In this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection, Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The real policy for which Obama will be known is not Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis and helping Americans and the rest of the world understand that liberal democratic rhetoric was really an ornamental cover for a system of concentrated financial and political power.
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In the first part of a three-part series, Matt Stoller explains why antimonopoly politics is experiencing a resurgence.
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The Big Three index fund managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors—hold a significant proportion of the stock of US public companies, and they continue to grow steadily. There is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will come to be dominated by the future “Giant Three,” write Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst.
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A peculiar feature of WhatsApp groups has made the spread of misinformation much easier. We need better design guidelines for platforms like WhatsApp, ones that can curb disinformation without infringing on user privacy.
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If we want to solve the disinformation crisis, we need to fix the perverse incentives created by the online advertising market through structural and regulatory solutions.
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Waiting for further proof of causal mechanisms before addressing the anticompetitive harm caused by horizontal shareholding is unjustified, just as it was when people argued we should wait for evidence of causal mechanisms before acting on empirical evidence that smoking causes cancer.
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Delivering UChicago’s 532nd Convocation address, Luigi Zingales advised young graduates to embrace their power as consumers, workers, and citizens and fight corporate monopolies.
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Simply adding competition in the tech sector won’t solve problems like privacy abuses or discrimination. Competition is needed, but regulation is a necessary element of any tech solution.
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Weak antitrust enforcement set the stage for Facebook and Google to extract the fruits of publishers’ labor. We won’t be able to save journalism and solve our disinformation problem unless we weaken monopolies’ power.
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The asset management industry has become increasingly concentrated in recent decades. Regulators are concerned about the systemic risks this may pose. Using data from the US, this column suggests that the increased concentration has led to more volatile prices of stocks held by large institutional investors. This poses challenges for regulators trying to weigh price efficiency and economies of scale.
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The notion that Facebook, Google, and Twitter should be assigned fiduciary duties toward their end users has gained broad support in recent years. However, this proposed framework invites policy misfires since it fails to grapple with the structural dimensions of tech platforms’ power.
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A new report by the journalist network Investigate Europe claims representatives of Facebook and Google pressured members of an EU working group on fake news to drop proposals that would have called for an examination of the role played by tech platforms’ business models and market power in the spread of disinformation online.
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