Hipster Antitrust: The European Way, the fourth Annual Conference of the Florence Competition Programme (FCP) will take place Oct. 25, 2019 at the European University Institute (EUI) campus in Florence. The conference will discuss the main ideas behind the new Hipster Antitrust movement in USA and its influence on EU competition policy and beyond.
The past decades have been characterised by a limited antitrust enforcement in USA. Due to the “non-interventionist approach” suggested by the Chicago school and the high burden to prove antitrust violations introduced by US Supreme Court case law, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been rather reluctant to start any public enforcement action under US antitrust rules. Nevertheless, in view of the growing degree of market concentration of the US economy, in recent years a number of academics have argued in favour of a stronger degree of intervention by US antitrust authorities, in order to come back to the original goals of the US Sherman and Clayton Act.
So far, the intellectual movement, known as “Hipster Antitrust” or “New-Brandeis School”, has had a limited policy impact in USA. By contrast, the European Commission and a number of NCAs in Europe have recently started to enforce EU competition rules more actively.
