The precise moment of doctrinal rupture arrived at 1:00 PM on July 1, 2021. In an open commission meeting, the Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 to rescind the 2015 "Statement of Enforcement Principles." This was not merely administrative housekeeping. It was a calculated detonation of the Consumer Welfare Standard that had governed antitrust enforcement for four decades. Under the prior 2015 guidance, the Agency restricted its own Section 5 authority to conduct that violated the Sherman Act. The rescission decoupled the FTC from those judicial constraints. It signaled that the Commission would no longer require proof of higher consumer prices to challenge monopolistic conduct. The target was no longer just price inflation. The target was the structure of power itself.

Chair Lina Khan utilized this statutory freedom to resurrect the moribund "refusal to deal" doctrine. The Supreme Court had effectively buried this theory in the 2004 Verizon v. Trinko decision. Trinko held that even monopolists have no general duty to collaborate with rivals. The Roberts Court viewed forced sharing as a dampener on innovation. Khan and her team rejected this premise. They argued that digital gatekeepers do not simply refuse to deal. They condition access on exploitative terms that suffocate competition in its incipiency. The Agency pivoted from "duty to deal" to "discriminatory access." This semantic shift allowed enforcers to bypass the strict evidentiary requirements of Aspen Skiing. The strategy was to attack the terms of trade rather than the refusal to trade.