Antitrust Populism: Towards a Taxonomy

GAICIL Insights

Every technological revolution provokes a political backlash, and competition law is often where the backlash lands.¹ Antitrust Populism: Towards a Taxonomy, by Joshua Wright and Aurelien Portuese, gives the latest backlash an anatomy. Antitrust populism, the populist use of competition policies, is rising again, the authors write, mainly because of the challenges the digital economy poses to traditional competition tools.

The tool the article builds is a taxonomy. It separates conceptual antitrust populism from political antitrust populism and argues that the two bolster and reinvigorate one another. Political populism is competition law used as an instrument of mobilization. Conceptual populism is the set of ideas that supplies the vocabulary and justification for that use. The taxonomy, the authors write, enables a better understanding, and subsequently a better response, to the unprincipled use of antitrust laws for populist reasons.

Why should a classification scheme matter? Because technology debates move fast and blur distinct claims into one roar. A complaint about the political power of large firms differs from a claim about higher prices, which differs again from a claim about reduced innovation. Fused together, they produce enforcement that cannot be measured against any clear standard. Pulling them apart lets policymakers ask which claims rest on economic evidence and which rest on sentiment.

Bring the result forward to the present. Artificial intelligence is the next arena for this sorting exercise. AI has quickly inherited the anxieties once aimed at digital platforms: concentration, influence over information, the power of a few large firms. Calls to turn competition law on AI developers draw on both facets the authors describe. Some reflect genuine competitive concerns that economic tools can analyze. Others reflect broader unease with size and success. A taxonomy is a sieve: run each proposal through it before the enforcement decision, and the economic grains separate from the political ones.

The normative claim is blunt. The economics of competition law should avoid the outdated populist reasoning of antitrust's early days. A return to pre-economics competition policy, the conclusion argues, would harm both the innovativeness of disruptive industries and the advancement of academic knowledge, because it would discard decades of scholarly contributions and enforcement improvements. The authors credit the antitrust economic revolution beginning in the mid-1970s with greatly improving on an aimless doctrine.

That history weighs heavily in AI. Economic analysis lets enforcers test whether conduct raises prices, lowers output or reduces innovation. Those tools are imperfect, and AI markets strain them with zero-price services, network effects and breakneck change. The article acknowledges that the new market actors of the digital economy challenge antitrust enforcement. Its answer is to refine the economic approach while keeping the discipline evidence imposes, and to resist trading it for standards nobody can test.

There is a reason untestable standards are dangerous. A rule that cannot be falsified can be applied to anyone. In a field as fast-moving as AI, that converts competition law into a discretionary weapon, and discretion invites lobbying by whoever is losing the market race.

The article also insists that modern antitrust populism must be conceptualized because its influence demands scrutiny. Movements that shape law deserve careful examination of their premises. For AI, that means asking whether a proposed intervention rests on demonstrated harm or on general hostility to large firms. A framework that sorts arguments by their foundations helps legislators, judges and agencies avoid smuggling political goals into a legal domain built to protect the competitive process.

The deepest stake is institutional stability. Innovation runs on predictable rules. Firms investing in AI place long-horizon bets that require confidence that success will be judged by economic standards. Populist enforcement, cut loose from economics, injects uncertainty that discourages those bets. The taxonomy is a mooring line that keeps competition law anchored, letting legitimate concerns about digital markets be met with rigorous tools while guarding against antitrust as an instrument of politics.

The practical question for anyone drafting AI competition policy follows directly: which facet is speaking? If the answer is the political one, the proposal belongs in a legislature's debate about values. If it is the conceptual one, it needs evidence. Keeping those lanes separate may decide whether AI markets stay open to the disruptive competition that drives progress.