Daily Journal // June 22, 2026
For most of my career–from serving as chief counsel to the United States Senate’s Antitrust Subcommittee in the early 1990s, through my tenure as chief counsel for competition policy under President Obama and as a deputy associate attorney general under President Biden–I have worked on one basic question: How do we keep markets open and competitive so that dominant firms cannot harm consumers?
From every one of those vantage points, the same lesson kept surfacing: Old laws that were designed to curb the excesses of corporate power had instead been wielded to entrench monopoly power across our economy. The evidence has consistently shown that this trend toward concentrated corporate power produces many harms: higher prices, lower wages, greater inequality and narrower opportunities for business growth. That is why California’s AB 1776, the COMPETE Act, matters. It offers a timely chance to modernize the state’s competition law as meaningful federal enforcement has all but disappeared.
California’s core antitrust statute, the Cartwright Act, was written in 1907. It was a serious law for its era, but its era was one of railroads and trusts, not digital platforms and data-driven markets. More glaring is the monopoly loophole at the center of the law. The Act prohibits two or more companies from colluding with one another, yet it does not clearly prohibit a single dominant firm from acting on its own to suppress competition. California is one of only five states without that protection; forty-five states have it.
The largest corporations in the world have exploited this loophole in California law to delay relief and waste taxpayer dollars. In California’s ongoing case against Amazon, where it is accused of agreeing with major retailers like Levi’s, Hanes, Home Depot and Chewy’s to hike prices on non-Amazon retail channels, the e-commerce giant argued that the Cartwright Act does not reach its conduct at all. In other words, Amazon was trying to force the case into federal court, where a half-century-long crusade to shield corporate giants from accountability has proven more successful.
This is the heart of the matter, and it is a lesson I learned from the inside. Relying on decades of federal court decisions that have steadily narrowed the reach of industrial era competition law to govern a fast-paced technology-driven economy is not working. Even when antitrust enforcement successfully challenges monopolistic tech sector practices, litigation takes forever, and so far, the remedies have done almost nothing to prevent ongoing market abuses. It’s been nearly two years since a federal judge found that Google illegally monopolized online search, yet a remedy has yet to unlock promised competition, or to prevent Google from attempting the same tactics to strangle the next generation of AI chatbots.
I say this as someone who spent years working in and around the federal government. I do not make the case lightly that Washington can no longer be counted on to lead. Look no further than the Justice Department, where I spent many years fighting for strong enforcement. The department recently dropped its case against Live Nation, leaving states in the precarious position of bringing one of the world’s most unpopular monopolies to justice. This is where we are: As federal enforcement has retreated, federal courts have narrowed the law and federal policymaking on competition is in disarray.
When the national backstop weakens, responsibility should not disappear–it must shift to the states. California, the nation’s largest economy, has both the capacity and the tradition to lead our country with cutting-edge, forward-looking policy.
This is why the COMPETE Act is so important to enact. Its core provisions take traditional antitrust principles updated for today’s economy and apply them to dominant firm behavior unencumbered by poorly reasoned, antiquated caselaw. The bill makes it illegal for a single dominant firm to suppress competition. It addresses dominant gatekeepers that block rivals from reaching customers or leverage power in one market to crowd out competitors in another. It protects workers and suppliers by recognizing buyer-side market power, the kind a dominant employer can use to hold down wages. In short, the bill updates the toolkit; it does not reinvent it.
The self-serving industry argument that strengthening antitrust law might chill innovation is based in fear, not reality. In my experience, the opposite is true and the evidence says the same. The economywide trend toward industry concentration has certainly increased corporate profits, but it has not increased business efficiency. Open competition is what drives innovation. Furthermore, small and midsized businesses drive that growth; only the largest firms wield power to squelch it. The COMPETE Act recognizes that reality, exempting some 98% of small and medium-sized businesses from the law.
Of course, California’s history makes the point better than I can. The microprocessor, the internet, generations of creative industry–these innovations came from open, contested markets, not from protected incumbents. Modernizing the law to keep markets open is how we can protect the innovators still to come.
Given the current vacuum in meaningful federal enforcement, now is the time for California policymakers to come together and give enforcement agencies the tools they need to protect consumers and workers. The COMPETE Act offers a critical opportunity to do just that. The legislature should act quickly to put this bill on Governor Newsom’s desk, seizing the opportunity to build more competitive markets and preserve the wellbeing of citizens in California and beyond.