Last Updated: September 01, 2026

← Just want the overview? Read the We The People Summary.

The 21st Century Antitrust and Competition Act

• Legislative Pathway: Standalone (Structural reforms to market competition; reconciliation-eligible components for agency funding)
• Goal: To restore competitive markets as the foundation of a productive American economy. When companies grow large enough to dictate prices, crush rivals, and capture regulators, the system stops working — not just for consumers and small businesses, but for the honest companies trying to compete on the merits.

Earned vs. Extractive Monopoly: The Governing Distinction

Before any enforcement standard applies, this Act draws a bright line that conventional antitrust often blurs. Not all market dominance is the same, and treating it as if it were would kill the very innovation a competitive economy depends on.

• An Earned Monopoly is the temporary reward of superior innovation. A firm builds a better product, serves customers more effectively, or takes a risk no one else would, and the market rewards it with dominant share. This is the engine of progress: the prospect of outsized, monopoly-like returns is precisely what drives people to attempt the difficult and the unproven — new drugs, new energy systems, new computing platforms, space launch. Antitrust must not punish this. A firm that is large because it is good has done exactly what the system is supposed to reward, and its position is inherently contestable — a better rival can displace it.

• An Extractive Monopoly is dominance that has stopped competing on the merits and now sustains itself by closing the market behind it: regulatory capture, rent-seeking, predatory pricing to starve entrants, serial acquisition of nascent rivals, self-preferencing, patent thickets, and lobbying for rules that lock in incumbents. This dominance is no longer earned; it is defended. It extracts from consumers, workers, and would-be competitors what it can no longer win by being better.

The standards below are aimed at the second category, not the first. Every enforcement trigger — exclusionary conduct, self-preferencing, roll-ups, non-competes — targets the conduct by which dominance is defended against competition, not the fact of dominance itself. We are not punishing success; we are removing the mechanisms by which yesterday’s success forecloses tomorrow’s. Where this Act sets share-based presumptions, the burden is structured around demonstrated exclusionary behavior, preserving room for dominance that remains genuinely contestable. Killing the golden goose — the incentive to take the great risk — is itself a policy failure this framework is designed to avoid.

Modernized Merger Standards

Restore meaningful structural review of mergers and acquisitions in concentrated industries.

• Presumption against mergers in already-concentrated markets (HHI > 1,800 post-merger), with the burden of proof on merging parties to show consumer benefit
• Outright ban on horizontal mergers between companies with combined U.S. market capitalization above $100 billion
• Vertical merger scrutiny restored: presumption of harm where a dominant platform acquires a market participant on its own platform
• Roll-up review: Aggregate review of sequential acquisitions by private equity in fragmented industries (hospitals, dental practices, veterinary clinics, mobile home parks)
• Pre-merger filing fees scaled by transaction size to fully fund DOJ/FTC review capacity

Structural Breakup Authority

Reinvigorate Sherman Act § 2 enforcement and clarify statutory remedies for monopolization.

• Clear statutory standard: Firms with persistent market shares above 60% that have engaged in exclusionary conduct face structural separation
• Tech platform line-of-business restrictions: Dominant digital platforms (Systemically Important Digital Platforms, >10% of U.S. users) prohibited from preferencing their own products on their own marketplaces
• Interoperability and data portability mandates for dominant platforms, modeled on telephone number portability — users can leave without losing their network or data
• Patent thickets: Reform pharmaceutical patent practices that extend monopoly periods past 20 years through layered secondary patents
• Non-compete bans for workers earning under $150,000 nationwide; preempts state-level enforcement of overbroad non-competes

Strengthened Enforcement Capacity

Funding and authority alone do not produce enforcement — institutional capacity must be rebuilt.

• Triple funding for DOJ Antitrust Division and FTC Bureau of Competition over five years ($1.2B → $3.6B combined)
• Dedicated industry units: Tech platforms, healthcare consolidation, agriculture/meatpacking, pharmaceuticals, finance
• State Attorney General coordination: Federal grants to state AGs for joint antitrust enforcement; preserve state authority to bring independent cases
• Private right of action strengthened: Treble damages preserved; class action procedural barriers reduced for documented antitrust harms
• Cooling-off period of 5 years before senior antitrust enforcers can join firms with active cases before their former agency

Digital Platform Regulation

Establish a sector-specific regulator for Systemically Important Digital Platforms (SIDPs), analogous to financial regulation of systemically important banks.

• New Digital Platforms Bureau within the FTC, with rulemaking authority over SIDPs
• Self-preferencing ban: SIDPs prohibited from giving their own products/services preferential ranking, placement, or terms over competitors on their own platforms
• Acquisition pre-clearance: SIDPs must obtain clearance before acquiring any firm above $50M in revenue
• Data trust requirements: Consumer data held by SIDPs subject to fiduciary duty (no monetization without explicit informed consent)
• Interoperability standards for messaging, social, and marketplace platforms above defined thresholds

Targeted Sector Remediation

Apply structural review to industries where consolidation has already produced documented consumer harm.

• Meatpacking: Cap the share of any single processor at 25% of national slaughter capacity for cattle, hogs, or poultry (currently four firms control 85% of beef processing)
• Pharmacy Benefit Managers: Break the vertical integration of PBMs with insurers and retail pharmacies; require pass-through pricing
• Health insurance consolidation: Reverse insurer-provider mergers that create regional monopolies; restore network competition
• Agriculture inputs: Address seed and pesticide concentration (Bayer-Monsanto, Corteva, Syngenta-ChemChina, BASF control ~70% of the seed market)
• Rail and shipping: Restore competitive access in industries where rate-setting affects every downstream sector

Constitutional Authority

Article I, Section 8 (Commerce Clause — interstate commerce regulation, long-settled basis for antitrust); Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890; Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914; Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914; Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976. (The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 is deliberately not relied on. It restricts price discrimination in ways that shield competitors from price competition rather than protecting competition itself — the reason it went substantially unenforced after the 1970s — and it is the wrong foundation for an Act whose purpose is restoring competitive markets.) Antitrust law has the strongest constitutional foundation of any major federal regulatory regime — even the most conservative Supreme Court interpretations affirm Congressional authority to prevent restraints on interstate trade.

Constitutional authority is not the binding constraint here, and the Act should not pretend otherwise. No serious party disputes that Congress may legislate antitrust. What decides cases is judicial doctrine: the consumer welfare standard, and the successive narrowing in Verizon v. Trinko (2004), Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007), and Ohio v. American Express (2018). This Act is therefore drafted to operate through statutory standards, structural presumptions, and merger thresholds that Congress sets directly, rather than through litigation outcomes that depend on courts abandoning the consumer welfare standard. Where a provision does depend on judicial receptivity, it is identified as such.

Rationale

Concentrated market power is not a left-right issue — it is a “Working vs. Broken” issue. When four firms control beef, three control the seed market, and a handful of digital platforms gate access to commerce, communication, and information, the competitive feedback loops that make a market economy productive stop functioning. Small businesses cannot enter. Innovation slows. Prices rise. Workers lose bargaining power. Honest companies competing on quality lose to vertically-integrated rivals who can cross-subsidize predatory pricing. This Act restores the original American bargain: anyone can start a business, anyone can compete, and no firm grows so large that it can rewrite the rules in its favor. We are not punishing success — we are restoring the conditions that made success possible.

Implementation Timeline

• Year 1, Q1: New DOJ Antitrust and FTC Bureau of Competition funding effective; recruitment begins for industry-specific units
• Year 1, Q2: Updated merger guidelines published; pre-merger filing fee schedule revised; non-compete ban effective
• Year 1, Q3: Digital Platforms Bureau established; SIDP designations begin
• Year 1, Q4: Sector remediation cases filed in meatpacking, PBMs, and tech self-preferencing
• Year 2: First structural remedies negotiated or litigated; interoperability standards proposed
• Year 3-5: Pattern-and-practice consent decrees executed; ongoing enforcement institutionalized

Fiscal Impact

Total federal cost: $2.4B annually at full strength (DOJ Antitrust: $1.8B; FTC Bureau of Competition: $1.8B combined; Digital Platforms Bureau: $400M; State AG grants: $200M; minus existing $1.8B baseline). Offset by: (a) filing fee revenue from pre-merger notifications ($300-500M annually); (b) civil penalty recoveries (historical average $1-2B annually under current understaffed enforcement; expected $4-8B at full capacity); (c) reduced consumer costs from competitive markets (estimated $200-400B annually in healthcare alone — see Council of Economic Advisers concentration analyses). Net fiscal benefit: strongly positive. Net economic benefit to households: $1,000-3,000 per year in lower prices and higher wages.

Political Considerations

This Act will draw the most concentrated lobbying opposition of any provision in the mandate — the firms most affected have the deepest resources to deploy. Frame as: pro-small-business, pro-worker, pro-innovation, anti-monopoly. The political coalition is broader than it appears: small business associations, independent farmers and ranchers, app developers locked out of platform marketplaces, independent retailers, regional banks, and consumers paying inflated prices. Polling shows 70-80% support for breaking up large tech platforms across party lines. Counter the “innovation will suffer” argument with the historical record: the AT&T breakup (1984) launched the modern telecommunications and internet industries; the IBM consent decree (1956) enabled the software industry. Structural relief is how markets renew themselves.