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14 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
To Republicans whining about the Hunter Biden censorship, you had four years to bring antitrust cases against Facebook and you didn't. Your FTC fought bitterly against sanctioning FB. Democrat @davidcicilline wrote a report on FB's monopoly, @Jim_Jordan opposed it.
I *loathe* the way Democrats gave Obama a pass on all of his failures, which included everything from a foreclosure wave to amnesty for white collar criminals to opioids to failures on antitrust and banking regs.

Trump has done the same thing. Lotta talk, little action.
We brought this up last March. Trump's antitrust chief Makan Delrahim was *helping* big tech. nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opi…
I will also note that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett will probably make it much harder to bring antitrust cases against tech platforms. Clarence Thomas's comment on Section 230 is heartening, but we need a lot more than that to address big tech power. mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-trumps-…

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More from @matthewstoller

Matt Stoller Profile picture
16 Oct
The author of this piece @Claudia_Sahm has it wrong. The answer is to give up on the Fed and to actually turn to politics. Congress needs to address our political problems, and handing it over to the Fed to take care of Wall Street was the wrong move. nytimes.com/2020/10/16/opi…
What I mean here is that the Fed needs to *let the stock market crash* and refuse to engage in fiscal policy. And Congress needs to replace the FOMC with a Congressional committee. That's what pushing Congress means, not Jay Powell murmuring at hearings.
I'm well aware that @Claudia_Sahm has been saying Congress needs to act. My point is, that doesn't matter, the problem is institutional. Congress is the only body that can address our problems, and the Fed is putting Congress to sleep by taking care of the stock markets.
Read 4 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
11 Oct
I've spent a few months reading and learning about English history. My conclusion is that it is perhaps necessary that the 1619 Project overstate its claims, and hopefully there is a great synthesis coming.
It's just too easy to write history from the vantage point of the winners, because winners tend to document their point of view incessantly. Also, the winners often destroy whatever the losers wrote down. If the 1619 project overstates their claims, well, maybe that's ok.
The synthesis I want is one combining the narratives of Oliver Cromwell adherents with slavery.

Bacon's Rebellion is a good place to start. That was key to forming racial hierarchies, but it was also a burning ember from the English Civil War.
Read 4 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
9 Oct
A new digital regulatory agency is a TERRIBLE idea for many different reasons. First, there are no boundaries. Everything is digital these days. Second, the FTC and DOJ didn't lack jurisdiction, they just didn't act. Why would a new digital agency not repeat that?
Dodd-Frank was a failure, but liberals bought into it because we got a regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB was mostly useless, then Trump shut the CFPB down with a shrug.
The way to address structural problems on Wall Street is to *break up the big banks,* not by regulating them. The same thing is true with big tech. The solution for things that are too big is to make them smaller.
Read 4 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
6 Oct
The threats Facebook and Google made to Australia after that country attempted to regulate them come up in the Cicilline Report on big tech. Apparently @davidcicilline is unhappy when big tech monopolies threaten sovereign nations.
“It would be commercial suicide to be in Amazon’s crosshairs . . . If Amazon saw us criticizing, I have no doubt they would remove our access and destroy our business.”

- Anonymous partner of Amazon to the Antitrust Subcommittee
An attorney representing app developers said they “fear retaliation by Apple” and are “worried that their private communications are being monitored, so they won’t speak out against abusive and discriminatory behavior.”

Jfc
Read 38 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
6 Oct
1. I'm reading Republican @RepKenBuck's leaked views on the big tech antitrust hearing, and it's quite a remarkable document. First, the Chicago School has lost the argument. Buck endorses the the fact there's a monopoly crisis.

"Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have used...
2. "... their monopoly power to act as gatekeepers to the marketplace, undermine potential competition, and pick winners and losers, all while simultaneously cozying up to unfriendly nations like China in order to further expand their global footprint."
3. "Big Tech's titans, with a combined market cap nearing $5 trillion, have tipped the technology marketplace towards monopoly. These tech titans have used their dominant positions to hike fees, misappropriate third-party data, steal IP..."

It goes on. This is a Republican!
Read 8 tweets
Matt Stoller Profile picture
5 Oct
People on both sides of the aisle think my plan to make Trump the King of Florida is dumb, juvenile, unconstitutional, and totally impractical.

If both sides dislike it I must be doing something right!
A friend working for a Florida legislator once took a phone call from a constituent angry about Obamacare. She tried to explain that he should talk to his member of Congress, that this was the Florida legislature. He screamed at her and insisted there was no such thing.
In Goliath I found that there was a massive speculative land bubble in the Florida town of Nettie in 1925, which collapsed when investors realized that the town didn't exist. Seriously make Trump the King of Florida.
Read 5 tweets

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