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1. People often ask me why antitrust is suddenly a big thing again. What happened? Is it just the tech platforms? Trump? What happened? The answer is both simple and complex. We are in the midst of an intellectual revolution. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
2. Partly it's fear, fear not of government, but fear of *private* government. Government Google can make you homeless.
3. Today I'm going to discuss how far we've come. Things were very different just fifteen years ago. We believed we were consumers, not citizens, and for many of us, life was good. There was a belief Wall Street power and progressive social justice were compatible.
4. In 2000, after decades of deregulation, the economy was so good people were getting job offers from prison. "Employers will call and say, 'We need somebody right away -- if you have any ex-cons, clean them up and send them over." nytimes.com/2000/04/03/us/…
5. In 2001, Democrats told themselves a story about how wonderful a job they had done. This is the headline in The Onion. "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'" politics.theonion.com/bush-our-long-…
6. The smugness was bipartisan, and existed deep into the commercial/policy worlds. In 2005, Republican Fed governor Ben Bernanke, did an economist mic drop, popularizing the term “The Great Moderation” to describe the period from the early 1980s onward. federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/spee…
7. Thomas Friedman in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree and his 2005 book The World is Flat noted that countries with McDonald's don't go to war with each other. China would become democratic without conflict, because McDonald's and X-Boxes create liberal democracy.
8. Bill Clinton built a policy architecture friendly to monopoly, and particularly friendly to internet-based monopolies. With the May 1998 WTO electronic commerce declaration, ecommerce would be a special customs-free zone. clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/new/html/Tu…
9. In 1999, Democratic fixer Stuart Eizenstat penned a memo on putting together a Treasury task force to implement Bill Clinton's goal of developing a list of "critical policy changes necessary for Treasury to enhance the growth of e-commerce.”
10. Eizenstat sought to find ways to get agencies to identify all rules and laws that might "impose a barrier to electronic transactions or otherwise impede the conduct of e-commerce and to recommend how such laws or regulations may be revised."
A libertarian paradise as policy.
A libertarian paradise as policy.
11. Such policy changes, which came from ideas years before, have concentrated power in our world. Roll this forward twenty years and we see the massive monopolies this thinking has produced. But in many ways, it wasn't just the ideas, but the same people who hold this power.
12. After all, Eizenstat was running ecommerce policy out of Treasury, doing things like ID management, in partnership with the chief of staff for Larry Summers, a savvy young bureaucratic player he referred to in the memo as Sheryl. This was of course Sheryl Sandberg.
13. Tomorrow I'll start to tell the story of why this system collapsed, and the early anti-monopoly movements. But there are two important trends to understand. First, the rise of anti-monopolism is a global, not just an American, story. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
14. And two, the rise of anti-monopolism is not a right or left wing movement. It's fundamentally a business reformist movement. It's about seeing ourselves not as consumers, but as producers, farmers, engineers, workers, and fundamentally as citizens. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
15. Now that I'm done writing my book, I've started a daily newsletter focused on the history of monopoly, with the goal of restoring fair commerce, innovation and democracy. mattstoller.substack.com/welcome
16. My favorite founding fathers quote is John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson forty years after the Declaration of Independence.
"What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it."
"What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it."
