There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting without restraint on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.

In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.