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Antitrust Without Romance

Thibault Schrepel
Associate Professor of Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Faculty Affiliate, Stanford CodeX

Published
28 May 2019

Cite as Schrepel, Thibault. “Antitrust Without Romance.” Network Law Review, Spring 2019. https://www.networklawreview.org/new-article-antitrust-without-romance/.

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Dear friends,

I have the distinct pleasure of introducing my newest working paper entitled “Antitrust Without Romance” in which I discuss the extent to which the romantics are taking over antitrust law. To this end, I analyzed all the speeches given by US and EU Commissioners (you’ll find numerous graphs) and showed that they are building on populist rhetoric that pits the elites (often, the technological elite embodied by tech companies) against the people.

I then moved on to analyzing the damages they are doing to antitrust law by moralizing it (using porous concepts such as “fairness”) and not introducing certain types of enforcement so that it benefits their personal interests. I believe that decades of jurisprudence could be jeopardized in the coming years in violation of the rule of law. To remedy this issue, I propose several institutional and substantial reforms of antitrust law and authorities. Let’s join forces!

The article is freely available at this link (via SSRN):
> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3395001 <

I hope that you’ll find it interesting,
I wish you a great day,
Thibault

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