The consumer welfare standard was supposed to be on the defensive. After nearly a decade of attacks from the neo-Brandeisian movement, critics had cast it as too narrow, too technocratic, and too forgiving of “Big Tech.” Yet the standard’s most important new ally may turn out to be an unexpected one: geopolitics.
The consumer welfare standard asks whether business conduct harms the competitive process, typically by raising prices, reducing output, degrading quality, or slowing innovation. Neo-Brandeisianism, by contrast, is more skeptical of concentrated economic power as such. It worries not only about prices and output, but also about whether large firms wield too much political, social, or economic influence.
For all its political momentum, neo-Brandeisianism has had a much harder time reshaping antitrust law than reshaping antitrust rhetoric. Courts have largely continued to apply economically grounded standards focused on competitive effects, efficiency, innovation, and consumer welfare. As Lazar Radic and Nicolas Petit recently observed, neo-Brandeisianism has had far greater influence on the political conversation surrounding antitrust than on antitrust doctrine itself.
Strategic rivalry between the United States and China has now added a new dimension to that debate. Innovation, technological leadership, and economic performance have become matters of national strategy, particularly in industries such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and advanced manufacturing. Ironically, that shift has strengthened the case for an antitrust framework centered on efficiency, innovation, and dynamic competition—the very considerations at the heart of the consumer welfare standard.
When Antitrust Goes Geopolitical
This shift matters for antitrust policy. Critics have long argued that the consumer welfare standard is too narrow because it focuses on economic outcomes rather than broader social goals. Yet geopolitical competition has underscored the importance of precisely the factors that consumer-welfare analysis emphasizes: innovation, productivity growth, technological leadership, and efficient use of resources. These are no longer merely economic objectives. They are increasingly sources of national strength.
That does not mean antitrust should become industrial policy in a wig and robe. Competition authorities should not promote national champions or sacrifice competition principles in pursuit of geopolitical objectives. Competition law and industrial policy serve different functions. Governments may legitimately pursue industrial-policy goals through subsidies, procurement policies, research funding, export controls, and investment incentives. Competition law, by contrast, should remain focused on preserving competition, market contestability—the ability of new rivals to challenge incumbents—and innovation.
Even so, geopolitical realities reinforce the case for an antitrust framework that prioritizes efficiency and innovation, rather than treating scale itself with suspicion. The point is especially clear in artificial intelligence and semiconductor markets, which feature enormous fixed costs, significant economies of scale, intense global competition, and fast-moving technological ecosystems. In these sectors, large firms often play a critical role in financing research, building infrastructure, and commercializing new technologies. Indeed, some of the United States’ most important advantages in artificial intelligence depend on firms that would plainly qualify as “Big Tech.”
Why Size Isn’t the Right Question
That reality creates an obvious tension for neo-Brandeisian approaches that treat bigness itself as suspect. If technological leadership depends partly on globally competitive firms operating at scale, policymakers may grow less willing to treat size as a problem in itself. That does not mean large firms get a free pass. Exclusionary conduct, anticompetitive acquisitions, and practices that suppress innovation remain legitimate antitrust concerns.
The right question is whether particular conduct harms competition and innovation—not whether a firm has simply become large. That distinction matters especially in AI markets, where the most efficient business structures and technical architectures remain uncertain. Nobody yet knows exactly which models, platforms, chips, cloud systems, or organizational forms will prove most effective. Competition policy should therefore focus on preserving innovation rivalry, rather than trying to engineer market outcomes—or market structures—through highly prescriptive interventions.
Recent survey evidence also suggests public attitudes toward artificial intelligence are more nuanced than often assumed. Although many Americans worry about artificial intelligence’s social consequences, RAND survey data indicate that a significant share of the public views U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence as strategically important and worries about China overtaking the United States in AI development. In other words, skepticism of large technology firms may increasingly coexist with the recognition that technological leadership is now part of geopolitical competition.
The Consumer Welfare Standard Strikes Back
To be sure, the political landscape remains fluid. Anti-bigness arguments continue to influence policy debates and are no longer confined to the neo-Brandeisian movement. Vice President J.D. Vance has expressed sympathy for concerns about excessive concentration, and some competition officials continue to advocate heightened scrutiny of large technology platforms based less on demonstrable competitive harms than on their size and economic importance.
There are also reports that Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) may soon reintroduce the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Modeled in part on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, the bill would impose a range of obligations on designated technology companies, limiting their ability to expand into adjacent markets, including, presumably, artificial intelligence. Among other things, it would restrict some forms of vertical integration—that is, combining complementary stages of production or distribution within the same company—and require covered platforms to share investments and capabilities through interoperability mandates, which require systems to work with rivals’ products or services. None of these provisions would require a showing of harm to consumers. The future direction of U.S. antitrust policy therefore remains contested.
Even so, the broader trend is becoming harder to ignore. Geopolitical competition is pushing policymakers to focus on innovation, productivity, technological development, and dynamic efficiency. Across the Atlantic, Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness identified a lack of scale as a central weakness, while the European Commission’s draft merger guidelines increasingly treat scale and innovation as complementary competitive virtues. These developments sit more comfortably within the consumer welfare tradition than within approaches that regard economic scale as inherently suspect.
The irony is difficult to miss. Geopolitical competition was supposed to make the consumer welfare standard look obsolete. Instead, it has highlighted the importance of the very factors the framework has emphasized all along: innovation, efficiency, and economic dynamism. In a world defined by technological rivalry, consumer welfare looks less like a narrow economic objective and more like a strategic necessity.
