US: Warren’s antitrust bill would enhance gov control over the biggest US companies

Presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren is drafting a sweeping piece of legislation that would go far beyond breaking and blocking deals between companies and would exert more control over some of America’s largest firms, reported CNBC. 

People with knowledge of the bill and who support it say the measure takes important steps towards clarifying the rule book under which the country’s largest companies play, after years of lax or incomplete oversight. Its detractors, including academics and antitrust lawyers who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, say it takes unprecedented steps to legislate America’s largest companies that undoes decades of jurisprudence and weakens the country’s competitive stance.

The bill, tentatively named the Anti-Monopoly and Competition Restoration Act, is coauthored with Rep. David Cicilline (Democrat – Rhode Island) who chairs the antitrust subcommittee on the House Judiciary panel. Cicilline has said he will not introduce new antitrust legislation until the investigations he is leading into the growing power of big tech companies like Facebook have concluded.

Bloomberg News first reported on the anti-merger aspects of the bill last week. 

CNBC has reviewed a draft of the bill. The legislation ultimately proposed may take a different shape. But its ideas demonstrate how dramatically Warren wishes to approach antitrust policy in the US Warren, who has built her top-tier Democratic presidential campaign on a populist call for structural change in the American economy, has already pushed for breaking up big technology companies like Amazon and Facebook.

Full Content: CNBC

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