THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

That this phalanx of potent reform legislation moved forward at all would have been politically unthinkable as recently as a year ago. And it did so despite fierce opposition from an army of industry lobbyists and tech industry-funded research and advocacy groups--some left of center, like the Progressive Policy Institute, others right of center, like the Alliance on Antitrust. Apple sent letters to committee leaders warning that the bills, if turned into law, would thwart the company from offering privacy and security protections to users. CEO Tim Cook, according to the New York Times, called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to try and sway her from backing the effort. [...]

In situations like this, a classic Washington maneuver is to offer up legislation that seems to address a problem, but actually doesn't, in order to give on-the-fence lawmakers a way of looking like they are doing something about it when, in fact, they are not. Two GOP senators have already done precisely that. Mike Lee, of Utah, and Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, might have seemed to join the growing cohort of anti-monopoly lawmakers in Congress last week when they introduced the TEAM Act to Reform Antitrust Law. The TEAM acronym stands for "Tougher Enforcement Against Monopolies." "Anticompetitive and monopolistic business practices hurt innovation and consumers," Grassley said in a press release announcing the legislation. "This bill streamlines and strengthens antitrust enforcement and holds bad actors accountable for their actions while preserving a free market.

But according to a number of antitrust experts, the measure would do the opposite. Under the Orwellian guise of claiming to ramp up antitrust enforcement, critics say, the bill would weaken America's antitrust regime by taking away the Federal Trade Commission's enforcement authority and enshrining into law the very approach that led to the crisis reformers are trying to address. "This is very much a pro-monopoly bill," Sandeep Vaheesan, a former Federal Trade Commission official who is now the legal director for the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank, told me. "The Tougher Enforcement Against Monopolies title is false advertising."

The Lee-Grassley legislation would primarily do two things. It would consolidate all antitrust enforcement to just one agency--the Department of Justice--and would codify into federal law the consumer welfare standard, the theory espoused by the late jurist Robert Bork in the 1970s that antitrust law should focus narrowly on the effects on consumers and not on the potential harm that a merger or a corporation's conduct may have on competitors.

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