BIG by Matt Stoller

I believe there is a private right of action on anti trust. If you're really interested in it, I suggest subscriber to https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

Antitrust has almost never been applied to big tech, in part because antitrust enforcement in general is only given lip service for many decades. This environment means it's also very difficult for antitrust enforcers to win even if they wanted to. This has been changing recently though. https://www.thebignewsletter.com is a great resource on these things.

Posting Matt Stoller’s BIG newsletter as a resource. His journalism covering monopolies and related litigation is nothing short of phenomenal. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about how big business works to suppress employees customer and regulator power. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

I highly recommend the work of Matt Stoller in this regard (1), in particular his book Goliath (2) that goes over the history of monopoly fights over the past century and laid out how we got to where we have today (hint: eerily similar to the 1920s but not as bad) 1. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ 2. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/goliath-how-monopolies-secretly-took-ove…

I love this: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ Truly high quality writing. Also, Matt Levine.

That's a part of it. The other part was the federal government not enforcing anti trust law for decades, enabling consolidation. Matt Stoller writes extensively about this at https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ and in his book "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy." Consolidation and monopolies are good for shareholders and management, competition is good for consumers and labor, broadly speaking. Business consultants exist for a purpose that can be described as "how can we squeeze this enterprise or deal for as much as we can?" Sometimes that's squeezing your customer base through anti competitive practices. Sometimes thats offshoring (labor arbitrage). Sometimes it is M&A (realizing "efficiencies"). Sometimes it is squeezing your existing labor pool as hard as you can. Or a combination of the above. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/Matt-Stoller/Must-Read-…

I think this is at least part of the explanation. Market consolidation via mergers and acquisitions is definitely still happening - in some industries more than others - but it perhaps doesn't receive the same level of reporting as it used to. Maybe because it's become normalised, or because the narrative around monopolies seemed to shift for the better past of this century. Matt Stoller has a very good blog about monopolies and consolidation: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ To take one of the most recent articles: > In October of 2023, Exxon, one of the biggest integrated oil firms, announced it would buy Pioneer Natural Resources for $59 billion, which was quickly followed by tie-ups between Chevron and Hess ($53 billion), Occidental Petroleum and CrownRock ($12 billion), Diamondback and Endeavor ($50 billion), and Chesapeake-Southwest ($7.4 billion). Other notable deals included Exxon-Denbury ($6B), Ovintiv - Black Swan, PetroLegacy, Piedra Resources ($4B), Permian Resources-Earthstone ($4.5 billion), and Civitas buying $7 billion of assets in the Permian. That’s a little less than $200 billion in mergers. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/fear-and-consolidation-in-the-oil

yup - good read: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-efficiency-moat-why-china-is

This is great on this topic: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/gatekeepers-of-law-inside-the-westl…

FYI: Larry Ellison's net worth is down $200 billion since September. (Hateful Eight = Mag 7 + Oracle). https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-iran-war-pric…

This is a good read if you haven’t seen it. Spoiler alert it’s private equity. Shocker I know. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investi…

Well I dunno what to think about the argument here https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ which I think has an element of truth to it but that it also comes out of a need people have to believe that all problems are caused by a conspiracy of a few sinister people. Like it or not, people don't believe in markets and they don't believe in government. Maybe they are right to not believe in these things but in a certain sense it becomes a self-reinforcing pose.

Part 1: Hatching a Conspiracy (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investi… Part 2: How Chicken Genetics Barons Created the Egg Crisis (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/fowl-play-how-chicken-genetics-baro… Part 3 hasn't been released yet, but it's a good read so far.

Only attempting to share information. Is there an unstated next step (or next-next step) given Apple's moves? A gentle suggestion for a more interesting / entertaining article currently on the front page with a glance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43311696 Hatching a Conspiracy: A BIG Investigation into Egg Prices https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investi… P.s. @gnabgib thanks for all your excellent dupe postings! I used to do a lot but life got busier. You are appreciated. Edit: @thrdbndndn: My bad, yes this submitted article is the one that sucks. Thank you! If you delete your reply it will make things less confusing, but no worries and best wishes.

>> The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-rent-is-too

Well, um, er. As a matter of fact the antitrust enforcers just won their case against Google. They are in the remedy phase now. Figuring out what Google's punishment is going to be. Google no longer being allowed to pay Firefox for its default search placement is most certainly in play as part of the possible remedies. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopo… If you follow the money the idea that Google would sabotage Firefox doesn't make a lot of sense. It's more likely that Google kept Firefox on life support so they could plausibly deny that they had a browser monopoly. Firefox blew that by mismanaging its market share into oblivion though.

Strategically, quite a bit. Wired recently had a piece on this: https://www.wired.com/story/4-internal-apple-emails-helped-doj-build-a… Matt Stoller also had a really great writeup: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-the-apple-antitrust-suit-matter…

Still fascinating how presciently Matt Stoller nailed the issue 5 years ago: Let’s start by admiring the company that was Boeing, so we can know what has been lost. As one journalist put it in 2000, “Boeing has always been less a business than an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

Matt Stoller writes a lot about Antitrust recently: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ He often manages to sound hopeful. My cynicism makes me suspect any enforcement actions will tend to work in favor of the centralist forces, somehow.

The FTC is still spooling anti trust enforcement back up from a nonexistent state. A lot of the rules governing mergers and acquisitions haven't been enforced since the 1980s due to regulatory capture. Read up on developments in anti-trust in the last couple of years here: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywood > [Netflix] now routinely ends shows after their second season, even when they’re still popular. Netflix has learned that the first two seasons of a show are key to bringing in subscribers—but the third and later seasons don’t do much to retain or win new subscribers.. Ending a show after the second season saves money, because showrunners who oversee production tend to negotiate a boost in pay after two years.. Netflix’s strategy is straightforward market power exploitation.. cancelling shows that subscribers like, so it won’t have to pay creators the amount they would otherwise be able to get for making good commercially successful art. > [Pre 1990s] The Paramount Consent Decrees and the Fin-syn rules were designed to break creative industries into a three-tiered structure: production, distribution, and retailing. Producers were prohibited from vertically integrating into the traditional distribution business. That way, there are fewer conflicts of interest in the content business; producers had to create high quality work, and if they didn’t, distributors could choose to sell someone else’s art. Policy removed power as the mechanism of competition, and emphasized art.. > We should aim to restore open markets for content again. This means separating out the industry into production, distribution, and retailing. We should probably ban predatory pricing so Netflix isn’t dumping into the market. And we should…

> Thompson is responding to a specific paper. yes, he's responding to [0] which was written by Musharbash and published in Matt Stoller's newsletter. and as I said, he's being selective about what criticism he's responding to and what he's ignoring. because Stoller has also published, in the same newsletter, articles about RealPage price fixing [1, 2]. Thompson says: > The antitrust left, however, claims... if he's going to say "here's what the antitrust left believes" and then proceed to debunk it, I think it's reasonable to point out that his response is cherry-picking only part of what that "antitrust left" believes. of course, if he wants to publish a follow-up article defending RealPage, I'd love to read it. 0: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-big-homebuil… 1: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-rent-is-too 2: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental-inflation

Incredibly dishonest article. It's shocking to see people support this. And I love the way it's framed in a conspiratorial tone, and uses coded language to make you doubt this is a quantifiable problem. All while he ignored many parts of the text he allegedly was critiquing. I'm still shocked that this is getting upvoted. The very first sentence in the article is this: >This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business. "Insists" is doing a lot of work here to support the rest of the article. But it's lies through omission. >At a high level, I have never found these arguments persuasive Irrelevant if it persuades you. This isn't a high school debate class, facts and metrics are what matters. >One hallmark of a monopolistic market is rising profits. Not even close to true in theory or practice. In theory, monopolies have ever way in order to set prices for whatever goal their after. They may also lower supply thereby lowering aggregate profits. Long term profits can justify anything now. Anti competitive practices are mainstays of monopolies. Not whatever the author just made up. >The Musharbash essay on Dallas—like too much of the antitrust left’s work on housing Oh boy here we go! The boogeyman has been setup, the ominous "they" is out.. checks notes... make housing available for average people. >is filled with out-of-context quotes, overconfident assertions lacking…

This entry in Matt Stoller's newsletter goes into a lot of detail on how this works: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed > It’s easy to believe the worst about Live Nation, they have a bad reputation. But the reason I buy this particular story is because it is consistent with the behavior of many dominant middlemen firms in our economy, from pharmacy benefit managers to Amazon to big banks securitizing mortgages in the financial crisis. As monopoly scholar Kate Judge noted, such dominant middlemen use fees and kickbacks, hidden via a complex maze of subsidiaries and overlapping lines of business, to extract in ways that are hard to see. In Live Nation’s case, it’s clear they are generating a great deal of revenue, but somehow show low margins for many of their products. Hiding the price hikes is important, because monopolization is harder to prove that way.

> I gave up completely when his view of why the DOJ keeps losing literally became "the judiciary is corrupt" Why is that your view if that is what literally happens in a court of law? > The best way to explain Bidenomics is to listen to a judge Biden recently appointed to the D.C. district court, Ana Reyes, who was hostile to the Antitrust Division when they brought a case against two smartlock makers. Last month, Reyes sat on an American Bar Association panel where she attacked the idea of stronger antitrust enforcement, focusing specifically on her skepticism around labor-related claims. She bragged to the audience of defense attorneys that during the antitrust case she heard, she 'pranked' government lawyers by spending three minutes pretending to dismiss their key witness, before saying ‘April Fools. "I have never in my life heard stunned silence," she later said gleefully. > Having a corporate lawyer bully turned judge appointed by Biden killing an antitrust suit brought by Biden officials is a great example of Bidenomics, because it shows the lack of coherence of this administration’s policy. I’m a big fan of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, but another Biden judge - Jacqueline Corley - let through the largest big tech merger of all time, when Microsoft bought Activision, after Khan challenged the deal. [1] - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/strikes-and-bidenomics

> This is what happens when institutions are on the wrong side of history. Clearly, big tech does not represent an existential threat to civilization or even to economic well-being. The FTC is run by a graduate student with a paper to her name. She looks increasingly out of her depth. Alternate take: Khan is the best thing about the US government right now. Matt Stoller [1] has a good take on the Microsoft case, and in particular why it was really messed up that Microsoft won. Most of his takes are good, imo, because he believes that America is really messed up because of unchecked monopolies, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Although, what I don't see discussed as much is: suppose Microsoft won because their merger with Activision doesn't violate existing antitrust law. Well, _should it_? Those laws are just the ones we ended up with. And considering that monopoly behavior in America seems to making life much worse, year over year... yeah, instead of thinking there's something wrong with Khan for losing the case, we could see it as a need for stronger laws, which would give her FTC more teeth. [1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

Please check out the investigation in 3 parts (linked from OP's link) where they explain all of it. Fascinating reading in my opinion. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investi…

Every single load of bullshit shuffled into our faces has been presented as a benefit to consumers. Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly. And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded. More: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-secret-plot-to-unleash-corporat…

Link to the Musharbash article that spurred the congressional investigation (2025): https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-rol…

See also Matt Stoller on fire truck private equity: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-rol…