Question

Passage A
For decades, the "consumer welfare" standard has been the lodestar of antitrust law, introduced in the late 1970s by the Chicago School of economics to replace what was viewed as a chaotic enforcement regime. Under this standard, anticompetitive behavior is primarily identified through short-term price increases or artificial output restrictions. However, the unprecedented rise of digital platform monopolies has exposed the severe limitations of this traditional framework. Because dominant tech platforms frequently provide their consumer-facing services at a price of zero, they effortlessly evade scrutiny under standard price-centric analyses. Yet, these platforms inflict profound economic harms: they extract highly invasive amounts of personal data, create insurmountable switching costs that lock in users, and systematically acquire nascent competitors to preempt future threats. Furthermore, when a tech giant engages in predatory pricing—subsidizing below-cost services to bankrupt rivals—current jurisprudence struggles to respond. Courts typically require proof that the monopolist will subsequently raise consumer prices to recoup its losses. In multi-sided digital markets where platforms monetize user attention through targeted advertising rather than charging subscription fees, this recoupment requirement is functionally obsolete. To restore competitive vitality, regulators must abandon the narrowly conceived consumer welfare standard in favor of a structural approach that explicitly recognizes data extraction and innovation suppression as distinct harms, independent of immediate price effects.

Passage B
Critics of current antitrust enforcement frequently argue that the consumer welfare standard is fundamentally ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of zero-price digital markets. This prevailing perspective, however, relies on an overly reductive interpretation of the standard's capabilities. While it is undeniably true that the Chicago School revolution of the 1970s emphasized quantifiable price effects to introduce much-needed economic rigor into antitrust jurisprudence, the consumer welfare standard has never been exclusively confined to monetary price. Over the past several decades, federal courts and regulators have explicitly recognized that consumer welfare also encompasses non-price parameters such as product quality, consumer choice, and technological innovation. A digital platform that unilaterally degrades privacy protections or stifles technological advancement is actively harming its users, and such detrimental conduct is entirely actionable under the existing legal paradigm. The popular alternative—discarding the standard for a nebulous "structural" or "public interest" approach—threatens to return antitrust law to the unpredictable, highly politicized era that preceded the 1970s reforms. Without the objective anchoring principle of consumer welfare, regulators would be forced into the impossible task of balancing competing societal goals, such as shielding small competitors from legitimate competition versus maximizing economic efficiency, inevitably leading to arbitrary enforcement. Rather than discarding a historically tested framework, modern enforcers should utilize the standard's inherent flexibility to rigorously measure how aggressive data extraction negatively impacts the actual quality of digital services.

Based on the passages, which one of the following claims about the Chicago School is explicitly supported by both authors?