"Never Seen Anything Like It:" The Biggest Month in Antitrust in 50 Years

antitrust, competition policy, interoperability mandates, better privacy regulation and a popular movement towards a more decentralized political economy and a less captured bureaucracy in Brussels and Washington

In recent years a new anti-monopoly movement has emerged, partly inspired by the Progressives, with new ideas for the old desire to make all citizens capable of participating in our political and economic life. Its most famous advocate is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who often echoes Brandeis, and who told the story of Frances Perkins one night in a c

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But this Google trial? By far the most important moment was when Judge Mehta denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial for fear that information Google wishes wouldn’t be disclosed become public. Indeed, Google lawyers have explicitly argued that the judge should avoid allowing documents to become public... See more

The Four — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — are an invasive species that, over the last decade, have compromised the immunities of the retail and media sectors. Spend has rushed toward digital, where apex predators take 1 of 3 e-commerce dollars (Amazon) and 2 of 3 digital marketing dollars (Google/Facebook). Covid-19 is just finishing the job... See more

The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”