Three, two of the four leading mobile network operators (MNOs). The CMA was concerned that the merger would create market power and raise prices, and it was skeptical of behavioral remedies to alleviate the merged firm’s increased market power. The UK government criticized the long investigation. In December 2024, the CMA seemed to shift its course and approved the merger subject to behavioral and regulatory remedies. Addressing the feared price rise, the remedy included a three-year price cap for retail customers and set terms for wholesale supply by the merged firm to mobile virtual network operators, who rely on the MNO’s physical infrastructure.
The jewel of the settlement (to the government) was the companies’ 11 billion pound commitment to roll out a 5G network throughout the U.K. Vodafone called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the UK’s digital infrastructure,” bringing “vastly superior network quality to tens of millions of consumers and businesses up and down the country.” The investment, it said, would “propel the UK’s telecoms infrastructure to the forefront of European connectivity.” A law firm’s newsletter assessed the deal as “The CMA’s Gamble on Investment Promises & Price Caps.” Was the settlement a Faustian bargain: sacrificing healthy, actual competition (which might have held prices down and spurred innovation) for a promise of future investment (to be sure, a big promise), along with price regulation to try to make up for the lost market forces?
On September 10, 2025, the CMA issued a discussion paper “to explore how competition can unlock investment and help firms to scale up in the UK” in support of the government’s growth mission.
The tailoring of the U.K. competition law to the growth agenda is a new example of “bespoke antitrust,” a phenomenon where general antitrust rules are customized to fit an industry, a party, or a particular practice.
Part II: Power and politicization in the U.S.
The U.S. has yet to see any official revision to the role of antitrust enforcement like the Draghi Report or the Strategic Steer. So far, the rhetoric of bigness, growth, and national power and advantage has not explicitly manifested itself in antitrust policy. National security remains the domain of other instruments, notably the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). For the moment, antitrust enforcement continues to target entrenched monopolists that seek to exclude rival upstarts.
A prime example of this continuing strong antitrust enforcement, even against powerful and successful U.S. firms, is the government’s vigorous prosecution of the monopolization cases against the major Big Tech platform companies—Google (both for online search and ad tech), Meta, Apple, and Amazon. To date there have been no settlements and the Antitrust Division pressed for strong remedies (with a mixed record of success at the trial court level) in the two Google cases that it won on liability.
It is not clear, however, whether we can equate the government’s vigorous prosecution of the Big Tech cases with vigorous antitrust enforcement. Instead, the litigation strategies can be viewed as part of an effort to defend and entrench conservative views. Conservative critics, both within the Trump administration and among its outside supporters, have long attacked Big Tech for allegedly disfavoring and deplatforming conservative websites and content.
Further, there are now signs that the rule of law for antitrust enforcement is beginning to fray under pressure from two directions. The first is from the Trump administration’s promotion of its “America First” agenda and its pursuit of global economic hegemony. The second is from the administration’s personal and crony interests and ideological agendas.
A case in point for the first strand—U.S. hegemony—is encapsulated in the administration’s release of “America’s AI Action Plan: Winning the Race,” announced on July 10, 2025. The AI Action Plan outlines how the U.S. can “ win the race to achieve global dominance” in AI. The document says that “whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap broad economic and military benefits.” The plan calls for removal of all “onerous regulation” and mandates “review [of] all Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations commenced under the previous [Biden] administration to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.”
A case in point for the second strand—political dealmaking—is the settlement of the merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks. The settlement shows how crony lobbyists can fuzz the borders between national public interest and personal gain.
HPE and Juniper Networks were the second and third largest providers of wireless local area networks to customers such as U.S. colleges. The Department of Justice sued to block the merger shortly after Trump took office for his second term. In their answer to the complaint, the merging parties averred that the merger was necessary to fight Huawei and “reduce the use of Chinese technology in critical infrastructure globally.” However, Huawei does not compete in the relevant (U.S.) market, from which it is legally barred, and wireless local area networks in colleges are not generally considered part of our “global critical infrastructure.” The merging parties retained lawyers and lobbyists close to the president and crafted a settlement with the office of Attorney General Pam Bondi that cleared the deal with (generally perceived) light divestiture and licensing relief. The parties also reportedly promised the administration to create new jobs at a U.S. facility. The assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ Antitrust Division, Gail Slater, disapproved of the proposed settlement and of the process of the government’s working with lobbyists to forge settlements. Bondi overruled Slater, fired her two chief deputies for “insubordination,” and forced the settlement of the case.
Under the Tunney Act, the settlement in HPE/Juniper must receive court approval. In its Tunney Act filings, the DOJ does not mention the China issue (or any job promises, for that matter), but the merging parties do indicate that there were communications with the DOJ “about the national security interests favoring consensual resolution of the action.” One press report also states that the “U.S. intelligence community” intervened to persuade the DOJ to settle, quoting a “senior national security official” as saying that a settlement “serves the interests of the United States by strengthening domestic capabilities and is critical to countering Huawei and China.”
DOJ decisions in other recent merger cases further suggest that antitrust enforcement is becoming increasingly politicized. After the DOJ dropped its case against the merger of American Express Global Business Travel and CWT on the eve of trial, Slater protested to the press that she was not pressured to dismiss the merger challenge, even though the merging parties had retained a well-connected lobbyist to represent them. And after the DOJ decided against blocking T-Mobile’s acquisition of competitor Uscellular, Slater issued a rare closing statement to explain her decision. She stated that the merger offered UScellular’s “sizable customer base” the “hope” of a “more robust cellular network,” but also bemoaned the fact that telecom acquisitions have now left most consumers “just the ‘Big 3’ national carriers” to choose among. She wrote, paradoxically: “the stark facts of today merit our immediate attention: together, the Big 3 account for more than 90 percent of the roughly 335 million mobile subscriptions in the United States.”
Moreover, the U.S. government is now taking ownership interests in critical industries, such as steel and semiconductors, threatening to do the same in defense industries, and sometimes insisting on taking a percentage of the sales made by exporting corporations, raising comparisons with China-style state capitalism.
What lessons do we take from these examples? Will Trump’s AI Plan come into play when Google or Microsoft seeks to buy or invest in additional promising AI start-ups? Will the administration decide that antitrust is “onerous regulation” that might frustrate the U.S. goal of global dominance? Will bigness in tech come to be preferred to competition for the presumed (without evidence) macro health of the country? Trump has gratuitously attacked the EU for regulating “our” Big Tech firms, threatened tariff retaliation against the EU after the Court of Justice upheld a multi-billion dollar fine against Google for violating EU competition law, and threatened tariffs and export curbs against countries that adopt regulatory laws that he views as an “attack [on] our incredible American Tech Companies.” At the same time Trump has accepted millions of dollars in campaign contributions from U.S. tech firms and even asked tech companies to kick in money to help build his White House ballroom. Chief executives of tech companies have come to the White House to praise him and Trump has congratulated Google’s CEO for the “very good day” Google had when the district court delivered its limited remedy order, in which he refused to force divestiture of Chrome or to stop Google from making payments for being the default search engine.
All of this may presage a turn of the tide in the Big Tech cases; perhaps a settlement, or a dismissal, or a decision not to appeal an adverse ruling. However disappointing such outcomes might be, though, they won’t be surprising.
Part III: The Integrity of Antitrust
We have identified three objectives of politicians who are trying to subordinate antitrust to larger or just different agendas: (1) the macro goals of growth, investment, and competitiveness; (2) global hegemony or even just holding one’s own in the global marketplace; and (3) personal politics—whether ideological or financial—which may also be wrapped in the robes of macro or nationalistic goals. These three objectives call for different approaches.
The first, macro goals, are legitimate objectives. Antitrust experts tend to believe that good antitrust enforcement supports macro goals; that leaving antitrust to do its job will do more to advance the macro objectives than a hunch that “lightening up” antitrust is the better prescription. But not everyone agrees that antitrust and macro objectives are always aligned.
The best path to handle these claims lies within the antitrust system, which focuses on facts, economic analysis, and reasoned decision-making. The fact is that sometimes size is needed to achieve economies of scale and scope; more profits may be necessary to attract innovation and feed growth; and national security concerns may legitimately be considered in crafting antitrust remedies. At the same time, even those who favor “superstar firms” recognize that we need antitrust enforcement to stop such firms from suppressing upstart innovators.
The second, nationalistic policy, is doubtfully a legitimate objective for antitrust. Antitrust is at heart an open system. We pay attention to national borders or ownership only to the extent that they affect our analysis of how markets work, not because we want a particular nation or “its” firms to “win.” Moreover, it is not obvious that special regard to a nation’s economic success calls for relaxation of antitrust enforcement. Fears (The China Card —“You must let us merge or you will throw the game to China”) tend to be overstated or just specious. Again, skepticism is warranted, and authorities should at least demand some showing of the need to relax antitrust and the efficacy of doing so. Calling out claims that are unsupported and unverifiable is important.
The third, political/personal weaponization, has no legitimacy. It is bad for the country, for democracy, for rule of law, for all of the people except the privileged, corrupt elite. It threatens to gnaw away at and trivialize the whole antitrust enterprise, which becomes a mere tool of political power. The high ground is clear: publicly acknowledging, condemning, and resisting all political weaponization. But we are not so naïve as to expect constant heroism from people whose jobs are on the line.
Conclusion
A consistent theme in the arguments we have discussed is that bigness is better, and necessary. The antitrust answer is to examine the claim more concretely. How big is really necessary and at what cost? Will treating bigness as a virtue in the case of a merger that is already of such size and qualities as to be anticompetitive really advance macro interests (growth, investment) or even hegemonic aspirations? It is much more likely that pleas in favor of the transaction are opportunistic and vested-interest hyperbole, and thus not legitimate. Therefore, we should be skeptical of the claim that either effective global competition or national interests require ever bigger firms. We should at least demand transparency and put the burden on the merging parties to prove their claim with convincing evidence, if indeed the claim is admissible under applicable law.
The geopolitical pressures that we have discussed were very much on display in three consecutive speeches that the leaders of the EU, U.K., and U.S. antitrust agencies delivered at an antitrust conference in New York City on September 18 and 19, 2025. EU Commissioner and Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera talked about democracy and defended proceeding against Google, but she also argued for “Single Market champions,” albeit “Olympic champions” that still compete amongst themselves in Europe. The CMA’s CEO Sarah Cardell began by recognizing the changing geopolitical and policy landscape. She emphasized her government’s focus on growth and the importance of encouraging “scale-ups” for U.K. firms that might become “global superstars.” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Slater stressed the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan” and the desire to maintain American AI “dominance,” while also showing concern over viewpoint bias in digital platforms, AI, and “news markets.”
An undercurrent in each of these speeches was national priority over neutral competition. Unaddressed was the extent to which nationalism will distort nation-neutral competition.
To some extent, antitrust enforcement can legitimately be “bespoke” for genuine macro and even national interest concerns. But it cannot legitimately bend to personal and authoritarian interests. It behooves the antitrust enforcement community to be cautious and transparent in the case of the former, taking care that an important national goal is being served. In the case of the latter, it behooves us all to stand up for due process, democracy, and the antitrust rule of law.
Authors’ Disclosures: The authors report no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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