Thread by @matthewstoller

1. My piece with @ShaoulSussman goes into the backstory on the big tech hearings. How this hearing goes, and whether Congress develops the confidence to break up and regulate these giants, will in many ways determine whether we remain a democracy.
politico.com/news/agenda/20…

2. The harms of these giants were hidden from the public because they offer free services to consumers. But low prices mask a deep threat to our society, starting with an invasive surveillance architecture that has concentrated ad revenue and threatens free expression itself.

3. Two thirds of American counties have no daily newspaper, largely because Google and Facebook have diverted revenue from the free press to themselves. In addition, these entities propagate misinformation, harm mental health and promote racial discrimination

4. Even an ad boycott by a host of corporations opposed to Facebook’s hate speech policies drew a response fit for a monopolist: “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough,” said Zuckerberg. That’s power. politico.com/news/agenda/20…

5. Amazon has built powers that exceed those of the government. In 2004, Jeff Bezos privately told Amazon executives that he wanted to “draw a moat” around the company's customers. There are 118M Prime subscribers domestically, versus 129M total households in America.

6. Amazon often decides intellectual property disputes among merchants because it is so big. As Harvard Law professor @rtushnet has noted, “Amazon, with its size, now substitutes for government in a lot of what it does.”

7. These platforms, whose market cap surpasses the GDP of many nations, function as the quasi-governmental gatekeepers of America’s commerce. Mark Zuckerberg once made this point explicitly: “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company."

8. This situation is deeply un-American. @ShaoulSussman and I have a hard time conveying just how strong the anti-monopoly tradition in the colonies and then the U.S. has been, for four hundred years.

9. The first anti-monopoly statute was passed in the colony of Massachusetts in 1641: “There shall be no monopolies granted or allowed amongst us." teachingamericanhistory.org/library/docume…

10. A monopoly set off the American Revolution, as Americans threw the tea trafficked by the tea monopolist, the East India Co., into Boston harbor. mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-boston-t…

11. In 1829, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, struck down an illegal monopoly involving a Boston bridge, noting colonists “came to this country with a hatred of monopolies, and they ordered, not that no monopoly should be granted, but that none should be allowed.”

12. Frederick Douglass in 1856 wrote "monopolies of land..." have "converted the civilized world into an abode of millionaires and beggars; which renders the enslavement of the peoples of the world possible, and shrouds the future of liberty with gloom."

jacobinmag.com/2020/02/freder…

13. WEB Dubois, in Black Reconstruction, wrote of the land monopolists who supported and extended slavery and then after the Civil War aligned with Northern monopolists to subvert Reconstruction. webdubois.org/wdb-BlackRecon…

14. John Hume, an Ohio abolitionist who lived into Teddy Roosevelt's era, described the slave power a one consolidated bloc whose control dwarfed the power of industrial trusts.

"Our mighty Steel Corporation would have been a baby beside it."

15. Henry George in the 1870s and 1880s continued this theme with his single tax theory on the land monopoly. Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century.

16. In the 20th century: "Monopoly, whether of wealth, power, business, or what not,” summarized the Ohio Supreme Court in condemning AT&T’s telephone monopoly of the 1920s, “has always been most odious and reprehensible to our American people and their democratic institutions.”

17. In the industrial age, Congress passed federal antitrust laws in 1890, 1913, 1936, and 1950. Rep. Emanuel Celler, who ran the Antitrust Committee investigated monopoly power in steel, ticketing, newsprint, aluminum and baseball.

So what happened? The 1970s.

18. In the 70s, American elites adopted a new philosophy of governance. Two movements, the law and economics school from the University of Chicago on the right, and the consumer rights movement on the left, argued legislative control of markets is corrupt. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…

19. Americans were no longer citizens but consumers, and monopolies, according to Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, could serve consumers well. Fear not corporate power, fear merely Big Government. And let the expert economists make decisions about markets, not the rabble.

20. By 1998, this philosophy was so inculcated in our governing elites that Larry Summers linked American global primacy not to ideals of freedom, but to our giant corporations, like Microsoft, Coca Cola, and Walmart. vice.com/en_us/article/…

21. Similarly, Senator Dianne Feinstein, in 2010, upon voting against a measure to break up large banks, said to a colleague, “This is still America, right?” (h/t @connaje) google.com/books/edition/…

22. Steeped in this confused anti-American ideology favorable to monopoly, the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations did not use merger laws, and Congress did not regulate data or online commerce, so Silicon Valley grew to gargantuan proportions.

23. In other words, Jeff Bezos, etc, aren’t powerful sovereign-like entities because they are brilliant, as their boosters would say, or dastardly, as their opponents might offer. They are governing us, because we the people have refused to do so through our public institutions.

24. @RepJayapal understands the stakes. “We need to move very quickly, as a Congress, to reassert our authority into regulation of these tech companies and [their] anticompetitive practices." washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

25. As @davidcicilline and the Antitrust Subcommittee demand answers from big tech CEOs, they are filling a gap that our last several generations of leaders have left. If they fill it well, they will reassert a tradition that is 400 years old, and yet, surprisingly modern.