#Antitrust Laws and Competition Issues

[youthchronical]

Senate Confirms Gail Slater as Justice Dept.’s Antitrust Lead

The Senate on Tuesday approved Gail Slater, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department antitrust division, by a vote of 78-19. Ms. Slater, a veteran tech and media lawyer, has pledged to be skeptical of corporate power across the economy, and has been particularly critical of power in the tech industry. At her confirmation hearing, she expressed concern about the dominance of some…

[fans4wga]

CALL TO ACTION to support WGA/SAG-AFTRA: Submit a comment about the corporate monopoly crisis.

August 18, 2023: You can personalize the template message included in the above link, or simply just add your name & email. Seems like it's US only; please boost if you can't sign yourself.

From the WGA:

"More than 100 days into our strike, as we continue to fight for the sustainability of our profession, events in Washington, D.C. provide an opportunity for writers to shine a light on one of the root causes of the strike: media consolidation. For decades, the WGA has advocated for stronger antitrust oversight, bringing attention to the ways that mergers and vertical integration in our industry – from AT&T-Time Warner to Warner Bros.-Discovery to Amazon-MGM to Disney-Fox – have consolidated the power of our employers and harmed writers as well as the diversity of content. In numerous reports and policy filings – including a new report called The New Gatekeepers: How Disney, Amazon and Netflix Will Take Over Media, released yesterday – the WGA has documented the threat to our industry from past and future consolidation and called for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. Our current strike highlights the urgency of the issue; studios gained power through anti-competitive consolidation and vertical integration and then used that power to push down wages and impose more precarious working conditions for writers while profiting off of their work, and currently – together – refuse to bargain a fair contract for writers to mitigate those harms. Last month, the FTC and DOJ jointly released proposed revisions to their Merger Guidelines, a policy document designed to guide law enforcement around consolidation. These new Draft Guidelines are part of an effort by these agencies to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. Compared with prior versions of Merger Guidelines, they give significantly more weight to the ways that mergers can be harmful and, for the first time, explicitly direct agencies and courts to consider how mergers can hurt workers. The Draft Guidelines have been released for public comment, and the FTC and DOJ want to hear from people who have been affected by consolidation – people like you.”

The FTC and DOJ are accepting comments on their revisions of the Merger Guidelines until September 18.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Worker misclassification is a competition issue

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/#bedoya

The brains behind Trump's stolen Supreme Court have detailed plans: they didn't just scheme to pack the court with judges who weren't qualified for – or entitled to – a SCOTUS life-tenure, they also set up a series of cases for that radical court to hear.

Obviously, Dobbs was the big one, but it's only part of a whole procession of trumped-up cases designed to give the court a chance to overturn decades of settled law and create zones of impunity for America's oligarchs and the monopolies that provide them with wealth and power.

One of these cases is Jarkesy, a case designed to allow SCOTUS to euthanize every agency in the US government, stripping them of their powers to fight corporate crime:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/sec-v-jarkesy-the-threat-to-congressional-and-agency-authority/

The argument goes, "Congress had the power to spell out every possible problem an agency might deal with and to create a list of everything they were allowed to do about these problems. If they didn't, then the agency isn't allowed to act."

This is an Objectively Very Stupid argument, and it takes a heroic act of motivated reasoning to buy it. The whole point of expert agencies is that they're experts and that they might discover new problems in American life, and come up with productive ways of fixing them. If the only way for an agency to address a problem is to wait for Congress to notice it and pass a law about it, then we don't even need agencies – Congress can just be the regulator, as well as the lawmaker.

If there was any doubt that Congress created the agencies as flexible and adaptive hedges against new threats and problems, then the legislative history of the FTC Act should dispel it.

Congress created the FTC through the FTCA because the courts kept misinterpreting its existing antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act. Companies would engage in the most obvious acts of naked, catastrophic fuckery, and judges would say, "Welp, because Congress didn't specifically ban this conduct, I guess it's OK."

So Congress created the FTC with an Act that included a broad authority to investigate and punish "unfair methods of competition." They didn't spell these out – instead, they explicitly said (in Section 5) that it was the FTC's job to determine whether something was unfair, and to act on it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The job of the FTC is to investigate unfair conduct before it becomes such a problem that Congress takes action, and to head that conduct off so that it never rises to the level of needing Congressional intervention.

Now, it's true that since the Reagan years, the FTC has grown progressively less interested in using this power, but that's broadly true of all of America's corporate watchdogs. But as the public all over the world has grown ever more furious about corporate abuses and oligarchic wealth, governments everywhere have rediscovered their role as a public protector.

In America, the Biden administration altered the course of history with the appointment of new enforcers in the key anti-monopoly agencies: the FTC and the DOJ's antitrust division. But more importantly, the Biden admin created a detailed, technical plan to use every agency's powers to fight monopoly, in a "whole of government" approach:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Now, this can give rise to seeming redundancies. Take labor issues. The NLRB is a (potentially) powerful regulator that had been in a coma for decades, but has awoken and taken up labor rights with a fervor and cunning that is a delight to behold:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

At the same time, the FTC has also taken up labor rights, using its much broader powers to do things like ban noncompetes nationwide, unshackling workers from bosses who claim the right to veto who else they can work for:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

But the NLRB doesn't make the FTC redundant, or vice-versa. The NLRB's role is principally reactive, punishing wrongdoing after it occurs. But the FTC has the power to intervene in incipient harms, labor abuses that have not yet risen to the level of NLRB enforcement or new acts of Congress.

This case is made beautifully in Alvaro Bedoya's speech "'Overawed': Worker Misclassification as a Potential Unfair Method of Competition," delivered to the Law Leaders Global Summit in Miami today:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Overawed-Speech-02-02-2024.pdf

Bedoya describes why the FTC has turned its attention to the problem of "worker misclassification," in which employees are falsely claimed to be contractors, and thus deprived of the rights that workers are entitled to. Worker misclassification is rampant, and it transfers billions from workers to employers every year. As Bedoya says, 10-30% of employers engage in worker misclassification, allowing them to dodge payment for overtime, Social Security, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, healthcare, retirement and even a minimum wage. Each misclassified worker is between $6k-18k poorer thanks to this scam – a typical misclassified worker sees a one third decline in their earning power. And, of course, each misclassified worker's boss is $6k-$18k richer because of this scam.

It's not just wages, it's workplace safety. One of the most dangerous jobs in the country is construction worker, and worker misclassification is rampant in the sector. That means that construction workers are three times more likely than other workers to lack health insurance.

What's more, misclassified workers can't form unions, because their bosses' fiction treats them as independent contractors, not employees, which means that misclassified construction workers can't join trade unions and demand health-care, or safer workplaces.

Contrast this with, say, cops, who have powerful "unions" that afford them gold-plated health care and lavish compensation, even for imaginary ailments like "contact overdoses" from touching fentanyl – a medical impossibility that still entitles our nation's armed bureaucrats to handsome public compensation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

Cops have far safer jobs than construction workers, but cops don't get misclassified, so they are able to collect benefits that no other worker – public or private – can hope for.

Not every employer wants to cheat and maim their employees, of course. In Bedoya's speech, he references Sandie Domando, an executive VP at a construction company in Palm Beach Gardens. Domando's company keeps its employees on its books, giving them health-care and other benefits. But when she started bidding against rival firms for jobs funded by the covid stimulus, she couldn't compete – two thirds of those jobs went to other firms that were able to put in cheaper bids. Those bids were cheaper because they were defrauding their workers by misclassifying them. Thus, publicly funded projects were overwhelmingly handed over to fraudulent companies. Fraud becomes a fitness-factor for winning jobs. It's a market for lemons – among employers.

Employee misclassification is a pure transfer from workers to bosses. Bedoya recounts the story of Samuel Talavera, Jr, a short-haul trucker who worked for decades in the Port of Los Angeles. For decades, his job paid well: enough to support his family and even take his kids to Disneyland now and again.

But in 2010, his employer reclassified him as a contractor. They ordered him to buy a new truck – which they financed on a lease-purchase basis – and put him to work for 16 hours stretches in shifts lasting as much as 20 hours per day. Talavera couldn't pick his own hours or pick his routes, but he was still treated as an independent contractor for payroll and labor protection purposes.

This lead to an terrible decline in Talavera's working conditions. He gave up going home between shifts, sleeping in his cab instead. His pay dropped through the floor, thanks to junk-fees that relied on the fiction that he was a contractor. For example, his boss started to charge him rent on the space his truck took up while he was standing by for a job at the port. Other truckers at the port saw paycheck deductions for the toilet-paper in the bathrooms!

Talavera's take-home pay dropped so low that he was bringing home a weekly wage of $112 or $33 (one week, his pay amounted to $0.67). His wife had to work three jobs, and they still had to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing their home. When Talavera's truck needed repairs he couldn't afford, his boss fired him and took back the truck, and Talavera was out the $78,000 he'd paid into it on the lease-purchase plan.

This story – and the many, many others like it from the Port of LA – paint a clear picture of the transfer of wealth from workers to their bosses that comes with worker misclassification. The work that Talavera did in the Port of LA didn't get less valuable when he was misclassified – but the share of that value that Talavera received dropped to as little as $0.67/week.

Worker misclassification is rampant across many sectors, but its handmaiden is technology. The fiction of independence is much easier to maintain when the fine-grained employer-employee control is mediated by an app (think of Uber):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

That's why those scare-stories that AI trucks were going to make truckers obsolete and create an employment crisis were such toxic nonsense. Not only are we unlikely to see self-driving trucks, but the same investors that back AI technology are making bank on companies that practice worker misclassification through the "it's not a crime if we do it with an app" gambit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

By focusing our attention on a hypothetical employment crisis that will supposedly be caused by future AI developments, tech investors can distract us from the real employment crisis that's created by app-enabled worker misclassification, which is also the source of much of the capital they're plowing into AI.

That's why the FTC's work on misclassification is so urgent. Misclassification is a scam that hurts workers and creates oligarchic power – and it's also a mass-extinction event for good companies that don't cheat their workers, because those honest companies can't compete.

Worker misclassification is having a long-overdue and much needed moment. The revolutionary overthrow of the rotten old leadership at the Teamsters was caused, in part, by a radical wing that promised to focus the Teamsters' firepower on fighting worker misclassification:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union

This has become a focus of labor organizers all around the world, as worker misclassification-via-smartphone has infected labor markets everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#an-injury-to-one

Bedoya's speech is a banger, and it reminds us that labor rights and anti-monopoly have always been part of the same project: to rein in corporate power and protect workers from the insatiable greed of the capital class:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

[mariacallous]

The US Department of Justice has sued Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, for abusing their alleged monopoly in the ticketing market to trample competitors.

Filed on Thursday in the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit focuses on Ticketmaster’s long-term exclusivity contracts with many of the largest music venues, making it the predominant ticketing service available to concertgoers. The firm secures these deals in part by “threatening and retaliating against venues that work with rivals,” the DOJ alleges.

In the complaint, the DOJ accuses Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which acts as a promoter for hundreds of high-profile artists, of exploiting their relationship to establish a “self-reinforcing flywheel” that blocks competitors from gaining a foothold. Live Nation parlays its exclusive promotion deals into exclusive ticketing deals with venues, the DOJ claims, which are left with no practical choice but to go with Ticketmaster, for fear of losing access to sought-after acts represented by its parent company. The DOJ is seeking to break up the joint organization.

“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” says attorney general Merrick Garland in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation–Ticketmaster.”

In a lengthy statement provided to WIRED, Live Nation disputes the DOJ's allegation that it and Ticketmaster wield monopoly power. “The DOJ's lawsuit won't solve the issues fans care about relating to ticket prices, service fees, and access to in-demand shows,” the company says. “Calling Ticketmaster a monopoly may be a PR win for the DOJ in the short term, but it will lose in court because it ignores the basic economics of live entertainment, such as the fact that the bulk of service fees go to venues, and that competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster’s market share and profit margin.”

The charges brought by the DOJ mirror allegations made previously against Ticketmaster in two ongoing private lawsuits.

In December 2022, Ticketmaster was sued by hundreds of Taylor Swift fans, who brought a case in response to a high-profile ticketing debacle that reportedly left them queuing for hours to pay for tickets that they had been assigned under an early access program, with many ultimately unable to claim their allocations. The incident led to a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee on consolidation in the ticketing industry and, reportedly, helped catalyze the investigation into Ticketmaster by the DOJ.

In their lawsuit, the Swift fans accused Ticketmaster of abusing its dominant position to impose “higher prices in the presale, sale, and resale market for concert tickets.” The company has “effectuated this anticompetitive scheme by forcing fans of musicians to use Ticketmaster exclusively to buy concert tickets,” the lawsuit alleged.

In the second case, a class action brought in 2022 on behalf of Ticketmaster customers in the US, Live Nation and Ticketmaster were accused of abusing the complementary relationship between their services to overcharge consumers and sustain their monopoly. “Live Nation controls the vast majority of the big national touring acts and, either explicitly or implicitly, coerces concert venues into selecting Ticketmaster as their ticketing service provider on pain of losing high-value acts,” claims Adam Wolfson, a partner at Quinn Emanuel, the law firm representing the plaintiffs.

This type of conduct, known as tying, was explicitly forbidden under the consent decree imposed upon Live Nation and Ticketmaster by the DOJ as a condition of their 2010 merger. “Our allegation is that they did it anyway,” says Wolfson. “Ticketmaster’s behavior is an open secret—everyone talks about it.”

In a corporate blog post published in March, Dan Wall, executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs at Live Nation, rejected allegations that Ticketmaster is driving up the price of tickets. The face value of a ticket is decided by the artist, he wrote, while the service charge—from which Ticketmaster draws its cut—is set by the venue.

In a call with reporters, a senior DOJ official described this line of defense as a “red herring” in the context of the alleged antitrust violations. “Our position is that removing the chokehold that Live Nation has at all levels of the ecosystem will be beneficial with respect to the way prices are set.”

A problem common to antitrust disputes, says Bradley Justus, an antitrust attorney at law firm Axinn, is the difficulty in distinguishing easily between practices that amount to anticompetitive behavior and those that might be considered sensible business strategy. The DOJ will argue that the exclusive deals entered into by Ticketmaster are categorically anticompetitive. “The antitrust question is: How extensive is the scope of those agreements? Are they truly so broad that another competitor couldn’t enter and scale?” says Justus.

The DOJ claims that the terms of the contracts mean that “venues cannot consider or choose rival ticketers or switch to better or more cost-effective ticketing technology.” The effect, it claims, is both to stifle competitors and minimize the pressure for Ticketmaster to improve its own product, to the detriment of concertgoers.

Although the DOJ has petitioned for Live Nation to be broken up, it has not outlined the specific structural changes it will go after, nor any injunctions it may try to impose with respect to the company’s exclusive contracts. “A breakup is absolutely on the table, but it’s important not to put the cart before the horse. In antitrust cases, any remedy has to be specifically tailored to the violation found,” a senior DOJ official told the press. “Based on the allegation that Live Nation and Ticketmaster have exerted control at every level of the ecosystem, aspects of the company need to be broken apart in order for competition to flourish in the live music industry.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jim Morin, Miami Herald

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 17, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 18, 2024

Yesterday, Trump gave his first press conference since the election. It was exactly what Trump’s public performances always are: attention-grabbing threats alongside lies and very little apparent understanding of actual issues. His mix of outrageous and threatening is central to his politics, though: it keeps him central to the media, even though, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo on December 13, he often claims a right to do something he knows very little about and has no power to accomplish. The uncertainty he creates is key to his power, Marshall notes. It keeps everyone off balance and focused on him in anticipation of trouble to come.

At the same time, it seems increasingly clear that the wealthy leaders who backed Trump’s reelection are not terribly concerned about his threats: they seem to see him as a figurehead rather than a policy leader. They are counting on him to deliver more tax cuts and deregulation but apparently are dismissing his campaign vows to raise tariffs and deport immigrants as mere rhetoric.

As the promised tax cuts are already under discussion, interested parties are turning to deregulation. Susanne Rust and Ian James of the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that on December 5, more than a hundred industrial trade groups signed a 21-page letter to Trump complaining that “regulations are strangling our economy.” They urged him to gut Biden-era regulations and instead to “partner” with manufacturers to create “workable regulations that achieve important policy goals without imposing overly burdensome and impractical requirements on our sector.”

They single out reductions in air quality, water quality, chemical, vehicle, and power plant environmental regulations as important for their industries. They also call for ending the “regulatory overreach” of the Biden administration on labor rules, saying those rules “threaten the employer-employee relationship and harm manufacturers’ global competitiveness.” They want an end to “right-to-repair” laws, a loosening of the rules for how and when companies need to report cyber incidents, and the replacement of mandated consumer product safety rules with “voluntary standards.”

They also call for cuts to the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts and for looser corporate finance regulations. On December 12, Gina Heeb reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s advisors are exploring ways “to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington,” including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

As Catherine Rampell explained in the Washington Post today, Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to protect bank deposits so that a bank’s customers can trust that mismanaged banks won’t lose their money. The FDIC also oversees those banks so that they are less likely to get into trouble in the first place. Congress created the system after people rushing to get their money out before a collapse actually created the very collapse that they feared, with one bank failure creating another in a domino effect that dug the economy even further into the crisis it was in after the Great Crash.

But the insurance money for those banks comes from fees assessed on the banks themselves, so abolishing the FDIC would save the banks money.

When he learned that Trump’s advisors are eyeing cuts to the FDIC, Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse commented: “When I lecture about New Deal banking reforms, I note that some of the key measures—like Glass Steagall—were repealed by the right with disastrous results like the 2008 financial meltdown, but ha ha, no one will ever be stupid enough to kill FDIC and bring back the old bank runs.”

Ben Guggenheim of Politico was the first to report that twenty-nine Republican members of Congress are also quick off the blocks in getting into the act of promoting private industry, calling for the incoming president to end the program of the Internal Revenue Service that lets people file their taxes directly without using a private tax preparer. Other developed countries use a similar public system, but in the U.S., private tax preparers staunchly opposed the public system. When more than 140,000 people used the IRS pilot program this year, they saved an estimated $6.5 million. Republicans called for its end, warning it is “a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach.”

But for all their faith that Trump will deregulate the economy, economic leaders seem to think his other promises were just rhetoric.

Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that business executives have been lobbying Trump to change his declared plans on tariffs. The president-elect has vowed to place tariffs of 25% on products from Canada and Mexico, and of an additional 10% on products from China. He claims to believe that other countries will pay these tariffs, but in fact U.S. consumers will pay them. That, plus the fact that other countries will almost certainly respond with their own tariffs against U.S. products, makes economists warn that Trump’s plans will hurt the economy with both inflation and trade wars.

Schwartz reported that some companies and some Republicans are hoping that Trump’s tariff threats are simply a bargaining tactic.

Trump supporters say something similar about his vow to deport 11 to 20 million undocumented immigrants, hoping he won’t actually go after long-term, hardworking undocumented people. On December 10, Jack Dolan reported in the Los Angeles Times that the resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, depends on migrant labor, and on December 15, Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff of the New York Times reported the story of an undocumented worker brought to the U.S. as an infant, who is now trying to figure out his future after his beloved father-in-law voted for Trump. Two days ago, CNN reported on Trump-supporting dairy farmers in South Dakota who depend on undocumented workers, insisting that Trump will not round up undocumented immigrants, no matter what he says.

One person who is not discounting Trump’s threats is Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell will give up his leadership position in January and has told his colleagues he feels “liberated.”

McConnell appears to be taking a stand against Trump’s expected appointee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy speaks often against vaccines, and after the New York Times reported that the lawyer working with Kennedy to vet potential HHS staff petitioned federal regulators to take the polio vaccine off the market, McConnell—a polio survivor—warned: “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

McConnell has also been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s isolationism. He is a champion of sending military support to Ukraine and, after he steps down from the leadership, will chair the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the subcommittee that controls military spending. “America’s national security interests face the gravest array of threats since the Second World War,” McConnell says. “At this critical moment, a new Senate Republican majority has a responsibility to secure the future of U.S. leadership and primacy.”

McConnell will also chair the Rules Committee, which gives him a chance to stop MAGA senators from trying to abandon the power of the Senate and permit Trump to get his way. McConnell has said that “[d]efending the Senate as an institution and protecting the right to political speech in our elections remain among my longest-standing priorities.”

That last sentence identifies the current struggle in the Republican Party. McConnell is showing his willingness to prevent Trump and MAGA Republicans from bulldozing their way through the Senate in order to undermine the departments of Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services, among others. But when he talks about “protecting the right to political speech in our elections,” he is talking about protecting the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that permits corporations and wealthy individuals to flood our elections, and thus our political system, with money.

It is those corporations and wealthy individuals who are now lining up for tax cuts and deregulation, but who don’t want the tariffs or mass deportations or isolationism Trump’s “America First” MAGA base wants.

Trump and his team have been talking about their election win as a “mandate” and a “landslide,” but it was actually a razor thin victory with more voters choosing someone other than Trump than voting for him. He will need the support of establishment Republicans in the Senate to put his MAGA policies in place.

At yesterday's press conference, he appeared to be nodding to McConnell when he promised: “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen.” McConnell’s fierce use of power in the past suggests that the Senate’s giving up its constitutional power to bend to Trump’s will isn’t likely to happen, either.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[thoughtportal]

It sounds weird to say that carrots are having a moment, but social media has catapulted the humble root to a status resembling stardom. Anecdotal evidence suggests online carrot recipes trail in popularity only those for potatoes and brussels sprouts among vegetables, and Pinterest numbers support that: recipe searches for honey balsamic carrots on the platform are up 75% this year, while queries for roasted parmesan carrots skyrocketed 700%. Fresh carrots are an expanding $1.4 billion U.S. market, andAmericans are expected to consume 100 million pounds this Thanksgiving — roughly five ounces for every human being in the country.

At least 60% of those carrots are produced by just two companies, Bolthouse and Grimmway, both of which were acquired by buyout firms, in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

“There’s only two sources,” Adam Waglay, cofounder and co-CEO of Bolthouse owner Butterfly Equity, told Forbes. “We joke around — it’s kind of like the OPEC of carrots.”

Cartels are less funny for neighbors of the two producers in Southern California’s Cuyama Valley, who are calling for a boycott of Big Carrot over the amount of water their farms are sucking out of the ground. In 2022, Bolthouse and Grimmway together were responsible for 67%, or 9.6 billion gallons, of the area’s total water use. Local residents said they expect their wells to dry up if the carrot farms continue to use as much water as they do — Grimmway CEO Jeff Huckaby told Forbes his company has already reduced the amount of acreage it farms — and the two carrot producers have joined forces to defend their thirst in court. That worries local residents, who say they lack the deep pockets needed to wage a prolonged legal battle.

Cattle rancher Jake Furstenfeld places a boycott sign in New Cuyama, California in September.Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo

Water fights like this can take years to resolve, and often become a way to delay cutbacks, Karrigan Bork, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, told Forbes. “You see these rights again and again get trimmed back by the state or by courts,” Bork said. “In some cases, your savvy water users recognize that, and for them, just delaying that trimming back is a success, and the longer they can do that, the happier they will be.”

Price Concerns

Waglay uses the word “duopoly” to describe the two companies. Such market consolidationoften leads to higher prices, and the government has for years used increased consumer prices as an indicator of possible unfair competition. The U.S. Department of Agriculture declined to comment on any antitrust issues.

Since 2019, carrot producer prices have increased more than 40%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, outpacing the 22% inflation in the U.S. economy.

Carrot Top

Prices are near their highest since 2019, when Bolthouse was acquired by a private equity firm. Grimmway changed hands a year later.

Huckaby, the Grimmway CEO, told Forbes that the costs of a number of inputs have gone up, too. Packaging, fertilizer and fuel prices have all risen at a higher rate than inflation, he said, and California’s minimum wage has increased 27% since 2018. At $15 an hour, it’s the second-highest in the country.

Still, the carrot business has been a lucrative play. Total U.S. production value has increased 34% since 2019.

Duopoly Origins

Bolthouse, founded in 1915 in Grant, Michigan, started selling carrots packed in cellophane bags in 1959. In the 1970s and 1980s, production was centered around Bakersfield, California. After Bakersfield farmer Mike Yurosek invented “baby carrots” in 1986, consumption soared.

In the 1990s, Bolthouse ballooned into the largest carrot operator, reportedly shipping some 80% of California’s carrots. It amounted to half the U.S. carrot market in 1992, followed by Grimmway, founded by brothers Bob and Rod Grimm in 1969, and Yurosek’s family-owned outfit. Grimmway eventually bought out Mike Yurosek & Son. The carrot crop is now the tenth-biggest commodity in California, where one-third of America’s vegetables are grown.

Today, the industry’s growth could be limited by dwindling water supplies in the drought-prone Cuyama Valley, 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles and 90 miles west of Bakersfield. But the companies behind the duopoly aren’t giving up without a fight.

Both businesses, which own their own manufacturing, are hitting a similar point in their ownership lifecycles. Private equity-backed businesses typically change hands every three to five years. In 2019, Butterfly Equity acquired Bolthouse from publicly traded Campbell Soup for $510 million in cash. A year later, Grimmway was acquired by Teays River Investments, a Zionsville, Indiana-based investment firm, for an undisclosed amount. That means both businesses are in the sweet spot of what most investors consider the hot time to unload an investment or take it public.

Los Angeles, California-based Butterfly has sold only one of its investments, an organic protein company called Orgain, acquired by Nestle Health Science in February 2022 after two years of Butterfly ownership. Grimmway is Teays River’s only current investment after exiting two others in 2019 and 2013. Teays River held those investments for eight years and one year, respectively.

Grimmway’s owner, which according to Pitchbook has $1.38 billion in assets under management, is backed by pension funds including the public employees of the states of Maine and Oregon, Texas teachers, the New York state Teamsters union and the Producer-Writers Guild of America.

Butterfly Equity, by comparison, has $4 billion in assets under management and is backed byexecutives of private equity giant KKR, where Waglay worked for eight years. The firm has done eight deals in the eight years since it launched. Butterfly also owns America’s largest striped bass farm, the largest free-range egg company, an avocado oil maker that controls 60% of the market, and a large whey protein manufacturer.

Water Rights

Bolthouse and Grimmway started working with each other in a way that competitors rarely do. They filed a lawsuit together in 2021 in Kern County, California to ask a court to decide how to split up the water of New Cuyama, where they farm.

What’s happening in Cuyama Valley is an example of the kinds of water fights that are surfacing across California. Farmers of a variety of crops there have depended on irrigation for decades. Those years of pumping water and spraying it over crops through sprinklers or complex drip irrigation systems have had drastic implications, including threats of land sinking, a receding water table that makes it tougher to dig wells and the threat of some of them drying out.

That’s why water use around New Cuyama could get reduced by two-thirds over the next two decades. To bring the region back to a sustainable level by 2040, water cuts of 5% started this year and will continue each year going forward. The Cuyama basin currently has an annual water deficit of more than 8 billion gallons, and much of the area’s carrot farmland may have to be taken out of production. Some experts say Bolthouse and Grimmway would have to reduce their water consumption by about double what the city of Santa Barbara, California uses annually.

But water-efficient sprinklers can only save so much. The carrot companies’ lawsuit has forced area farmers, ranchers, residents and even the area’s public school to rack up legal bills. In response, a coalition of locals launched a boycott of carrots in July. The boycott’s goals: for the companies to drop the lawsuit, pay all legal fees and to reduce the amount of water they pump. One flyer the boycotters distributed suggests a Thanksgiving recipe for brussels sprouts instead.

Both Bolthouse and Grimmway lease farmland rather than own it. They recently withdrew from the lawsuit, though the companies that own the farmland are still in it, and what the judge decides will dictate how much the companies are able to farm there in the future.

Expanding Elsewhere

Huckaby said the carrot boycott has taken aim at Grimmway and Bolthouse because they’re easy targets. Only 3,700 of the 13,000 acres that Grimmway leases in the Cuyama Valley are being farmed, according to Huckaby. “We cut way back and we cut way back and we cut back and no one else did,” he said.

The companies may have to find new farmland to grow carrots. The average American now eats roughly seven pounds of the fresh vegetable every year, with consumption up 2% so far in 2023, according to NielsenIQ.

Grimmway has already expanded its farming operations outside of California with facilities in Florida, Washington and other states.

Butterfly’s Waglay doesn’t deny that water is one of the biggest barriers that his investment in Bolthouse faces. “Water challenges,” he said with a sigh. “This asset has great access to water, but it’s going to get worse and worse, and you need to be planning for that and trying to work on ways to minimize that. That’ll be a long-term challenge.”

California water fights often result in residents and smaller business owners getting “outgunned in the courts by large commercial actors,” Pomona College environmental analysis and politics professor Heather Williams, an expert on water issues, told Forbes. The lawsuit is among the first of many, she said.

“It’s put into motion a race to the basin — pumping as much as you can, and putting that into production,” Williams said. “Water is property in California. It’s what a rational actor acting on behalf of investors is going to do. If they’re playing this game, they’ve got to play hard.”

Grimmway and Bolthouse can move on, said Williams, unlike most of the residents in New Cuyama. “These are their homes, their small farms. If the well goes dry, it’s worth basically nothing,” she said. “They can’t pay lawyers for ten years of litigation.”

[mayamistake]

The terrifying reality of Trump's second term: Your job, savings and freedom are at risk | Opinion

Opinion by Robert Reich

As we come to the end of a difficult year, it’s important to establish a baseline for seeing how much worse Trump will make the American system starting January 20. Here are 20 current realities for where we are now — some brought on by Trump’s first term:

1. First, forget politics as you’ve come to see it as electoral contests between Democrats and Republicans. Think power. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system — really, an oligarchy of extraordinarily wealthy and powerful white men — and the vast majority who have little or none. Starting January 20, the oligarchy will be far more powerful.

2. Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the “free market” and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve. Starting January 20, it will serve the oligarchy even more than it already does.

3. Forget the standard economic goals of higher growth and greater efficiency. The issues are who benefits from more growth and efficiency, and how we define growth and efficiency. Starting January 20, the major beneficiaries will be Trump, Musk, and other oligarchs. Growth will be defined to exclude climate change and wars over ever-decreasing arable land and fresh water. Efficiency will be defined as eliminating anything Musk and Ramaswamy define as wasteful, potentially including social spending that many Americans depend on.opposed to what it calls “woke”ism, or efforts to make corporations more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. But much of so-called “corporate social responsibility” is a sham anyway. Corporations won’t voluntarily sacrifice shareholder returns unless laws require them to.

5. Even then, be skeptical of laws unless they’re enforced and backed by big penalties. Large corporations and the super-rich ignore laws when the penalties for violating them are small relative to the gains for breaking them. Fines are then simply costs of doing business. Musk and Trump are Exhibits A and B.

6. Don’t assume that we’re locked in a battle between capitalism and socialism. We already have socialism — for the very rich. CEOs today earn more than 300 times what their typical employee earns (up from 60 times in the 1970s). CEOs who are fired by their boards nonetheless get golden parachutes worth large multiples of their giant yearly compensation. Meanwhile, 60 percent of the wealth of the nation is in the hands of heirs who never earned it. Most Americans are subject to the harshest capitalism of any advanced nation.

7. Don’t define “national competitiveness” as the profitability of large American corporations. “American” corporations are now global, with no allegiance to America. This includes Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla, which have major factories in, and sales to, China.

8. Real national competitiveness lies in the productivity of the American people. This depends on their education and health and the infrastructure linking them together. But we spend relatively little on the education of poor kids. We spend more per person than any other advanced nation on health care but with the worst results of any advanced nation; our infrastructure still lags way behind that of China.9. Look at the structure of the economy, not the ups and downs of the business cycle. Economic reporting focuses almost exclusively on the business cycle: the dangers of inflation and recession. The focus should be on systemic, structural changes that have caused the wealth and power of a few to dramatically increase over the last 40 years at the expense of the many — such as labor laws and antitrust laws. Starting January 20, labor laws will discourage workers from organizing, and antitrust laws will allow monopolies to flourish.

10. Forget the old idea that corporations succeed by becoming better, cheaper, or faster than their competitors. They now succeed mainly by increasing their monopoly power, leaving consumers and workers with fewer alternatives. Expect far more mergers, acquisitions, and monopolistic practices after January 20.

11. Forget any traditional definition of finance. Think instead of a giant gambling casino in which bets are made on large flows of money, and bets are made on those bets (called derivatives). Trump and Musk can be expected to further deregulate finance. Keep your eyes especially on crypto and private credit. Both are likely to endure major crashes under Trump.

12. Don’t assume that the billionaire financial titans who run hedge funds and private equity funds have better means of predicting market movements than anyone else. They have better access to inside information than anyone else. The Securities and Exchange Commission has steadily allowed them to benefit from access to inside information. Expect the SEC to allow even more of this under Trump.

13. Don’t confuse attractive policy proposals with systemic changes. Even if enacted, attractive policies at most mitigate systemic problems. Solving those systemic problems requires altering the allocation of power. Starting January 20, the biggest systemic challenges — climate change, nuclear proliferation, and artificial intelligence — are likely to become far more threatening.14. Don’t assume the system is stable. It moves through vicious spirals and virtuous cycles. We are already in a vicious spiral in which great wealth has morphed into political power to change the rules of the game — taxes, labor, antitrust, bankruptcy, and finance — in ways that make the wealthy even wealthier and often harm those who are not wealthy. Expect far worse after January 20.

15. Don’t believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone’s future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they’re born into. Over the next 15 years, as wealthy boomers die off and leave their fortunes to their millennial children, America will witness the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in its history. Trump’s pending tax cuts will make all this worse; the oligarchy will become an aristocracy.

16. Don’t separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides. But class is critical, and most Americans are in the working class — with no job security and wages only slightly higher than they were 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Starting January 20, the divide will widen. The middle class will shrink even further. The oligarchy will get even richer.

17. Forget the old distinctions between “blue-collar” and “white-collar” jobs. A four-year college degree, especially from a prestigious college or university, is now the most important marker of real opportunity. Don’t expect this to change under Trump, despite his populist rhetoric.

18. Think systemically. As noted, the incomes of most people are stagnant, and their jobs are becoming less secure. Combine these realities with climate change that’s intensifying competition for arable land and potable water around the world, generating larger flows of refugees and immigrants. This is allowing demagogues like Trump to fuel bigotry by blaming immigrants for the stagnant incomes and economic insecurity. After January 20, Trump has promised to deport at least 11 million people in the United States who are undocumented.19. Understand the nature of power – who possesses it and why, how it is wielded, and for what purposes. Power means not being accountable for actions that hurt others but that increase your own power and wealth. Today’s most powerful include Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Jamie Dimon, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas.

20. Don’t treat power and wealth as separable. Great wealth flows from great power; great power depends on great wealth. Wealth and power are intimately connected to one another. After January 20, they will become one and the same.I don’t intend for these 20 realities to make you more cynical about the system or resigned to its intransigence.

To the contrary, the first step toward changing the system is to understand it. We need to see where the system is today in order to have a baseline for measuring how much worse it will become under Trump and his lackeys in Congress and the Supreme Court.

Seeing the system for what it is and what it will be under a second term of Trump will empower you to join with others to resist Trump, and eventually change the system for the better.

[wagecagelocations]

Here’s a refined breakdown of the negative impacts associated with the listed companies and the accusations tied to them:

Google

Google is one of the most powerful technology companies in the world, with significant influence over internet search, digital advertising, and data collection. The key negative impacts include:

垄断 (Monopoly):

Google has faced antitrust lawsuits in multiple countries, including the U.S. and EU, for allegedly using its dominant position in search and digital advertising to suppress competition.

Examples include prioritizing its own services (like Google Shopping or YouTube) in search results, disadvantaging competitors.

侵犯隐私 (Privacy Invasion):

Google has been repeatedly accused of violating user privacy through extensive data collection practices.

Issues like tracking users across websites (even in private browsing) and selling targeted ads based on sensitive user data have raised concerns.

Some governments have penalized Google for non-compliance with privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.

滥用权力 (Abuse of Power):

Google’s control over the digital advertising market has led to allegations of unfair practices, such as charging advertisers high fees or giving preferential treatment to its own ad platforms.

Critics argue this dominance stifles innovation and undermines smaller competitors.

Alchemy Technologies

Alchemy Technologies, a digital marketing company, has been accused of engaging in deceptive practices that manipulate user behavior:

Manipulation and Deception:

The company has been accused of misleading consumers through fake advertisements, false claims, or unethical digital marketing strategies.

Allegations include using dark patterns (design choices that trick users into actions they didn’t intend, such as subscriptions) and targeting vulnerable populations with exploitative tactics.

Erosion of Trust:

By misleading consumers and clients, companies like Alchemy Technologies contribute to widespread distrust in digital marketing practices, undermining the credibility of the broader advertising ecosystem.

Apple

Apple is known for its innovation and market leadership but has faced serious accusations regarding its business and labor practices:

垄断 (Monopoly):

Apple has been accused of monopolistic behavior, particularly regarding its App Store policies.

Developers are required to use Apple’s in-app payment system, for which Apple charges up to 30% commission, leading to accusations of anticompetitive behavior.

Legal battles, like the high-profile lawsuit with Epic Games, highlight claims that Apple unfairly limits competition within its ecosystem.

侵犯隐私 (Privacy Invasion):

Despite its public stance on user privacy, Apple has been accused of enabling surveillance, particularly in cases where it complied with government requests for user data.

Concerns about the AirTags product, which has been misused for stalking and tracking people without consent, further dent Apple’s privacy reputation.

强迫劳动 (Forced Labor):

Apple has faced allegations of forced labor within its supply chain, particularly involving factories in China and other countries.

Investigations have linked Apple’s suppliers to Uyghur forced labor in China, where workers are allegedly coerced into producing components for Apple products.

Reports of abusive working conditions, including long hours, low pay, and unsafe environments, persist, despite Apple’s claims of enforcing ethical supplier standards.

Summary of Impacts:

Google: Dominance in tech markets, privacy violations, and abuse of its powerful position have led to antitrust scrutiny and fines worldwide.

Alchemy Technologies: Manipulative and deceptive marketing practices harm consumer trust and foster unethical advertising environments.

Apple: Allegations of monopolistic practices, breaches of privacy, and labor rights violations cast a shadow over its reputation as a tech innovator.

Each company’s actions have far-reaching consequences, affecting industries, consumers, and global labor markets. Addressing these issues would require stricter regulations, transparency, and corporate accountability.

Here’s a refined breakdown of the negative impacts associated with the listed companies and the accusations tied to them:

Google

Google is one of the most powerful technology companies in the world, with significant influence over internet search, digital advertising, and data collection. The key negative impacts include:

垄断 (Monopoly):

Google has faced antitrust lawsuits in multiple countries, including the U.S. and EU, for allegedly using its dominant position in search and digital advertising to suppress competition.

Examples include prioritizing its own services (like Google Shopping or YouTube) in search results, disadvantaging competitors.

侵犯隐私 (Privacy Invasion):

Google has been repeatedly accused of violating user privacy through extensive data collection practices.

Issues like tracking users across websites (even in private browsing) and selling targeted ads based on sensitive user data have raised concerns.

Some governments have penalized Google for non-compliance with privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.

滥用权力 (Abuse of Power):

Google’s control over the digital advertising market has led to allegations of unfair practices, such as charging advertisers high fees or giving preferential treatment to its own ad platforms.

Critics argue this dominance stifles innovation and undermines smaller competitors.

Alchemy Technologies

Alchemy Technologies, a digital marketing company, has been accused of engaging in deceptive practices that manipulate user behavior:

Manipulation and Deception:

The company has been accused of misleading consumers through fake advertisements, false claims, or unethical digital marketing strategies.

Allegations include using dark patterns (design choices that trick users into actions they didn’t intend, such as subscriptions) and targeting vulnerable populations with exploitative tactics.

Erosion of Trust:

By misleading consumers and clients, companies like Alchemy Technologies contribute to widespread distrust in digital marketing practices, undermining the credibility of the broader advertising ecosystem.

Apple

Apple is known for its innovation and market leadership but has faced serious accusations regarding its business and labor practices:

垄断 (Monopoly):

Apple has been accused of monopolistic behavior, particularly regarding its App Store policies.

Developers are required to use Apple’s in-app payment system, for which Apple charges up to 30% commission, leading to accusations of anticompetitive behavior.

Legal battles, like the high-profile lawsuit with Epic Games, highlight claims that Apple unfairly limits competition within its ecosystem.

侵犯隐私 (Privacy Invasion):

Despite its public stance on user privacy, Apple has been accused of enabling surveillance, particularly in cases where it complied with government requests for user data.

Concerns about the AirTags product, which has been misused for stalking and tracking people without consent, further dent Apple’s privacy reputation.

强迫劳动 (Forced Labor):

Apple has faced allegations of forced labor within its supply chain, particularly involving factories in China and other countries.

Investigations have linked Apple’s suppliers to Uyghur forced labor in China, where workers are allegedly coerced into producing components for Apple products.

Reports of abusive working conditions, including long hours, low pay, and unsafe environments, persist, despite Apple’s claims of enforcing ethical supplier standards.

Summary of Impacts:

Google: Dominance in tech markets, privacy violations, and abuse of its powerful position have led to antitrust scrutiny and fines worldwide.

Alchemy Technologies: Manipulative and deceptive marketing practices harm consumer trust and foster unethical advertising environments.

Apple: Allegations of monopolistic practices, breaches of privacy, and labor rights violations cast a shadow over its reputation as a tech innovator.

Each company’s actions have far-reaching consequences, affecting industries, consumers, and global labor markets. Addressing these issues would require stricter regulations, transparency, and corporate accountability.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6752f369-7f9c-800c-8ef8-c927a0069dc6

[darkmaga-returns]

FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson has issued a warning against what he describes as pro-censorship advertising cartels, suggesting they may be in violation of US antitrust laws. In a pointed statement, Ferguson expressed his hope that the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would investigate these cartels for potentially suppressing competition and free speech.

In an interview with Natalie Winters of Bannon’s War Room, Ferguson said: “So generally, under our antitrust laws, private companies can sort of decide what they’d like to do with their own resources. But one of the most important things the antitrust laws forbid is people getting in a room and agreeing we’re not going to compete.” He elaborated that if advertisers are “getting in a room together and saying, hey, let’s all agree not to advertise on this platform because we don’t like that they have free speech on that platform,” then these actions could potentially violate antitrust laws.

[youthchronical]

DOJ Reinforces Demand to Break Up Google’s Search Monopoly

In a sign that President Trump is following the Biden administration’s lead in reining in Google, the Justice Department on Friday reiterated its demand that a court break up the search giant. The request followed a landmark ruling last year by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search by…

[vilkalizer]

“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. “That Google is long gone.”

please kill g**gle

(they will never kill g**gle)

In Its First Monopoly Trial of Modern Internet Era, U.S. Sets Sights on Google The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists.

On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today’s tech giants become dominant by breaking the law? The case — U.S. et al v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power.

Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations. But since then, companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have woven themselves into people’s lives to an even greater degree. Any ruling from the trial could have broad ripple effects, slowing down or potentially dismantling the largest internet companies after decades of unbridled growth.

The stakes are particularly high for Google, the Silicon Valley company founded in 1998, which grew into a $1.7 trillion giant by becoming the first place people turned to online to search the web. The government has said in its complaint that it wants Google to change its monopolistic business practices, potentially pay damages and restructure itself.

“This is a pivotal case and a moment to create precedents for these new platforms that lend themselves to real and durable market power,” said Laura Phillips-Sawyer, who teaches antitrust law at the University of Georgia School of Law.

The case centers on whether Google illegally cemented its dominance and squashed competition by paying Apple and other companies to make its internet search engine the default on the iPhone as well as on other devices and platforms.

In legal filings, the Justice Department has argued that Google maintained a monopoly through such agreements, making it harder for consumers to use other search engines. Google has said that its deals with Apple and others were not exclusive and that consumers could alter the default settings on their devices to choose alternative search engines.

Google has amassed 90 percent of the search engine market in the United States and 91 percent globally, according to Similarweb, a data analysis firm. Fireworks are expected at the trial, which is scheduled to last 10 weeks. Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from Apple and other tech companies will probably be called as witnesses.

Judge Amit P. Mehta, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, is presiding over the trial, which will not have a jury, and he will issue the final ruling. Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department, will lead the government’s arguments in the courtroom, while John E. Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, will do the same for Google.

The jockeying over the trial has already been intense. The Justice Department and Google have deposed more than 150 people for the case and produced more than five million pages of documents. Google has argued that Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s head of antitrust, is biased because of his earlier work as a private lawyer representing Microsoft and News Corp. The Justice Department has accused Google of destroying employees’ instant messages that could have contained relevant information for the case.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in an interview last month that the company’s tactics were “completely lawful” and that its success “comes down to the quality of our products.”

“It’s frustrating — maybe it’s ironic — that we’re seeing this backward-looking case and really unprecedented, forward-looking innovation,” he said.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Google’s search engine was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were students at Stanford University in the 1990s. Their technology was widely praised for serving up more relevant results than other web search tools. Google eventually parlayed that success into new business lines including online advertising, video streaming, maps, office apps, driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content. Those complaints brought scrutiny from regulators, though little action was taken.

In 2019, under President Donald J. Trump, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission decided to mount new antitrust investigations into tech companies as part of a broad crackdown. The Justice Department agreed to oversee inquiries into Apple and Google.

In October 2020, the government sued Google for abusing its dominance in online search. In its lawsuit, the government accused Google of hurting rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo by employing agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers to become the default search engine on their web browsers or be preinstalled on their devices.

“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. “That Google is long gone.”

Google’s actions had harmed consumers and stifled competition, the agency said, and could affect the future technological landscape as the company positioned itself to control “emerging channels” for search distribution. The agency added that Google had behaved similarly to Microsoft in the 1990s, when the software giant made its own web browser the default on the Windows operating system, crushing competitors.

A group of 35 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia also filed a lawsuit in 2020 accusing Google of abusing its monopoly in search and search advertising to illegally wedge out competitors. That case will be tried alongside the Justice Department lawsuit, though Judge Mehta threw out many of the states’ key arguments in a ruling last month.

In January, the Justice Department filed a separate antitrust suit against Google, accusing it of abusing its monopoly power in advertising technology. The company faces two other lawsuits from states that accused it of abusing monopolies in ad tech and for blocking competition in its Google Play app store.

For decades, judges have generally ruled against companies in antitrust cases only when their conduct hurts consumers, particularly if they have raised prices. Critics have said that lets companies like Google — which provides internet search for free — off the hook.

Google’s Mr. Walker said the case was a moment for the court to double down on that standard.

“American law should be about promoting benefits for consumers,” he said, adding: “If we move away from that and make it harder for companies to provide great goods and services for consumers, that’s going to be bad for everyone.”

Monopoly trials can change the direction of industries. In 1984, under pressure from the Justice Department, AT&T split itself into seven regional telecom companies. The breakup transformed the telecommunications industry by making it more competitive at the dawn of the mobile phone era.

But the effects of the government’s antitrust battle with Microsoft in the early 2000s were less clear cut. The two sides eventually settled after Microsoft agreed to end certain contracts with PC makers that blocked rival software makers.

Some tech executives said the Justice Department’s actions made Microsoft more cautious, clearing the way for start-ups like Google to compete in the next era of computing. Bill Gates, a Microsoft founder, has blamed the hangover from the antitrust suit for the company’s slow entry into mobile technology and the failure of its Windows phone. But others have argued that the settlement did little to increase competition.

Ultimately, the Google trial will test whether antitrust laws written in 1890 to break up sugar, steel and railroad monopolies can still work in today’s economy, said Rebecca Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school.

“The Google trial is a big test for the government’s entire antitrust agenda because its theory of monopolization is very much in play with many big tech companies,” she said.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Thankful for class consciousness

On November 27, I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Before the term "ecology" came along, people didn't know they were on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer – what does the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?

But as James Boyle has written, the term "ecology" welded together a thousand issues into a single movement. When we talk about "looking at our world through a lens," this is what we mean – apply the right analytical lens and a motley assortment of disparate causes becomes a unified, coherent project:

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=dlj

Unfettered, planet-destroying, worker immiserating corporate power is only possible in the absence of such a lens. Before neoliberalism can destroy our lives, it must first convince us that we are all disconnected. "There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants.

That's why neoliberalism is so viciously opposed to all kinds of solidarity, why corporate apologists insist that the only elections that matter are the ones where you "vote with your wallet." It's no surprise that the side with the thickest wallets wants to replace ballots with dollars!

Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy.

There are many tributaries flowing into this mighty river, but two of the largest are antitrust and labor. Antitrust seeks to ensure that our world is regulated by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public, rather than shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in smoke-filled rooms. Labor seeks to ensure that contests between profit for the few and prosperity for the many are decided in favor of people, not profit.

This coalition is so powerful that the ruling class has never stopped attacking it. Indeed, the history of US antitrust law can be viewed as a succession of ever-more-insistent laws enacted solely to make it clear to deliberately obtuse judges that competition law is aimed at corporations, not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Rising corporate power and declining worker power is bad for all of us. The failure of successive US administrations to block airline mergers led to sky-high prices and a proliferation of "junk fees" that can double the price of a ticket. The monopoly carriers stand to make $118b this year from these fees:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90981005/airlines-fees-118-billion-dark-patterns

The consolidation of the agricultural sector led to cartels that conspired to rig the prices of our food. These Les Mis LARPers rigged the price of bread!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783

Remember eggflation? Nearly all the eggs in US grocery stores come from a single company, Cal-Maine, which owns dozens of brands, including "Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs":

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

With all our eggs in one basket, it was easy for a single company to rig the egg market, blaming everything from bird flu to Russian invasion of Ukraine for doubling egg prices while their profits shot up by 65%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Antitrust isn't just about monopoly – it's also about oligopoly. The American meat cartel pretends that it's not rigging markets by outsourcing its price-fixing to a "clearinghouse" called Agri Stats:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Agri-Stats gets data from all the Big Meat companies, "anonymizes" it, and publishes it back to its subscribers, who use the service to coordinate across-the-board price-hikes that have cost the public billions in price gouging (meanwhile, Big Meat was able to secure $50b in public subsidies).

For forty years, governments have ceded power to "autocrats of trade" who usurped control "over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But that era is coming to an end. In the past year, American regulators have blocked airline mergers and promulgated rules banning junk fees. They've dragged price-fixing clearinghouses into court:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-turkey-eggs-and-air-travel-just

They're getting results, too: for the second year in a row, turkey prices are down. Cranberries, too (18%). Same for whipping cream (25%). Pie crusts are down. So are russet potatoes. Airfares are down 13.2%.

The egg cartel just lost a long-running court case over the last egg price-fixing campaign, which gouged Americans from 1990-2008:

https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/kellogg-kraft-secure-victory-in-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-egg-producers

The same fact-pattern that was revealed in that court case is repeated in this year's eggflation scandal:

https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action-Letter-to-FTC-Chair-Lina-Khan.pdf

That's terrific ammo for the FTC, and will doubtless benefit the Democrats running against would-be Indiana senator John Rust, whose family owns convicted egg cartel member Rose Acre Farms and whose wife just stepped down as chair of the board.

One underappreciated aspect of the global war on corporate power is that the same corporations commit the same crimes in countries all over the world, which means that whenever any government establishes evidence of those crimes, they are of use to all the other governments. Competition enforcers from the UK, EU, USA, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are coordinating to target the Big Tech cartel. Maybe Google and Facebook and Apple are bigger enough to resist any one of those governments – but all of them?

https://cmadataconference.co.uk/

One notable absence from the anti-monopoly coalition is Canada. While other countries merely stopped enforcing their competition laws in the neoliberal era, Canada never had a good competition law to enforce. Canada's official tolerance for monopolies has allowed a handful of companies to seize control over the economy of Canada and the lives of Canadians:

https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons-monopoly/

These monopolies are largely controlled by powerful families, Canada's de facto aristocracy, whose wealth and power make them above the law and subordinate the country's democratic institutions to billionaires' whims:

https://www.canadaland.com/tag/dynasties/

At long last, Canada has called time on oligarchy. Last week's Fall Economic Statement included an announcement of a muscular new competition law, including new merger guidelines, a new "abuse of dominance" standard, and Right to Repair rules:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132855021548769282/

The law also includes interoperability mandates for Canada's highly concentrated – and deeply corrupt – banking sector. These measures are strikingly similar to new measures just introduced in the US by the CFPB:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

The arrival of Canada's first fit-for-purpose competition rule coincides with all kinds of solidaristic movements in Canada that are fighting corporate power from the bottom up. Even Ontario, led by one of the most corrupt premiers in provincial history, can't break its teachers' union:

https://globalnews.ca/news/10105600/ontario-elementary-teachers-reach-contract-deal/

It's not just workers who benefit from solidarity: Tenants' unions have formed across the province in response to corporate takeovers of scarce rental stock. These finance-sector landlords have armies of lawyers who've figured out how to bypass rent-control rules and evict tenants who balk. Rather than rolling over, tenants' unions are organizing waves of rent-strikes:

https://macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/

As with Big Tech, the illegal tactics of the rental sector aren't confined to a single nation. In America, Wall Street landlords have dramatically increased the price of housing and kicked off an eviction epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

And as with Big Meat, landlords use arm's-length clearing houses to rig rental markets, coordinating across-the-board rent hikes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

In other words: to fix the housing market, tenants all over the world need to learn the tactics of labor unions. Housing regulators have to learn from agricultural regulators. Americans tenants have to learn from Canadians. These aren't 1,000 different fights – they're one big fight, and the coalition for dismantling corporate power is vast and powerful.

The most powerful weapons our bosses have is convincing us that we are weak and they are strong – so strong that we shouldn't even try to fight them. But solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions.

Tesla can't get its cars offloaded at the ports. It can't get its showrooms cleaned. No one will deliver its mail. No one will fix its chargers. The strike is spreading to Germany, and workers at its giant Berlin factory is set to walk out:

https://www.metafilter.com/201514/Swedish-Tesla-workers-go-on-strike

There's something delicious about how palpably frustrated Elon Musk is by all this, as he realizes that neither his billions nor his bully pulpit are a match for workers in solidarity:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-23/elon-musk-calls-swedish-tesla-strikes-insane-as-impact-spreads

It's a reminder of just how fragile and weak billionaires are, when we stop believing in them and deferring to them. Rebecca Solnit's latest Guardian column adds up the ways that allowing billionaires to run the show puts us all in danger:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis

They are the unelected "autocrats of trade" who control "the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life." They are the force that this new ecology movement is coalescing to fight: across borders, across sectors, across identities. No matter whether you are a worker, a tenant, a voter, a shopper or a citizen, your enemy is the billionaire class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/24/coalescence/#solidarnosc

[mariacallous]

In March 2007, Google’s then senior executive in charge of acquisitions, David Drummond, emailed the company’s board of directors a case for buying DoubleClick. It was an obscure software developer that helped websites sell ads. But it had about 60 percent market share and could accelerate Google’s growth while keeping rivals at bay. A “Microsoft-owned DoubleClick represents a major competitive threat,” court papers show Drummond writing.

Three weeks later, on Friday the 13th, Google announced the acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The US Department of Justice and 17 states including California and Colorado now allege that the day marked the beginning of Google’s unchecked dominance in online ads—and all the trouble that comes with it.

The government contends that controlling DoubleClick enabled Google to corner websites into doing business with its other services. That has resulted in Google allegedly monopolizing three big links of a vital digital advertising supply chain, which funnels over $12 billion in annual revenue to websites and apps in the US alone.

It’s a big amount. But a government expert estimates in court filings that if Google were not allegedly destroying its competition illegally, those publishers would be receiving up to an additional hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Starved of that potential funding, “publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether,” the government alleges. It all adds up to a subpar experience on the web for consumers, Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser says.

“Google is able to extract hiked-up costs, and those are passed on to consumers,” he alleges. “The overall outcome we want is for consumers to have more access to content supported by advertising revenue and for people who are seeking advertising not to have to pay inflated costs.”

Google disputes the accusations.

Starting today, both sides’ arguments will be put to the test in what’s expected to be a weekslong trial before US district judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia. The government wants her to find that Google has violated federal antitrust law and then issue orders that restore competition. In a best-case scenario, according to several Google critics and experts in online ads who spoke with WIRED, internet users could find themselves more pleasantly informed and entertained.

It could take years for the ad market to shake out, says Adam Heimlich, a longtime digital ad executive who’s extensively researched Google. But over time, fresh competition could lower supply chain fees and increase innovation. That would drive “better monetization of websites and better quality of websites,” says Heimlich, who now runs AI software developer Chalice Custom Algorithms.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO of ad-buying software developer Viant Technology, which both competes and partners with Google, believes that consumers would encounter a greater variety of ads, fewer creepy ads, and pages less cluttered with ads. “A substantially improved browsing experience,” he says.

Of course, all depends on the outcome of the case. Over the past year, Google lost its two other antitrust trials—concerning illegal search and mobile app store monopolies. Though the verdicts are under appeal, they’ve made the company’s critics optimistic about the ad tech trial.

Google argues that it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It further contends that customers benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts, and features that the government is challenging. “Google has designed a set of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a 359-page rebuttal.

For years, Google publicly has maintained that its ad tech projects wouldn’t harm clients or competition. “We will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content on the internet,” Drummond testified in 2007 to US senators concerned about the DoubleClick deal’s impact on competition and privacy. US antitrust regulators at the time cleared the purchase. But at least one of them, in hindsight, has said he should have blocked it.

Deep Control

The Justice Department alleges that acquiring DoubleClick gave Google “a pool of captive publishers that now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with changing to another publisher ad server.” The global market share of Google’s tool for publishers is now 91 percent, according to court papers. The company holds similar control over ad exchanges that broker deals (around 70 percent) and tools used by advertisers (85 percent), the court filings say.

Google’s dominance, the government argues, has “impaired the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose the ad tech tools they would prefer to use and diminished the number and quality of viable options available to them.”

The government alleges that Google staff spoke internally about how they have been earning an unfair portion of what advertisers spend on advertising, to the tune of over a third of every $1 spent in some cases.

Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to be broken up into multiple independent companies, so each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without the benefit of one pumping up another. The rivals also support rules that would bar Google from preferencing its own services. “What all in the industry are looking for is fair competition,” Viant’s Vanderhook says.

If Google ad tech alternatives win more business, not everyone is so sure that the users will notice a difference. “We’re talking about moving from the NYSE to Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs the media company Marketecture, tells WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may shift, but the experience for investors—or in this case, internet surfers—doesn’t.

Some advertising experts predict that if Google is broken up, users’ experiences would get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-block developer AdGuard, expects increasingly invasive tracking as competition intensifies. Products also may cost more because companies need to not only hire additional help to run ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So the ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an ad executive turned Syracuse University associate professor, told reporters in a recent call arranged by a Google-funded advocacy group.

But Dina Srinivasan, a former ad executive who as an antitrust scholar wrote a Stanford Technology Law Review paper on Google’s dominance, says advertisers would end up paying lower fees, and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future would mark an end to the spell Google allegedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A trial in a similar lawsuit filed by Texas, 15 other states, and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.

[theculturedmarxist]

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here.

Today, as the U.S. is drawn into wars in Israel and Ukraine, as well as the defense of now-peaceful Taiwan, I’m writing about war. Not the policy choices, or whether U.S. military power is a net force for good or ill, but the actual practical machinery behind the American defense base that produces the weaponry necessary to sustain the military.

As stockpiles dwindle, there is now widespread agreement among policymakers that America must rebuild its capacity to arm itself and its allies. But according to a new scorching government report released this week, that’s mostly just talk. The Pentagon doesn’t bother tracking the guts of defense contracting, which is who owns the mighty firms that build weaponry.

But first, I have a personal announcement. I am going on leave this week, and I’ve hired a colleague named Lee Hepner to take over for BIG while I am out. You are in for a treat. Hepner works with me at the American Economic Liberties Project. He’s a lawyer with over a decade's worth of policy and political experience at the state and local level, and when I have a question on the law or procedure, Hepner’s one of my go-to people. He’s drafted important legislation, and has recently been focusing on the airline industry, labor issues, and a lot of the major antitrust litigation I've written about here, including the trials of the Meta-Within merger, the Microsoft-Activision acquisition and the Google monopolization case. You're in good hands.

And now, let’s talk the defense base. Here’s an exceptionally boring chart that involves all the money in the world. Welcome to the Pentagon.

One of the more important side stories to the recent wars in Ukraine and Israel, and competition with China over Taiwan, is that the U.S. defense industrial base, composed of 200k plus corporations, is being forced to actually build weapons again. Defense is big business, and since the end of the Cold War, the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending.

The consequences, as with much of our economic machinery, are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output. Wall Street and private equity firms prioritize cash out first, and that means a once functioning and nimble industrial base now produces more grift than anything else. As Lucas Kunce and I wrote for the American Conservative in 2019, the U.S. simply can’t build or get the equipment it needs. There are at this point a bevy of interesting reports coming out of the Pentagon. The last one I wrote up earlier this year showed that unlike the mid-20th century defense-industrial base, today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments. And now, with a dramatic upsurge in need for everything from missiles to artillery shells to bullets, we’re starting to see cracks in the vaunted U.S. military.

The signs are unmistakable. In Ukraine, fighters are rationing shells. Taiwan can’t get weapons it ordered years ago. The Pentagon has put together a secret team to scour stockpiles to find high-precision armaments in demand on every battlefield and potential battlefield. But the problem goes beyond national defense. In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police. This shortage may look like a story of a sudden surge in demand, but it’s actually, as Elle Ekman wrote in the Prospect in 2021, a story of consolidation and de-industrialization.

Surges due to wars aren’t new, and there’s always some time lag between the build-up and the delivery. But today, the lengths of time are weirdly long. For instance, the Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years. Why? What is new is Wall Street’s role in weaponry. We used to have slack, and productive capacity, but then came private equity and mergers. And now we don’t. The government can’t actually solicit bids from multiple players for most major weapons systems, because there’s just one or two possible bidders. So that means there’s little incentive for firms to expand output, even if there’s more spending. Why not just raise price?

But don’t take my word for it, take that of the Pentagon. In 2022, the DOD reported that “that consolidation of the industrial base reduces competition for DOD contracts and leads DOD to rely on a more limited number of suppliers. This lack of competition may in turn increase the risk of supply chain gaps, price increases, reduced innovation, and other adverse effects.” And that’s why, more than a year into the Ukraine conflict, the ramp-up is still not where it needs to be.

This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is a Congressional office charged with investigating problems in government and business, explained why. The GAO came out with a report on how the Pentagon is doing essentially zero oversight of Wall Street’s acquisitions of defense contractors. The title is as boring as you’d expect, designed to have few people pay attention, but offering a red-alert to procurement officials.

The report is simply jaw-dropping. Despite all the chatter about consolidation at high levels within the Pentagon, and in Congress, the bureaucracy has made essentially no progress whatsoever. For instance, we have a trillion dollar defense budget, but there are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base. You couldn’t staff the morning shift of a small coffee shop with that, and yet two people are supposed to look at the estimated four hundred mergers plus going on every year among defense contractors and subcontractors.

Four hundred mergers every year is a lot, but of course, that’s just an estimate. Why don’t we know how many acquisitions happen in the defense base? As it turns out, it’s an estimate because the Pentagon isn’t tracking defense mergers anymore. To put it in boring GAO-speak, Pentagon“officials could not say with certainty how many defense-related M&A now occur annually because they no longer track or maintain data on all M&A in the defense industrial base.” So the DOD is almost totally blind to the corporate owners of contractors and subcontractors, which might be one reason that, say, Chinese alloys are being discovered in sensitive weapons systems like the state of the art F-35.

It gets worse. There’s no policy or guidance on mergers, and DOD doesn’t even require contractors or subcontractors to tell them that there is new ownership when an acquisition occurs. In fact, the Pentagon relies on public news to learn of mergers. They often do not know that the mergers are going on, or that the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing them. When big mergers happen, even if the Pentagon is concerned, no one tracks what happens after it closes. They do no analysis of industry sectors, as their “M&A office is not collecting robust data or conducting recurring trend analyses that could help them identify M&A in risky areas of consolidation among defense suppliers.”

The Pentagon’s head-in-the-sand approach is why Lockheed now has a chokehold on nuclear missile modernization, since it bought the key supplier of rocket engines and denies those engines to rivals bidding for the contract to upgrade what is known as the nuclear triad.

So how does the U.S. government manage defense base mergers? Well, the Pentagon defers to the antitrust agencies to look solely at competition. “While DOD policy directs Industrial Base Policy and DOD stakeholders to assess other types of risks, such as national security and innovation risks,” wrote the GAO, “they have not routinely done so.” Basically, dealing with their own defense base is someone else’s job.

What I found most useful about the GAO report is the Pentagon’s response, a classic bureaucratic hand wave. The DOD agreed with all the conclusions of the GAO. It should track mergers and what happens afterwards, it should have more personnel doing so, it should consider national security aspects of corporate combinations, and it should have clear policy on mergers. But it doesn’t. The DOD says it will have a better strategy to deal with mergers… by 2024. Basically, you’re right, but it’s not our problem.

Every day, it seems like political leaders and consultants are saying it’s time to really get that arsenal of democracy going, and to re-industrialize for real. It’s quite possible to get a lot done. The FTC and DOJ now have significant amounts of national security-related information on mergers due to a Congressional change in pre-merger notification laws in 2022, so the DOD could easily do a better job of tracking what’s happening in the defense base.

More to the point, the Pentagon is very powerful. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks could simply start smashing heads on competition and begin telling contractors that if they don’t shape up, she will start an internal war against them. Or the head of the Armed Services Committees could threaten the cushy cash flow that leads to record stock buybacks among contractors, if the ramp-up doesn’t start. Or they could grant antitrust authority for the DOD straight-up, which would rely on a national security standard that allows widespread corporate restructuring without the long slog of a court case. There are many paths.

But if you actually look at the guts of the bureaucracy, nothing is happening, because doing something about our industrial base means thwarting Wall Street, and that’s generally not something that’s considered on the table among normie policymakers. Giant bureaucracies are hard to change, but they are not immovable. One of the ways that you know a previously non-functional bureaucracy is on the right track is, ironically, if there is bitter infighting and anger among staff, who are being tasked to do things differently. But as the GAO showed this week, that’s just not happening in the Pentagon, or at least, not happening nearly fast enough.

And that’s why America is increasingly out of ammunition.

[just-about-nothing]

politico ran a story that came to me called as being called "the antitrust 'superhero' the next generation of law students is obsessed with", which, as someone who intends to be part of said generation and who has a long-standing interest in antitrust, i was quite interested in.

so i open the article and promptly laugh til i cry because it's about lina khan, who i am indeed obsessed with. the woman's a rockstar!!!!

notable bits:

"Khan, who happens to be not much older than many law students, is at least partially responsible for inspiring young people to turn to antitrust. After seeing her at the FTC, it’s clear that the DOJ’s civil rights division and the EPA aren’t the only options for those seeking a vehicle for change." mmm so true bestie (tho i do love the doj's civil rights division)

"“I think the antitrust status quo was built by young folks who came with these ideas about economics,” Kanter said in an interview. “They infused those ideas into the agencies, private practice and academia. We’re seeing a similar kind of energy just coming from a different ideological point of view — one focused on faithfully enforcing the law.”" fascinating -- and true! -- take on the issue. i understand why you have law & economics interwoven (it's the same reason engineers make good patent lawyers) but the emphasis does need to be on the law here, not on the economic end. being informed about the issue is the mark of a good lawyer but if you're going to be an attorney, i feel like the upholding of the law should be the priority, not the economic perspective.

"Meador eventually worked on antitrust while at the Texas Attorney General’s office and later did stints with the FTC. His ardor for antitrust is hard to deny: His Virginia vanity license plates were the U.S. legal code granting the FTC its authority to crack down on unfair competition." *heart eyes* that's the most genius vanity plate i've seen in my life that's amazing

"Khan said her goal is to make the FTC the premier landing spot for idealistic, trustbusting students as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. To that end, the agency recently launched an honors program for attorneys just out of law school to create a pipeline for top-notch talent. But she also needs to convince the American people that economic inequality is not an accident but the result of “concrete policy and law enforcement decisions.”" you've got me going, darlin! excuse law school debt & i'll go work for yall for sure lol (the latter part i'm sure most ppl on this site agree with)

great article, very enjoyable no notes

[leeanndicicco]

Google Ad business faces breakup after being charged with EU antitrust violations

Google may be forced to sell part of its ad business after being charged with violating the European Union’s antitrust laws. Following a lengthy investigation, the European Commission suggested that “mandatory divestment” is the only way the search engine can resolve the issue.

Why we care: If Google does sell part of its ad business, it could mark the start of a new digital marketing era with a more competitive market and fairer pricing. This could potentially lead to more transparency, greater campaign control for advertisers and increased innovation, which could prompt the creation of new ad tools.

What’s happening: The European Commission conducted a report into the operation of Google Ads and found that the search engine typically tends to favor its own ads, causing difficulties for competing providers.

When discussing potential solutions, the commission said that behavioral improvements would not be enough to rectify the matter. Instead, it has recommended that the search giant sells off part of its business.

What has Google said? Google released a statement today criticizing the commission’s findings. Dan Taylor, Vice President of Google Ads, wrote:

“The Statement of Objections from the European Commission sets out claims that are not new and relate to a narrow part of our advertising business. It fails to recognize how advanced advertising technology helps merchants reach customers and grow their businesses — while lowering costs and expanding choices for consumers.

“Ad tech is fiercely competitive and constantly evolving. We compete with hundreds of companies in this space, including household names like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta as well as specialized advertising technology companies like Criteo, The Trade Desk, and many others. Even media companies and retailers now offer competing advertising technologies.

“The digital advertising market enjoys competitive pricing, lively innovation, and robust competition — helping advertisers, publishers, and consumers. We look forward to showing how our ad tech tools help make the internet open, and accessible — and how breaking them would diminish the availability of free, ad-supported content that benefits everyone.”

Has this happened before? Earlier this year, nine U.S. states (Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Washington, and West Virginia), joined forces to bring a similar lawsuit against Google.

The states accused the search engine’s ad business of violating antitrust regulations. To rectify the matter, they urged Google to break up its Ad Manager suite, claiming it was exploiting its online advertising dominance. Google denied the claims and asked for the case to be dismissed.

In 2020, Google was also accused of breaching antitrust laws again in order to sustain its position as the leading search engine. This case is set for trial in September.

Deeper dive: You can read Google’s full response to the European Commission announcement about its advertising technology.

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About the author

Nicola Agius is Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land after joining in 2023. She covers paid search, paid social, retail media and more. Prior to this, she was SEO Director at Jungle Creations (2020-2023), overseeing the company’s editorial strategy for multiple websites. She has over 15 years of experience in journalism and has previously worked at OK! Magazine (2010-2014), Mail Online (2014-2015), Mirror (2015-2017), Digital Spy (2017-2018) and The Sun (2018-2020). She also previously teamed up with SEO agency Blue Array to co-author Amazon bestselling book ‘Mastering In-House SEO’.

Read more here https://sites.google.com/view/jedi-digital-marketing/social-media-management