Antitrust in an Election Year – Back to the Future: In Need of a New Antitrust Framework

Below, we have provided the full transcript of the panel discussion, Back to the Future: In Need of a New Antitrust Framework from the first episode of our series, Antitrust In an Election Year: Challenges Ahead.

Howard SHELANSKI:

Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Howard Shelanski, and I want to welcome you to the first of these CPI antitrust in an election year sessions. We’ve just heard from Commissioner Phillips. We’re going to follow up today with a really distinguished set of panelists who are going to talk about whether antitrust is in need of a new framework, and put that in the context of some of the proposals and some of the changes that might be coming as we move through this election cycle and into a new Congress and into a new presidential cycle.

Very pleased to have with us today folks that probably all of you know. We have Koren Wong-Ervin, a partner at Axinn. We have Bill Baer, a former assistant attorney general, currently at The Brookings Institution. Bill, of course, also former bureau director at the FTC and former associate attorney general. I put that below his antitrust posts. We also have Geoffrey Manne, the president and founder of The International Center for Law and Economics. And Professor Tim Wu from Columbia University Law School, and of course, a well-known commentator on these issues who also has had valuable experience contributing at the Federal Trade Commission and at OMB in the executive branch. So I lo