BRUSSELS — When the world's richest CEOs gather in the Alps or the Arabian desert, the parties are lush, the security is tight and the panel discussions are self-indulgent.
And then there's the Brussels Conference on Antitrust — a kind of anti-Davos, where a slightly less glitzy confederation of powerful-but-obscure regulators put their brains together and dream up ways to undo that world order.
The annual meeting, held each year at the upscale Steigenberger Wiltcher's hotel, has become one of the most important, if nerdiest, tickets on the transatlantic business circuit. This year, a thousand-odd corporate lawyers, lobbyists, regulators, journalists and students came to hear the people leading that mission: Lina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission, Jonathan Kanter of the U.S. Department of Justice and their counterparts in the European Union and elsewhere.
The crowds in the standing-room-only ballroom two weeks ago attest to the increasing power and momentum of the global movement to check the power of transnational corporations.
The rhetoric — about not just business competition, but saving democracy and stabilizing global politics — attests to just how ambitious its leaders have become.
For anyone who thinks of antitrust as a purely economic issue, those broader goals might come as a surprise. Regulators this year spoke of corporate power as a threat not just to economic freedom, but political freedom, and argued for a diverse set of tools including trade, industrial and tax policy to counter the problem.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai sat next to a South African official and argued for “breaking out of some of these colonial and post-colonial structures” and “transitioning out of old systems and trying to create new ones that are democratic and competitive.”
For that, she received a round of applause — one of several throughout the day — a rarity on the staid conference circuit.
Tai’s appearance is also symbolic of a bigger power shift in global corporate regulation. With U.S. agencies in the midst of headline-making suits against numerous big tech companies, this year’s event was in part a celebration of American regulatory force.
“The Americans were fluent and assertive with language about democracy and liberty while many Europeans were still talking the language of protecting the competitive process,” said the event’s organizer, Cristina Caffarra, a competition economist, in an interview afterward. That “feels entirely inadequate to the task.”
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