I've resigned my fellowship at Yale's Thurman Arnold Project. The director, Fiona Scott Morton, revealed that she’s a paid adviser to Amazon & Apple. I think that makes it hard to achieve the project’s goal of creating a space to grapple w/ the antitrust implications of Big Tech.
It’s also at odds with the legacy of Thurman Arnold, the anti-monopolist hired by FDR to rebuild the Antitrust Division at DOJ. Arnold took an aggressive approach to prosecuting monopolies, which he described as “a dictatorial power subject to no public responsibility” and…
…a “toll bridge over which everyone has to pass.” That sounds a lot like Amazon to me. We can only imagine that if Arnold were at DOJ today he would be marshalling the law to check the outsized power and abuses of the tech giants.
Picturing Arnold running the Antitrust Division today is an idea really worth meditating on. With an election coming up, a new president may in fact have a chance to hire someone with a similar zeal for policing our markets in the service of ordinary people and democracy.
