Neo-Brandeisian

The Neo-Brandeisian movement is an intellectual and political project that seeks to restore structural and democratic concerns to antitrust law, challenging the dominance of the Consumer Welfare Standard and the Chicago School framework. Named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who warned that concentrated economic power threatens democratic governance, the movement argues that antitrust should protect competition as a process, preserve the economic independence of small producers, and prevent the accumulation of private authority over public infrastructure. Neo-Brandeisians treat network effects and platform governance not as efficiency achievements but as structural threats that require proactive intervention, including merger prohibition, structural separation, and interoperability mandates. The movement gained institutional traction through the work of scholars like Lina Khan and Tim Wu, and through the Federal Trade Commission's renewed emphasis on structural remedies in the 2020s.

The Neo-Brandeisians are right that power matters, but they risk replacing one oversimplification with another: the belief that breaking up big firms is sufficient to restore competitive dynamism in markets where the architecture itself is the barrier to entry.