Earlier today at the Constitution Center, the Federal Trade Commission held the second hearing in its Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century series. Competition policy experts from across both the country and the political spectrum convened in Washington, D.C. to discuss the current state of antitrust law.

Highlights below.

It’s important to remember that not everything is an antitrust issue

Debbie Feinstein, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP: “I’m not sure why privacy is a competition issue. HIPAA isn’t a competition statute. We know how to deal with privacy issues quite well. We can do it through it through consumer protection, we can do it through statutes. I’m still puzzled.”

Dennis Carlton, Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago: “Don’t misuse antitrust by trying to fix problems that antitrust enforcement is not well suited to fix and has little to do with their creation.”

Dennis Carlton, Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago: “So judges would have a lot of discretion, antitrust enforcers would have a lot of discretion on which cases to bring. That seems pretty undisciplined. How are you going to tell whether someone’s doing a good job, if they can weigh a million things in their decision. I think it would lead to inefficiency and bad policy. Even worse, it will lead to, when you have wide discretion, no one can tell whether you’re doing a good job or bad job, that is, whether you’re adhering to the criteria that you’re supposed to be. That’s put you subject to lots of outside influence. Could be political influence, could be God forbid corruption. Could be the incentive of firms to lobby, or it could be, and Joe touched on this and I agree with it, the incentive of very profitable firms to sponsor legislation that says, ‘Listen, it’s not so bad, we’re within this, you had this huge discretion, why don’t do you this?'”

Dennis Carlton, Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago: “Well, I think antitrust is designed to promote the process of competition. Period. It’s not designed to solve important problems like — that may well exist, it’s just not suited for that.”

Current antitrust law, driven by the consumer welfare standard, has been successful

Keith Hylton, Boston University School of Law: “I guess, I’d begin with the statement that, in general, I think antitrust is in pretty good shape.”

Dennis Carlton, Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago: “As far as whether antitrust is up to the task of dealing with new problems, I think it is.”

Keith Hylton, Boston University School of Law: “The consumer welfare has been a big improvement. I would say it’s something like a foreseeable consumer welfare standard, because courts are taking into account efficiency gains and consumers often don’t get to benefit from the efficiency gains immediately, they don’t get to eat the efficiency gains right away. But in the foreseeable future they often do get to eat — quote unquote — eat the efficiency gains. So that’s what we have. And you could move away from the consumer welfare standard but I’m not sure what you would do, where it — what it — would be, you could try to take externalities into account.”

Dramatic changes to antitrust law could harm companies that are delivering value to American consumers

Robert Willig, Princeton University: “A major part of the changes in the economy, from my point of view, have been the increasing prevalence of economies of scale, also economies of scope. And I would like to point out this is not a bad thing in itself, because increase in scale economies is really a concomitant of the fantastic innovations that we’ve seen, the increases in productivity, the technological progress, the effusion of technology into a wide variety of sectors.”

Dennis Carlton, Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago: “Regulation can distort competition and serve special interest groups. I think the more you diffuse the goal of antitrust in competition policy the more likely you open our society up to distortionary policies that will serve a private interest.”

Antitrust law should be simple and standardized

William Kovacic, George Washington University Law School: “To do otherwise is to create a multi-goal framework without a weighting or hierarchy, that leads to you idiosyncratic outcomes, judge by judge, agency by agency, which they described as on the border of unconstitutionality. In other words, they said the only practical way to apply this law in a coherent, meaningful way is to adopt a principally economic orientation and focus without using the specific term on consumer concerns. Not just price. Quality, of course, innovation, but Areeda and Turner brought the center and the center-left along with them.”

William Kovacic, George Washington University Law School: “You will have to answer the challenge that these commentators offered, which says show me how it’s applied in a specific case. Show me the hierarchy of values, you want to give more emphasis to workers than you do on consumers? Consumers get lower prices but workers get lower wages? What’s the trade-off? What’s the exchange rate between the efficiency that comes from scale economies and the limited opportunities for SMEs.”