DOJ's Delrahim speaks on antitrust approach in age of mergers

• In an interview with CNBC, DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim was faced point blank with the weekend editorial by Columbia antitrust specialist Tim Wu, who said "It would be understandable if you assumed that the Anti-Merger Act of 1950 had been repealed. But in fact it remains on the books. It has merely been evaded, eroded and enfeebled by the corroding effect of decades of industry pressure and ideological drift, yielding hesitant enforcers and a hostile judiciary."
• "I don't know if there's been much hostility; I think the laws have been pretty well calibrated," Delrahim says. "Over the last 30-40 years we've had a pretty strong and bipartisan consensus ... on the right balance for antitrust enforcement ... Are there areas, do we wish it would go a different way? Are there cases we lose? Absolutely."
• Asked how closely the department looks in particular at platforms that touch multiple aspects of people's lives, like Amazon.com (AMZN +1%), Facebook (FB +1.3%) and Alphabet (GOOG +0.7%, GOOGL +0.7%), he replies "We're just there to police the markets. We're not picking winners and losers, we are not trying to choose which technologies -- frankly we're just not smart enough to be doing that. All we can do is make sure the markets are free, for new entrants to come in and topple the old ones."
• And as for the president's tweets about antitrust matters, including weighing in on the ACA's pressure on Comcast (CMCSA -0.2%), Delrahim notes the consent decree tied to Comcast's purchase of NBCUniversal expired but it's his job to make sure markets work nonetheless -- and he reiterated his opposition to behavioral remedies to cure antitrust concerns.
• "We come in and tell a company to withhold its natural tendencies, its natural incentives to make profit, and then they evaporate after five years, 10 years, seven years," he says. "And it makes no sense because seven years before, we're trying to guess where the market is."
• "I believe in structural solutions," he adds, saying that's why DOJ was opposed to parts of the AT&T/Time Warner merger "and that was the solution we provided." There's been a lot of support for the DOJ's appeal of the AT&T (T -0.5%) decision, he says pointing to 29 supporting economists. "We'll see what happens."
• Now read: RiverPark Wedgewood Fund Q3 2018 Investor Letter

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