The Corner Newsletter: Antimonopoly Under Trump, The Tech-Industrial Complex & Three Ideas to Curb Market Power ( January 17th, 2025)
Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss Biden’s foreboding about a tech-industrial complex and ask whether President Trump will use competition law to break corporate power, or concentrate power in his own hands.
Biden Warns of Oligarchy, But Undersells the Full Extent of the Threat
This week in his farewell address, President Biden warned bluntly of a dire threat to American democracy, in the form of an “oligarchy… of extreme wealth, power and influence” that endangers “our basic rights and freedoms.”
Biden intentionally echoed President Eisenhower’s famous farewell in 1961, in which the former general warned of a “military-industrial complex” that posed a “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Biden pointed his own finger at the rise of a “tech-industrial complex.”
It is tempting to view Biden’s speech through eyes jaundiced by the administration’s own failures. Why didn’t Biden or Harris say this during the campaign, choosing instead to cozy up to tech billionaires? Why did President Biden only hours before the speech sign an executive order that will concentrate even more power over cloud computing and AI in the hands of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon?
But the fact that Biden spoke these words truly matters. It is vital to recognize that the threats to American democracy are greater today than any time since the Civil War. By effectively owning up to his failure to fully address that threat in his four years in power, Biden helps us understand the next stage of the fight.
Yet if we are now to complete this effort, it’s vital to recognize how Biden’s speech, as powerful as it was, still undersold the threat we face.
For one, Biden did not focus sufficiently on the growing willingness of oligarchs to use their control over key communications platforms to directly suppress free speech and interfere in democratic debate.
Second, he did not focus on how these same people and corporations are attacking democracy in the traditional democratic allies of the American people, including the UK, Germany, and Brazil.
Third, Biden’s concept of a Tech-Industrial complex fails to effectively highlight the specific danger posed by the merger of state and private power, as did Eisenhower’s warning about the blending of the power of the military and big industry.
Fourth, Biden in his speech continued to promote the idea that the communications monopolists should fact-check the information they carry on their platforms, rather than simply stop amplifying and censoring specific individuals in ways that strip all users of real control over what they read and hear.
The good news is that the recent actions of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others have demonstrated to democrats around the world — from Brussels to the heart of MAGA — the exact nature of the threat. And further, that as the recent efforts by Ohio, Florida, and Texas to apply traditional non-discrimination rules to the communications platforms makes clear, people are fast relearning the historical models we need to resurrect today.
At Open Markets, we have been at forefront of the fight to break the manipulation machines of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and X for more than a decade. We look forward to finishing this effort in the days to come, in ways that make today’s communications platforms safe for all people, whether conservative, liberal, or whatever else they may choose to be.
Antimonopoly Under Trump 2.0 – Rule of Law or Rule of Trump?
Karina Montoya
Over the course of four short years, the Biden-Harris administration revolutionized how the U.S. regulates corporate power and behavior, in ways that helped to make the U.S. economy more fair, open, inclusive, and sustainable. They did so mainly by restoring America’s strong antimonopoly philosophy to competition policy and hiring the most aggressive antitrust enforcers the nation has seen in decades.
As President Trump takes office early next week, there is some reason to believe his team may embrace a similar approach. This confidence increased after Trump nominated Gail Slater to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, Andrew Ferguson to chair the Federal Trade Commission, and nominated Mark Meador for the FTC’s open seat. All three are viewed as moderately to strongly sympathetic to the antitrust enforcement philosophy of Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan.
This feeling was reinforced earlier this week during the Senate hearing on Trump’s nomination of Pamela Bondi to head the U.S. Department of Justice. In response to a question by Senator Amy Klobuchar as to whether she would continue ongoing antitrust cases against Apple and RealPage for example, Bondi responded, “I'm committed to that type of case and protecting consumers."
It would be prudent, however, to be realistic about the prospects for strong antimonopoly action under Trump. No matter how well intentioned, enforcers working for Trump may find themselves with much less freedom than their peers in the Biden administration. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the institutional and philosophical gains of the last four years will be reversed—at least at the federal level—either by the White House, Republicans in Congress, or both.
A far better indicator of future policy may be the statements of Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, signaling he will use the agency to boost Elon Musk’s interests (whose business deals Carr has publicly praised) and to target Trump critics in broadcast television and elsewhere. Another potential indicator that Trump will take a radically different approach is his acknowledgement, in a press conference last week, that Mark Zuckerberg’s recent changes to Facebook’s content moderation policies are a direct result of Trump’s threat last August to imprison Zuckerberg “for life,” unless he did “the right thing.”
Even absent such a worst-case scenario, and the Trump DOJ and FTC do carry on with aggressive action against Big Tech, that does not mean they will follow Khan and Kanter’s strong enforcement against the rest of corporate America. Indeed, dealmakers across the nation expect a surge in mergers and acquisitions activity in media, retail, energy, defense, food and beverage, and childcare—the latter led largely by private equity.
The good news is that the Biden-Harris antimonopoly revolution has opened a door that will be all but impossible to completely shut. Aggressive antitrust actions by the Biden administration have reached all sectors of the economy, and they have reminded the American people of the government’s key role in protecting them as citizens, workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers from politically and economically dangerous concentrations of power.
Similarly, Kanter and Khan’s aggressive enforcement actions—and dramatic rewriting of the enforcement philosophy contained in the government’s Merger Guidelines—forced judges across the federal and state governments to study up on this vast suite of pro-democracy laws, often for the first time in their lifetimes.
The most immediate reason for hope is that the many lawsuits filed by Khan and Kanter—often in tandem with U.S. state attorneys general—are now working their way through courts and will be hard to stop, even if the White House directly tries to interfere. The Google Search case, for example, has many states as co-plaintiffs, each of which must sign off on any settlement, independent of the DOJ. Similarly, in the DOJ’s lawsuit charging Google with a monopoly over ad-tech, foreign governments ranging from the European Commission to the UK to Canada have taken steps to piggyback on the U.S. actions.
Other lawsuits likely to move forward regardless of Trump policy include the price-fixing case against RealPage, led by both the DOJ and eight other states (recently revamped by the DOJ to include landlords as defendants); the crackdown against Amazon’s online retail monopoly spearheaded by the District of Columbia and California state attorneys general and joined later by the FTC; and the DOJ cases against Apple and LiveNation-Ticketmaster, which also have several states as co-plaintiffs.
All of which means that in the year ahead, competition policy will remain very much a major focus of both debate and action.
Three New Ideas to Put Working People First by Breaking Corporate Power
Open Markets Institute staff published three articles in this month’s Washington Monthly examining three industries with a big influence on the cost and fairness of American life — and offered solutions to make them better. In “Medicare Prices for All,” OMI policy director Philip Longman presents a simple plan to address the huge healthcare costs passed on to workers: tie employer health care plans to Medicare reimbursement rates. In “Corporate-Proof the Care Economy,” industrial policy program manager Audrey Stienon warns the US care economy is at risk of being captured by big corporations and private equity. Stienon details how government investments in care, whether by states or the federal government, can be structured to limit corporate control. In “Make Transportation Fair Again,” Longman shows how deregulation of airlines, freight rail, and trucking created harms from worse service to price discrimination to a hollowing out of industrial America and huge increases in carbon emissions. He argues that by restoring regulation’s traditional focus on non-discriminatory service, Americans can build a cleaner, more efficient, more equitable economy.
Open Markets Proposes Set of Reforms to Transform the Airline Industry
Open Markets submitted a comprehensive comment to the Department of Justice and Department of Transportation proposing reforms to address the ongoing decline in the airline industry and air travel experience. Written by policy analyst Arnav Rao, the comment describes how deregulation and weak antitrust enforcement over the last few decades harmed passengers, workers, and regional air service. The proposed reforms include capping the percentage of flights a single airline can control at major hubs; amending Federal Aviation Administration rules to ensure fair access to airport infrastructure, such as takeoff slots and gates; preventing predatory pricing that stifles competition from smaller carriers; and requiring airlines to improve rebooking for canceled or delayed flights. Read the comment letter here.
📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
The Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief in Ryan v. FTC, marking its second appellate defense of the Federal Trade Commission's nationwide ban on non-compete clauses. The brief argues that Congress empowered the FTC to prohibit unfair methods of competition like non-compete agreements, which are inherently coercive, suppress wages, and limit worker mobility. The brief was covered in antitrust news service MLex.
Editor & Publisher published a feature highlighting the work Open Markets and Center for Journalism & Liberty do to defend journalism’s pivotal role in U.S. democracy, quoting CJL director Dr. Radsch as saying that CJL is “particularly focused on journalism to ensure and figure out what do sustainable business models for independent, privately funded advertising-funded journalism look like.”
Open Markets food program manager Claire Kelloway argues in an op-ed in The Hill that Robert K. Kennedy Jr., nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is a false prophet for a food and medical system that limits corporate power and promotes healthy alternatives. “So long as political leaders in both parties fail to meaningfully speak to the ways powerful corporations make us sicker, conspiracy-minded figures like Kennedy will be able to fill the void,” Kelloway writes.
Open Markets senior fellow Johnny Ryan writes in The Guardian that Big Tech companies are undermining democracy in Europe by using algorithms that amplify disinformation and extremism while prioritizing profit over public interest. Ryan calls on European regulators to enforce the General Data Protection Regulation, which he says would “switch Big Tech’s algorithms off at a stroke, restoring X and other platforms to their pre-2014 golden age, before the algorithm.”
Center for Journalism & Liberty director Dr. Courtney Radsch and Open Markets senior reporter Karina Montoya coauthored a piece in Concurrences Review, N°1-2025, examining the U.S. District Court's ruling in United States v. Google LLC and the potential consequences for Google's business operations. “As the landscape for integrating AI in search and other digital markets continues to evolve, policymakers ought to consider that fair and robust competition requires public policy intervention,” they wrote.
OMI editorial director Anita Jain published a review of the book Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age in Washington Monthly, in which she reflected on how caring for her aging father shined a light on significant gaps in America's elder care safety net, such as the lack of affordable and accessible in-home care services. “Golden Years is a clarion call not just to reform the fragile system that supports old age in America but also to augment it to cover the long-term care the country, including my family, so desperately needs,” Jain writes.
In Dissent Magazine, chief economist Brian Callci and senior legal analyst Sandeep Vaheesan debate how the YIMBY (short for "Yes In My Backyard") movement, which calls for zoning reforms, fails to address the nation’s housing affordability crisis, arguing instead for the federal government to take a more active role in providing housing. “In our view, the creation of rights such as rent controls and protections against at-will eviction and increasing public investment in and social provision of housing are key examples of public market governance, not wholesale challenges to the basic idea of a market in housing,” they argue.
Open Markets and the Center for Journalism and Liberty published an expert brief titled AI and Market Concentration, showing how AI continues to be captured by Big Tech giants. The brief, written by CJL director Dr. Courtney Radsch, Europe director Max von Thun, and EU tech policy fellow Michelle Nie, proposes strengthening merger control, enforcing antitrust laws, imposing ambitious remedies such as divestitures, regulating cloud computing as a public utility, and holding Big Tech platforms accountable to existing laws. Read the brief here.
In an interview with BBC News, Open Markets Europe director Max von Thun discussed Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, suggesting his criticism of the company’s switch to a for-profit model isn’t entirely genuine — especially since Musk himself pushed for that change when he was involved. Rather, von Thun explains that the lawsuit seems more about personal grievances and competition with OpenAI through his own AI venture called xAI.
Tech Policy Press published a critique by CJL’s Dr. Radsch of last month’s bipartisan House AI Task Force's report, in which she said, “The conclusion of the IP section is exactly wrong — there is an urgent need for Congress to clarify the IP laws with respect to inputs, as a group of senators acknowledged early this year … that using publisher content to train AI systems without permission or compensation is not fair use.”
CJL director Dr. Radsch authored the foreword for a landmark report released by the Forum on Information and Democracy, called “Information Ecosystems and Troubled Democracy: A Global Synthesis of the State of Knowledge on News Media, AI, and Data Governance.” The report explores disinformation effects through media, politics, and trust; artificial intelligence and information ecosystems; and data governance and democracy.
OMI policy counsel Tara Pincock offered her thoughts to Project Syndicate on what impact incoming President Donald Trump's policies will have on the economy. “Those who argue that deregulation and tax cuts, of the kind Trump is offering, will fuel economic growth are the same people who advocate ‘trickle-down economics’—a concept that cannot be thrown into the dustbin of history fast enough,” she opined.
Europe director Max von Thun contributed to Promarket’s roundup of European antitrust trends for 2024, noting in particular that “a growing number of partnerships between Big Tech firms and AI startups also poses a serious challenge to the EU’s ability to prevent harmful consolidation in digital markets.”
Open Markets issued a mixed response to the Department of Agriculture’s final rule to regulate poultry farming. Food program manager Claire Kelloway wrote that while the USDA stopped short of banning the deceptive tournament payment system, the finalized rule will “make chicken contracts much more fair.” She also criticized USDA for withdrawing a proposed rule that would have made it easier for individuals to seek justice against unfair treatment by meatpackers, saying, “We are disappointed that USDA was not able to finish this foundational rulemaking in time.”
The Open Markets Institute applauded the Department of Justice for expanding its lawsuit against RealPage to include landlords allegedly involved in price-fixing through algorithmic rent-setting. “The Justice Department’s action puts property owners across the country on notice that price-fixing is always illegal, whether it happens in smoke-filled rooms or online,” Callaci said. “Landlords will no longer be able to avoid competing with each other through shared software, which will bring rents down.”
AG Daily quoted Open Markets food program manager Claire Kelloway on a legal battle between Missouri poultry farmers and Tyson Foods. Saying that Tyson’s size and political power make it difficult to hold it accountable, Kelloway noted, “Hopefully, the reforms and rulemaking keep coming until these antitrust laws are being enforced as intended.” The story was reprinted in The Missouri Independent, Phelps County Focus and KFEQ-AM.
🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
The Department of Justice announced a lawsuit against sprawling private equity firm KKR, alleging that the half-trillion-dollar asset management group had failed to file a number of required disclosures during a series of acquisitions between 2021 and 2022. (Financial Times)
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced a probe into Google’s search monopoly, utilizing new powers which allow the regulatory body to apply additional conduct standards to corporations it designates as having “Strategic Market Status.” (Reuters)
The Department of Justice offered legal analysis in a lawsuit seeking to block OpenAI’s ability to convert to a public company, pointing to legal doctrines that support the claim that OpenAI and Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive practices. (Reuters)
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued banking giant Capital One for misleading customers into believing they were receiving high interest rates in high-yield savings accounts, when instead rates were artificially low at 0.30 percent last summer compared with Federal Reserve rates above 5 percent. Capital One customers suffered $2 billion in losses from the deception. (New York Times)
📈 VITAL STAT:
$24.7 Billion
The combined value of 16 deals for which private equity giant KKR & Co. allegedly withheld documents for merger review by government regulators. KKR is being sued by the DOJ for failure to comply with the merger disclosure requirements of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. (Bloomberg)
📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:
House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company — Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou goes deep into the making of Chinese tech giant Huawei, tracing its roots from a humble telecommunications company to an international hardware empire. In her account, Dou dives into the increasing alarm Huawei’s rise has sparked across the west and investigates the way regulators have sought to curb the corporation’s capacities and influence.