Gary Reback, author of FREE THE MARKET, featured in the San Francisco Chronicle

Author favors stronger antitrust enforcement

By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
March 8, 2009; San Francisco Chronicle

Antitrust attorney Gary Reback stirred up Silicon Valley in the 1990s when he asked the Justice Department to protect Netscape and its Web browser from the machinations of mighty Microsoft Corp.
Netscape has since disappeared and the browser wars have been forgotten. But Reback has returned with a book, "Free the Market," in which he argues that government must do more to protect innovation and fair play.

"The hardest thing to get across to my libertarian and conservative friends in the tech industry is that we owe a lot of what we've got to the government," said Reback, 59.

"In earlier decades when government was more vigilant about antitrust, it created the openings that allowed Silicon Valley to exist," he said, citing one anecdote from his book.
Reback writes that, long before its breakup, AT&T settled one in a series of government antitrust cases with a deal that included licensing its transistor technology. One licensee was scientist William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor. Shockley opened a chipmaking laboratory in Mountain View. It failed, but several of his employees later founded famous Silicon Valley firms, including Intel Corp.

"And that's why we're sitting here today," Reback said.

In "Free the Market," Reback quickly sketches the activist period of antitrust law from the 1911 break-up of Standard Oil to the 1984 break up of AT&T.

"The rules were populist, they were set up to aid small businesses," he said.

Since the 1980s, however, he says antitrust policy has taken the hands-off, free market approach identified with Ronald Reagan.

Reback says former federal judge Robert Bork laid the intellectual groundwork for weaker antitrust enforcement. Bork is best remembered because his 1987 appointment to the Supreme Court was rejected in a controversy involving his views on abortion.

Bork's 1978 book, "The Antitrust Paradox," said big companies could be efficient in ways that benefited consumers and that market forces protected competition better than government regulators.

"For 20 years starting in the late 1970s, the Supreme Court took one chapter after another of Bork's book and made it into law," said Jonathan Baker, a law professor and antitrust expert at American University.

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