Antitrust & Trade Reg.
Jun. 23, 2026
California should lead on competition while Washington falters
As federal antitrust enforcement falters and monopolies tighten their grip on the economy, California's COMPETE Act aims to close a century-old loophole and give the state stronger tools to rein in dominant corporations.
Gene Kimmelman
Gene Kimmelman is a former senior official in the U.S. Department of Justice and former president of Public Knowledge. He has spent four decades in antitrust and consumer protection advocacy.
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 th...
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