Senate Judiciary committee passes big tech antitrust bill on nondiscrimination. 16-6.
Big tech probably spent tens of millions opposing this bill alone. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were calling Senators personally. A bipartisan thrashing is not the outcome they wanted.
As this bill moves, remember that it's just as possible for the bill to get stronger on the floor as weaker. Far more importantly than this bill, the Senate Judiciary just opened the floodgates. Now everyone knows there's an overwhelming majority to address big tech power.
Except for California Senator Dianne Feinstein, virtually every Senator, supportive or not, conceded we have a massive monopoly problem with big tech. This isn't the last legislative proposal that will pass the committee, not by a long shot. Congrats to @SenAmyKlobuchar.

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More from @matthewstoller

Jan 18
Lina Khan is talking about reviewing merger policy for the FTC and asking for public comments. Such public comments will be, in her words, "critical."
Khan saying that the current merger wave "threatens to concentrate markets further." See our report on the merger frenzy. economicliberties.us/our-work/merge…
Khan says that while the merger wave has "delivered benefits for investment banks," it has not delivered benefits for ordinary Americans.

Antitrust mic drop
Read 16 tweets
Jan 18
My initial thinking is that this is sort of an attempt to do to gaming what vertical integration did to Hollywood.
Some initial thoughts. The Microsoft-Activision acquisition is clear evidence of consolidation in gaming. It's not just that Microsoft already owns 30 studios, it's that Activision itself is a roll-up of 25+ gaming studios. A merger of mergers.
There are reasons to think Microsoft will run Activision better than its existing leadership, which is terrible. But the clear goal here is to build out its streaming service Game Pass, and more broadly to achieve market power in the ecosystem of gaming.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 18
This paper is incredibly dishonest. The main program was the Fed's bailout of the stock market, but somehow @davidautor de facto deny that the Federal Reserve bailout even existed. Just utterly shameful.
What a shocker that a bunch of Federal Reserve economists don't evaluate the Federal Reserve's massive bailout of billionaires.
The Paycheck Protection Program was quite successful at saving small businesses, and small businesses make a lot of products and services we need, and anchor communities. For some reason economists don't see any value in production or community.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 17
1. I know everything is supposed to be totally awful in politics, but allow me to interrupt constant doom and gloom with... good news. On the monopoly front, corporate power is, ever so slightly, ebbing. Here are eight examples from the last week. mattstoller.substack.com/p/hope-on-the-…
2. Government antitrust cases are progressing. The Federal Trade Commission won an important procedural victory against Facebook this week. marketplace.org/shows/marketpl…
3. Meanwhile, state attorneys general, whose antitrust case was dismissed last year, appealed the dismissal. Normally they would have given up, but increasing heat on Facebook gave confidence to state level enforcers.
Read 17 tweets
Jan 16
I was freaking out about COVID in Jan/Feb of 2020, before most people noticed. Back then Vox was saying it was the flu and Fauci was telling young people to go on cruise ships. Don’t act like the risk calculus of the public health bureaucracy is well-tuned to reality.
Back then among the left’s biggest concerns was whether people were patronizing Chinese restaurants. Our whole intellectual model for governance is embarrassing.
I wrote in Wired in late Feb of 2020 we would be experiencing shortages. Our risk calculus and governance models do not map to reality. wired.com/story/covid-19…
Read 5 tweets
Jan 16
So a different way to characterize what Google was doing to publishers is 'stealing.' Sorry to get all technical about it. wsj.com/articles/googl…
"Google pocketed the difference between what it told publishers and advertisers that an ad cost and used the pool of money to manipulate future auctions to expand its digital monopoly.”

Or, you know, stealing.
"The documents cite internal correspondence in which Google employees said some of these practices amounted to growing its business through “insider information."

So, then like, that's stealing.
Read 5 tweets

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