economic sociology. perspectives and conversations Volume 25 · Number 2 · March 2024 20 One explanation of this emerging phenomenon is states’ reduced capacity to prevent concentration and tackle abusive conduct on the part of major cor- porations. Antitrust law (and policies), pushed by in- ternational organizations as a mainstay of government efforts to tackle these problems, have had very limited success in practice. According to analysts, the reason for that, particularly in the United States and Europe, is that in both academia and the political arena there seems to have been a departure from the ideals of eco- nomic democracy or competitive markets that origi- nally were the cornerstone of antitrust law (see Klobu- char 2021, Stoller 2019, and Wu 2018, among others). Others point to the currently dominant ideology which tolerates business concentration (Davies 2014; Wigger 2008; Miola 2014; 2016). Furthermore, certain recent economic developments, in particular Big Tech, are largely beyond the reach of the current regulatory frameworks (e.g., Kira and Coutinho 2021). In this paper we put forward an additional ex- planation for the increasing concentration of econom- ic power, 2 namely that states find themselves unable to control economic power largely because of the emer- gence, in recent decades, of a “competition expertise” on how to regulate markets. is comprises the epis- temic community of actors in the fields of competition law and economics, and the body of actors, knowl- edge, discourses, and practices that underlie and guide intervention in the economy (Eyal and Buchholz 2010). e key point for us is that, somewhat paradox- ically, this expertise, whose raison d´être is ostensibly the state’s ability to control economic power, in fact focuses primarily on controlling state power. From this perspective, together with other hypotheses raised in the literature, we argue that the crisis of concentra- tion of economic power has not been caused by insti- tutional and governmental failure. It is rather the con- sequence of the success of a regulatory framework that is implemented with the overall aim of controlling state power. 3 In identifying and analyzing this expertise for the purposes of this paper, we rely on sociological, ethnographic, and historical research from the past decade. We draw on empirical material that we gath- ered during the course of earlier studies on Brazilian competition policy and the antitrust authority (Miola 2014; 2016; Onto 2009; 2014; 2019a; 2019b). e em- pirical basis for the present study includes: interviews; participant observation; ethnographic analysis; his- torical and historiographic narratives; official govern- ment documentation and internal organizational doc- uments of the Brazilian antitrust authority CADE (Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica); re- ports and documents of international agencies; legis- lation and rules on competition; studies on legal and Antitrust between success and failure A sociological and ethnographic reappraisal of Brazilian competition policy Iagê Miola and Gustavo Onto Introduction 1 If we were to go back in time and compare the reality of the mid-1990s to the present time, I have no hesitation in affirming that, in the last quarter of a century, antitrust analysis has become one of the areas of knowledge which, from the perspective of Law and of Economics, has evolved the most in Brazil. This success is shared between the public and private sectors, by academia and the third sector. (Alexandre Barreto, President of the Brazilian Antitrust Authority – CADE, November 2, 2020) M arket concentration, alongside financialization and the climate crisis, is increasingly per- ceived as a major problem in contemporary capitalism. e fact that significant economic sectors are in the hands of a small number of powerful corpo- rations – a phenomenon that is epitomized by Big Tech domination of the “digital economy” – is causing wide- spread concern. Excessively concentrated markets can be dysfunctional for the competitive logic that under- lies them, as well as for consumers and for small and medium-sized companies, whose very survival is threatened. at in turn aggravates existing social and economic inequalities and may even undermine estab- lished democratic structures, for example through the conversion of economic power into political power.