New Yorkers already pay the nation’s fourth-highest cost of living, so any law that chips away at workers’ incomes or job creation deserves extra scrutiny. A new study, Assessment of the Economic Costs of Imposing Abuse of Dominance Standards in New York State, does exactly what its title suggests—and the numbers should give legislators pause. The study estimates what would happen if the Twenty-First Century Antitrust Act replaces the “rule of reason” with a far harsher “abuse-of-dominance” test. In plain English, the bill would let regulators sue whenever a successful firm’s conduct merely “tends” to exclude rivals, even if consumers benefit.
The economists modeled how rational firms react to higher legal risk. When expected litigation costs outweigh the expected profits from a good deal or innovative business idea, firms simply shelve the plan. That chill on pro-competitive conduct ripples through the entire economy. State gross domestic product would fall 1 percent in the very first year—about $24 billion wiped off New York’s economic ledger in 2026 alone.
Fewer paychecks, thinner paychecks
GDP figures can feel abstract, but lost pay isn’t. The study projects a 0.6 percent decline in full-time-equivalent employment—61,000 jobs gone in year one. Wage compensation would shrink 0.7 percent—or $7 billion in aggregate pay—in 2026. Spread across New York’s workforce, that translates to $692 less in the average worker’s annual paycheck. For an average New Yorker already stretching to cover rent, losing the equivalent of half a week’s pay is painfully concrete. To put this in context, Albany recently approved sending 8.2 million households a rebate of up to $400—less than they would be taking from the average worker each year under this bill.
Worse, the pain would compound over time: More and more job-creating deals and business ideas get shelved due to legal risk, and worker productivity–and therefore pay–rises less than it would have. Using updated 2025 Congressional Budget Office growth projections, the authors extend the horizon to 2035. By then, New York’s economy would be $318 billion smaller, with 615,000 fewer jobs and a $96 billion hole in statewide wage income—or an average of $9,283 in lost earnings for every working New Yorker. That equals nearly three months of mortgage payments on a median-priced New York home today.
Who loses? Pretty much everyone.
Large firms are politically convenient targets, but the study warns that spillovers would hurt smaller players too. Industries where New York leads—like finance, insurance, hospitals, wholesale trade and tech—rely on scale, bundling, and the ability to integrate acquisitions quickly. The bill would presume many of those practices illegal. The chilling effect means fewer supply-chain efficiencies and less venture-capital funding for start-ups whose most likely exit is acquisition by a larger platform. When big buyers retreat, seed valuations fall and founders hire more slowly, if at all.
The result is not a Robin-Hood transfer from “Big Tech” to mom-and-pop shops; it is a net contraction. Lost scale efficiencies raise transaction costs that ultimately flow to consumers in higher prices across the economy. Meanwhile, reduced wage growth erodes households’ ability to absorb those higher prices. That one-two punch is the opposite of affordability.
Comparing costs and benefits
Supporters argue the bill combats monopoly power, yet New York already has the Donnelly Act, federal antitrust statutes, and a robust plaintiff’s bar. Incremental enforcement value is therefore modest, while the downside risk—measured in billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs—is large and immediate. Economic policy is about trade-offs; here the trade-off looks lopsided.
Antitrust should remain a scalpel, not a sledgehammer
New York has weathered recessions, pandemics, and fiscal crises, but it has never intentionally legislated away nearly a percentage point of annual growth. As an economist, I regard growth not as an abstract metric but as the fuel that funds higher worker pay and pays the taxes that support public schools and subway repairs. Before Albany engineers the nation’s strictest abuse-of-dominance regime, it should reckon with a sobering reality: the people who will shoulder the cost are not CEOs in Midtown boardrooms—they are the millions of New Yorkers already balancing rent and groceries. Lawmakers should hit pause, study the evidence, and choose prosperity over self-destructive symbolism.
Trevor Wagener is the Chief Economist of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and the Director of the CCIA Research Center.
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