As lawmakers in Washington act to shore up the rickety foundations of America’s formal democracy, via the pending update of the Electoral Count Act and the official report and criminal referrals of the January 6 select committee, Congress is also poised to sign off on some preliminary measures to rein in the top-heavy configuration of the country’s political economy. In the omnibus bill to fund the government next year, two pieces of legislation seek to reform the long-neglected strictures on antitrust in American law. One bill significantly boosts funding for antitrust enforcers in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission by imposing new fees on merger filings; the other greatly expands the jurisdiction of state attorneys general to pursue antitrust actions.

Both measures seem at first glance to be stodgy and procedural fare, focused on altering the behind-the-scenes legal playing field rather than mounting frontal assaults on the gargantuan tech, financial, and health monopolies choking off both market access for small-scale enterprises and consumer choice. But in the enforcement-challenged realm of antitrust, procedural reform counts for a lot—particularly at a moment when the Biden administration is mobilizing executive agencies like the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to target monopoly control of the economy. “It’s the most important antitrust reform since 1976—a huge deal,” says Matt Stoller, director of research for the Economic Liberties Project. “What we’re seeing is a revolution in antitrust enforcement.”

Stoller points to recent federal actions against oversize market players as signs of the shifting climate. Just this week, Epic Games, the makers of the video game Fortnite, agreed to a landmark settlement of more than half a billion dollars—half of which is devoted to consumer refunds—to resolve an FTC case against the company for deceptive marketing practices and other abuses in the game’s software. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is embroiled in another FTC suit seeking to block the company’s acquisition of the virtual-reality fitness company Within Unlimited, giving testimony that unconvincingly downplays the platform’s ambitions to corner the VR market. Another FTC suit filed just last week is challenging Microsoft’s $68 billion deal to acquire the gaming company Activision Blizzard. And the CFPB won a record $3.7 billion settlement from Wells Fargo for company manipulation of auto loans, mortgages, and customer deposit accounts.

Still, for all this welcome new activity on the long-dormant battlefronts of antitrust, the package now before Congress is also noteworthy for two bills it doesn’t include, which specifically targeted the monopoly practices of Big Tech. Both bills—intended to prevent companies from giving preferential treatment to their own services and subsidiaries on their platforms and from strong-arming third-party market players to ensure unilateral platform control of the apps market—emerged out of extensive congressional hearings, and both were dropped from the omnibus at the behest of Senate majority leader Charles Schumer. Also left on the cutting-room floor was a third bill that would insulate local journalism outlets from the practices of Big Tech predation. “The reason that these bills didn’t pass is Chuck Schumer,” Stoller says.“He just lied about a lot of things. He said he’d allow a vote and then he didn’t.”

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Indeed, a collateral effect of Schumer’s underhanded horse-trading is that the Republican case against Big Tech monopoly is gaining early influence as the GOP is set to come into the majority in the next session of Congress. “All the stuff we got in the omnibus was written by Republicans,” Stoller says. “And the other stuff that’s written by Republicans, that’s stuff the Senate is going to consider. I think in the House, they’ve already said they’ll be looking at app stores.” But Stoller insists that having the GOP directing future antitrust legislation is not necessarily an obstacle to substantive progress: “Itwill be hard for what [incoming House Judiciary chairman] Jim Jordan was going to do; he was planning to punish the people who’d pushed for antitrust. But now he can’t, since the majority’s so narrow.” And with hostility to Big Tech serving as one of the few issues binding together an increasingly fragmenting conservative movement, Stoller sees the potential to build on the successful reforms that survived the omnibus culling. “The thing about the Republicans is that they’ll fight you, but when they say they’ll do something, they do it,” Stoller says “Schumer said he was going to allow a vote and just lied about it.

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