Our country, right or wrong: The FTC Act’s influence on national silos in antitrust enforcement

Posted by Social Science Research Network

Our Country, Right or Wrong: The FTC Act’s Influence on National Silos in Antitrust Enforcement

By Steven S. Nam (Stanford University)

Abstract:     The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 (“FTC Act”), a model for many other countries that set up their own competition agencies, combines the control afforded by presidential appointment and removal powers over FTC commissioners with an exceedingly discretionary mandate. This Article contends that the FTC Act’s outmoded openness to strong presidential direction, where adapted abroad, has helped detract from antitrust regulator independence. Even advanced players in the liberal international economic order such as South Korea have made use of the U.S.’s original blueprint for unitary executive-stamped antitrust enforcement without sharing a long historical evolution of counterbalancing regulatory norms, e.g. the judicial check that was Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935).

Strong executive direction in antitrust enforcement is particularly suited to state-sponsored capitalist economies and moreover the mercantilist administrations among them, given their belief that the state and big business must cooperate in the face of zero-sum international competition. South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak’s term (2008-2013) serves as an apt recent case study, featuring dirigiste calibration of antitrust enforcement against a backdrop of global recession. This Article examines the parallels between the FTC Act and the South Korean Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act before scrutinizing the enabled silo-like enforcement patterns of the Korean Fair Trade Commission under the Lee administration. Increasingly widespread erosion of public confidence in free and competitive trade demands a better understanding of the forces preventing global convergence in antitrust enforcement, and of their roots.

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