Antitrust Through Her Eyes: Women Antitrust Experts on the Next Era of Competition Policy
By Bisma Shoaib*
Antitrust discourse has historically been dominated by a narrow set of voices. As antitrust enforcement evolves to address complex new challenges, the perspectives of women in the field remain an underutilized asset. Their experiences and expertise provide vital insight on how competition policy can better promote fairness, inclusivity, and respond to technological disruption. This article draws on conversations with leading female scholars and practitioners to outline three key priorities for how antitrust can better serve the public interest and protect competition over the next five years.
Restoring Trust Through Impartial and Timely Enforcement
The legitimacy of antitrust enforcement rests on its ability to act swiftly and impartially, free from political or corporate favoritism. Eleanor Fox, a leading expert in international competition policy and professor of trade regulation emerita at New York University School of Law, underscores the urgency of this principle: “End the politicization that has crept into antitrust. We should be able to regain confidence that there is not selective enforcement based on who are friends and who are enemies; who are nationals and who are not.” Political interference in antitrust enforcement undermines both public trust and the rule of law. Thus, preserving the integrity of antitrust requires a return to principled, impartial enforcement that is grounded in evidence, not political allegiance.
Equally important as impartiality is efficiency. Delays in addressing anticompetitive conduct and merger activity allow dominant firms to solidify their power, undermining both the law’s deterrent effect and public confidence in its ability to deliver results. Catherine Simonsen, partner and co-founder of Simonsen Sussman LLP, emphasized the following:
“private plaintiffs and, increasingly, public enforcers like states are overly-focused on monetary relief, which bogs cases down in years of class certification and expert-related disputes. By the time the plaintiff secures a favorable judgment, it has won the battle but lost the war — the defendant has been able to reap the gains of its anticompetitive conduct and entrench its dominance for years, and any injunctive relief is far too little and too late. We must be more aggressive and proactive as private and public enforcers if our antitrust laws are to have a greater role than simply increasing the cost of doing business for dominant firms and providing attorneys’ fees for plaintiffs’ counsel.”
Addressing Structural Inequality by Centering Underserved Communities
By focusing enforcement on sectors that disproportionately affect working- and middle-class communities, and by challenging concentrated power that reinforces economic exclusion, antitrust policy can help level the playing field. Professor Fox emphasizes that antitrust policy must “focus on areas critical to middle-class and poorer populations, including food and agriculture, communications, and digital markets.”
This need becomes even more pressing as artificial intelligence reshapes the economic landscape. AI is no longer confined to the tech sector. It is embedded across every major industry, from healthcare and agriculture to communications and finance. Its foundational infrastructure — training data, compute power, and large language models — is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant firms. This level of control threatens to entrench incumbents, distort market access, and exacerbate structural inequities across all facets of society.
Danica Noble, attorney in the North-
west Region of the Federal Trade Commission and a seasoned antitrust litigator, explained:
“AI is a borderless and transformative technology whose inputs, impacts, and innovations transcend corporate boundaries and national jurisdictions. With experts forecasting the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence — capable of human-level reasoning — within this timeframe, it’s imperative to prevent monopolistic dominance and ensure equal opportunity through open, fair competition. Prioritizing competitive markets is essential to efficiency, innovation, and unlocking AI’s full potential for societal benefit while guarding against the risks of monopolistic control.”
In other words, protecting the AI ecosystem is essential not only for efficiency and innovation, but also to ensure that the benefits of this transformative technology reach communities long marginalized by entrenched power structures.
Addressing the potential global concentration of AI power also demands international cooperation, as fragmented enforcement allows dominant firms to exploit regulatory gaps and deepen inequality. Professor Fox highlights the need for international collaboration, warning that without it, “the powerful global firms continue to gain from the fragmentation and there is no coordinated pushback.” By pooling knowledge across jurisdictions, competition authorities can move beyond reactive measures toward forward-looking strategies that ensure innovation benefits all consumers — not just entrenched incumbents.
Expanding Consumer Welfare to Include Data Privacy
The extensive legislative history of antitrust laws and the statutory language do not endorse a narrow consumer welfare standard focused solely on price and output. What it makes clear is Congress’ goal to prevent conduct that suppresses competition and harms consumers or vulnerable suppliers, like the labor force. Yet, the consumer welfare standard, introduced into antitrust by Robert Bork, has shaped enforcement for decades. Courts have historically applied the consumer welfare lens to treat harms that are difficult to quantify as either speculative or beyond the scope of antitrust concern, and have focused heavily on price and output. This approach has left out non-price dimensions of competition that matter deeply to consumers, including data privacy. It has permitted dominant firms to undermine privacy protections under the guise of economic efficiency. But for consumers, privacy is not a marginal issue. It is a core component of autonomy, trust, and digital well-being.
To know the price of everything and the value of nothing is not wisdom; it’s policy failure. The exclusion of privacy from antitrust analysis reflects not only a reliance on outdated analytical tools but also a deeper misjudgment: the tendency to prioritize what is easy to measure over what truly matters to consumers. In an increasingly data-driven economy, that tradeoff is no longer tenable. Reimagining the consumer welfare standard to explicitly include privacy would align antitrust enforcement with the lived realities of consumers and the true dynamics of competition in digital markets.
The Path Forward
In conclusion, antitrust enforcement stands at a pivotal moment. Across sectors — from healthcare and agriculture to telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and social media — the public is demanding action to rein in concentrated power and restore fairness to the marketplace. Communities are feeling the effects of monopolistic behavior in rising prices, shrinking choices, weakened privacy, and the erosion of innovation. Effective antitrust policy is a vital tool for advancing equity and preserving individuals’ economic agency.
*Disclaimer: The views in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Commission, any individual Commissioner, or any other component of the agency. Furthermore, the views expressed by individuals quoted in this article are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their respective organizations, agencies, or employers.
Bisma Shoaib is an antitrust attorney in the Northwest Region of the Federal Trade Commission. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Antitrust, Consumer Protection, and Unfair Business Practices Section of the Washington State Bar Association. She is also a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe and a Certified Information Privacy Manager.
