By Kiran Stacey, Financial Times
In 1914, US President Woodrow Wilson enacted what was meant to be the final flourish of the early antitrust movement. In the previous decade, the US government had broken up some of the most powerful monopolies in history, including Standard Oil, American Tobacco and the Northern Securities Company.
Now Wilson wanted to make sure such monopolies were never allowed to exist again. So he set up the Federal Trade Commission, an almost uniquely powerful Washington regulator tasked both with writing new competition rules and enforcing them. More than 100 years later, many progressives think the FTC has failed in its core mission. They point to the existence of giant US technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon and argue that monopolies have once more been allowed to take over the US economy.
