Last week Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked an attempt by the Senate to pass the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act. The bill “would change the structure and the amount of filing fees levied by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),” increasing fees on mergers over $1 billion. Sen. Paul believes “antitrust zealots” are getting in the way of free market activity and cites the video services industry as an example of the marketplace unfettered by big government.
Excerpted from Sen. Rand Paul’s Dec. 8 Senate floor speech:
Just take the issue of video services. In 2005 when Netflix was already several years old and growing in popularity, the FTC, believe it or not, visited itself in blocking a merger between Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. So this is the inside of government. Netflix is beginning to take off and the antitrust busters – the trustbusters are breaking up VCR companies, DVD companies, they’re going after blockbuster. This is the incompetence of government and we should not encourage this. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video no longer exist. Even now Netflix is one they’re worried about. So Netflix was the competitor that put Blockbuster out of business. They wanted to get blockbuster to forbid them from merging. It makes no sense at all.
No such fear exists today though, that Netflix will be a monopoly since they’re competing with Hulu, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV, Paramount Plus and others. But five or six years ago you might have thought Netflix is gonna take over the world, we got to break them up. No, if companies please their consumer, let them get bigger – bigger means they’re giving their customers something they want. We didn’t need government to break up Netflix. We didn’t need government to interfere to ensure competition and innovation. All we needed to do was let the marketplace work. But standing in the way of the benefits of the market are the antitrust zealots.