MY UT COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE ON TRUMP AND ANTITRUST:

Donald Trump railed against the proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner on the campaign trail.

With corporate consolidation growing and increasing concerns from some economists over a lack of competition and innovation due to the domination of business behemoths, might a new Trump administration be pushed by his populist followers to take a harder line on mega-mergers?

“We’re at the beginning of something significant that could happen with Trump in terms of this populism,” said Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who worked in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. “You might have antitrust enforcement like under Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican appealing to a populist base.”

Stucke is author, with Oxford’s Ariel Ezrachi, of Big Data and Competition Policy. Given Trump’s interest in regulating Internet behemoths like Google, I expect he’ll have a lot to do in coming years.