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The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) - Cory Doctorow
It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement account, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in America in suing Facebook.
Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:
https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-59
In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour"
Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":
https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf
The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:
Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.
And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.
More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement account, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses
By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1
Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.
That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in America in suing Facebook.
Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:
https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-59
In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour"
Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever/#oligarchism
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