The 2023 Merger Guidelines and the Arc of Antitrust History
评估2023年联邦反垄断机构发布的合并指南，认为其打破了从结构导向转向福利导向的长期趋势，但通过模糊处理在福利主义与非福利主义政策间取得平衡，牺牲了清晰度并抑制了有益交易。
In 2023, the federal antitrust agencies rewrote the nation's flagship merger policy document, as part of a broader “Neo-Brandeisian” effort to bring about a deep reform of the antitrust system. The result—the 2023 Merger Guidelines—has been highly controversial: celebrated by some as a revolutionary advance, and criticized by others as a step back toward a benighted past. This article evaluates the 2023 guidance against the arc of antitrust's modern history. It argues that the new guidance breaks a long trend of migration from structure toward welfare as the primary orientation of merger enforcement, but that it does so cautiously, by achieving a fraught ambiguity between welfarist and nonwelfarist policies. In inviting both revolutionary and evolutionary readings, the agencies have sacrificed clarity and discouraged beneficial deals, but they have also deferred—at least for now—a sharp conflict between those who would preserve antitrust's governing paradigm and those who would remake it.