Much like in the first Gilded Age, antitrust enforcers today are hitting labor, not capital. This is thanks to Robert Bork’s radical and influential reinterpretation of antitrust law. In helping successfully rewrite antitrust, Bork left a legacy of corporate supremacy and individual powerlessness.
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Amazon’s price matching policies, which were meant to ensure its dominant position, diminished the ability of brands to control how their products are distributed and the prices at which these products are sold, writes Shaoul Sussman.
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Studies of the evolution of market power since 2000 have focused mostly on publicly traded US firms. This column introduces a new global study that incorporates private firms and decomposes the aggregate effect into intensive and extensive margins. It shows the increase in markups is broad-based across countries and sectors but is driven by a small number of firms.
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For decades, competition in America has been on the wane, leading to slower economic growth and a gaping chasm of inequality. Antitrust can help reverse the trend, but antitrust doctrines and enforcement actions once thought adequate are proving insufficient. Fixing the problem is urgent.
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In this third and final part of his three-part series on the resurgence of antimonopoly, Matt Stoller explains how the election of Donald Trump helped bring antimonopoly thinking back to the forefront of the political discourse.
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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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The federal antitrust agencies don’t appear to be serious about their recent Big Tech push. And given that the Supreme Court and federal judiciary are firmly in conservative hands, it doesn’t matter—antitrust enforcement won’t come back so soon.
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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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