40 years ago, the Reagan administration decided that monopolies were good, actually.
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Rather than preventing the kinds of mega-mergers that increased corporate power (over workers, regulators, customers and competitors), Reagan decreed that monopolies were "efficient" and should be left alone.
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40 years later, every one of our industries has consolidated and consolidated and consolidated, dwindling to a handful of companies that dominate sectors from tech to law to pro wrestling to beer.
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These companies now rule the roost, to the great detriment of the customers who patronize them, and the workers who produce their products and services.
Media was the canary in monopoly's coalmine. The media baron is an archetypal Ur-monopolist, along with the coal baron, the oil baron, the railroad baron.
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Media companies understand that eliminating competition and owning the whole supply chain lets them shape the narrative, underpay creators, charge audiences more, and bring politicians to heel.
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Media consolidation has only accelerated since Reagan's time, but the 2010s were a bonanza for monopoly formation. Both Obama and Trump presided over five "megamergers" that resulted in companies on a scale never seen, in America or the world.
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The @WGAWest's "Broken Promises" report analyzes these five megamergers and the promises that the execs who presided over them made about the preservation of competition, choice and fair business practices.
wga.org/the-guild/advo…
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wga.org/the-guild/advo…
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The five mergers are: Comcast and NBCUniversal; AT&T and DirecTV; AT&T and Time Warner; Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House; and Disney and Fox.
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The case-studies are more like postmortems, as the researchers find - again and again - that the mergers resulted in worse working conditions, worse services, and higher prices.
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For example: Comcast-Universal downranked rival news channels and reduced speeds and raised prices on broadband. AT&T-Directv raised prices and offered bundles no one wanted. AT&T-Time Warner raised prices and laid off workers and nuked its competitors channels.
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Charter-Bright House raised prices and broke its promises to expand broadband. Disney-Fox pulled its films from rep theaters, killed Fox's competing animation department and pulled Disney content from rivals like Netflix, and then embarked on waves of layoffs.
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As the Guild points out, post-Reagan antitrust only has one bright line for enforcement: monopolies must not raise prices or lower quality. Yet all of these monopolists raised prices, lowered quality, or both.
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Reaganite antitrust is a failure even by its own lights: the "efficient" monopoly that benefits the public is nowhere to be seen.
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The Guild calls for a return to the pre-Reagan antitrust standard, with limits on vertical and horizontal mergers, lower barriers for antitrust action and merger reviews (including retrospective reviews).
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They also call for merger review to explicitly consider the impact on workers, a general prohibition on abusive dominance, and a beefed up FTC and DoJ antitrust budget.
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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/req…
pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/req…
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