[todd-davies]

> It seems like the implicit assumption is that there must be a harm somewhere, we just haven't found it yet... isn't any business's primary purpose to compete with / harm competitors?

As a general rule, firms want to escape competition in order to make higher profits. There's nothing wrong with that! Indeed, the mechanism by which economic competition generates many of its benefits is that firms innovate in order to escape competition, and for those innovations to be useful for us all. So, where does competition/antitrust law come in? In part, it's about ensuring that firms escape competition in the way that we want. Innovation and competition on the merits is good, underhanded tactics to harm competitors is bad. All competitions need these kind of rules, regardless of whether they're economic, political, sporting, etc. When you have a large population of thousands of firms, you can be sure that some of them will be trying to compete unfairly, hence the assumption that there is some harm that we're yet to find.

> there isn't any consumer harm to be found, only harm to smaller competitors' businesses

We can distinguish between 'static' and 'dynamic' harms. Static harms are those which happen in the short run, such as a cartel agreeing to increase prices or not innovate. These harms are quite concrete and easy to define. Dynamic harms are those which affect the way a market might function in the future. For instance, a harm to innovation may result in people not having access to new products. It's hard to say for sure whether these harms will actually manifest, so we're usually talking about tendencies instead of certainties. It's perfectly reasonable to consider tendencies under the law though (e.g. we might prohibit drink-driving for the same reason). Dynamic harms usually have harm to consumers as a second order effect (e.g. reduced innovation or choice).

[tqi]

Thanks for the thoughtful and clear explanation!

The analogy to drunk driving makes sense, but in the context of business is it so important to get ahead of the harms that we have to legislate against pre-harms? Innovation and merit and underhanded tactics are in the eye of the beholder, and it seems like we apply a LOT of preexisting notions of who is a good company and who sucks when we evaluate behaviors. That doesn't feel like a sustainable way to write and enforce laws.

[todd-davies]

No worries :) You're right that the law shouldn't be arbitrary. Lots of what the law is applied only when a cases passes legal tests to determine if some conduct violates the law. These tests are applied the same way to everybody and are thus impartial. Naturally, there's lots of debate and research into which legal tests we should use, and what their substance is.