Thread by @doctorow

Publishing is dominated by just five giant players: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Harpercollins and Macmillan.

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Within that five-company oligarchy, one company stands out as a true monopolist: Penguin Random House, the megafirm created when Random House's owner, Bertelsmann, executed a merger-to-monopoly by buying Penguin in 2013.

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Now, Penguin is about to effect another monopolistic merger, by acquiring Simon & Schuster from Viacom, which bought the company in 1994. The acquisition was always a bad fit: it was driven by a desire to create a vertical monopoly.

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Viacom leadership thought they could use the relatively small publishing company to provide raw material for the larger, more profitable TV and film divisions (the same logic that drove Time-Warner's acquisition of DC Comics). It never really panned out.

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Within Viacom, S&S has always borne the brunt of corporate scheming, protected from the princelings of the sprawling corporate empire by erstwhile CEO Les Moonves's indulgence and favoritism.

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So when Moonves was drummed out of his job in the midst of a truly awful, disgusting #MeToo scandal, the writing was on the wall for S&S. Not even a string of successful anti-Trump tell-all books could save it.

vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/t…

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The $2.175b acquisition is contingent on regulatory approval.

It should not receive regulatory approval.

businesswire.com/news/home/2020…

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In a year in which the FTC, the Senate, the House, Republicans AND Democrats have all taken up antitrust, there is no better test of whether they're serious about monopoly that this idiotic merger.

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After all, we don't have to speculate about what Random House will do after it absorbs S&S. We have the historical record of what it did when it bought Penguin: shut down imprints, fired workers, subjected writers to worse deals, put the screws to booksellers.

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This didn't happen in the shrouded mists of ancient history: it is still happening RIGHT NOW. It's not a case of "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

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It's more: "When a firm called 'Monopolists, Inc' sends a legal team dressed as the Monopoly Guy to file regulatory documents printed on the back of Monopoly money, and challenges you to a friendly game of Monopoly before the meeting starts, assume they are monopolists."

eof/