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Today, Morgan Harper, Senior Advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project, will appear in front of the House Judiciary Committee to discuss Economic Liberties' policy priorities and the recommendations in the Antitrust Subcommittee's recent report on restoring competition in digital markets.
Today, Morgan Harper, Senior Advisor at the American Economic Liberties Project, will appear in front of the House Judiciary Committee to discuss Economic Liberties' policy priorities and the recommendations in the Antitrust Subcommittee's recent report on restoring competition in digital markets.
The hearing -- "Reviving Competition, Part 1: Proposals to Address Gatekeeper Power and Lower Barriers to Entry Online" -- comes on the heels of a particularly scandalous week for Facebook, in which it shut off access to Australian news and information around the world and is under increasing scrutiny for allegedly systemically defrauding advertiserson its platform. In her testimony, Harper will encourage the subcommittee to pursue a "regulated competition" approach, arguing that both structural solutions and new regulation are needed to address the broad range of economic and social harms posed by dominant platforms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Morgan Harper's written testimony is available below.
Chairman Cicilline, Ranking Member Buck, and Members of the Subcommittee and the full Committee, thank you for the opportunity to give this testimony.
I appear before you today as someone who has devoted her career to figuring out how to broaden economy opportunity in this country. That pursuit has led me many places: the Federal Trade Commission as a recent college graduate, a corporate law firm, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What those experiences have shown is that until we address corporate power at its core, the rest of us are just playing for economic scraps. And currently, there is no greater power that threatens our livelihoods and civil liberties than the Big Tech platforms.
The basic issue is best put by none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we're really setting policies."
The technology that we have today is extraordinary. Each of us carries a camera-enabled supercomputer in our pocket, which connects to a grid of billions of people with whom we can talk, do business, tell stories, or organize in civic or political groups. My generation has grown up watching these technologies flourish. The most important technologies underpinning the digital era, like semiconductors, networking equipment, personal computing, are the result of decades of research and engineering across public and private institutions, as well as coherent competition policy which ensured that this technology would never be captured by a monopolist.
And yet, today, that is exactly what has happened. We have allowed the digital technology that should be a tool of liberty to become instead a vehicle for profit-driven control and deception. By refusing to use our traditional anti-monopoly policies, we have allowed a few tech barons to choose who gets to participate in politics, pick winners and losers in the economy, and sell services enabling scams, counterfeiting and racial discrimination.
There are many reasons to be concerned with the overwhelming power of large technology platforms, and monopolies in general. In this testimony, I'm going to try to cover many of them. But the core problem is simple and gets to what Mr. Zuckerberg noted. Facebook and the other tech platforms are not just corporations. They run critical 21st century infrastructure and make their own rules. We cannot allow tech monopolists to wield this power, with the ability to censor or destroy. Under your leadership, Congress can restore the government's long legacy of standing up to corporate power that threatens our American way of life. It is time to break them up.
I. Defining dominance and harm
As the subcommittee's extraordinary 16-month investigation and report revealed last year, Big Tech corporations--Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple--have and abuse their extreme market power. Facebook and Google, which together control key communications networks and the digital advertising industry, conduct unwanted surveillance of their users to maximize advertising revenue and depreciate the value of newsgathering. Amazon runs the infrastructure for modern commerce, and engages in a host of anti-competitive practices, such as predatory pricing, leveraging its dominance from one market into another, self-preferencing its own products, tying its services to extract more money from those who must use services, and weaponizing counterfeit products. Apple dominates the mobile operating system market, and uses it to demand exorbitant fees and commissions from developers for software distribution.
It is impossible to include an exhaustive list of the harms this dominance causes because they are so large and so intertwined with much of our economic activity. Fortunately, this subcommittee is well-aware of the remarkable scale and scope of these institutions, so I will just mention a few.
Let's start with entrepreneurship, the backbone of Silicon Valley. There has been a sharp decline in business formation since the early 1980s, but venture capitalists have started using a specific term in the technology industry. They call industry segments dominated by a Big Tech monopolist a "kill zone," and research shows there is less investment and innovation in areas adjacent to large firms such as Google and Amazon. But it's not just in the technology sector. Big Tech undermines ordinary small businesses that are the glue of our communities. From 2000 to 2015, the economy lost more than 108,000 local, independent retail businesses, a drop of 40 percent when measured relative to population. In a 2016 survey of more than 3,000 independent business owners, 70 percent noted that competition from Amazon was their biggest challenge. These firms also have significant tax advantages from cities and states, which they then use to compete with smaller local firms.
These monopolists also tend to reduce product quality over time as competition declines. For instance, surveys routinely show that Americans do not like corporations collecting their private data, and when it was competing with MySpace and other social networks, Facebook promised that it would not engage in excessive collection and misuse of user data. At one point, the firm even allowed users to vote on its terms of service. As soon as Facebook gained market power, however, it backtracked on its promises to both users and media partners that had installed Like and Share buttons under the premise that Facebook would not collect user data. When users could no longer switch, Facebook downgraded the quality of the product. It has subsequently begun collecting more data and inserting more ads into its social networks. Google, similarly, is directing more and more traffic to its own properties and paid search results, as well as disguising which search results are paid and which are organic. This can cause massive harm, such as directing addicts to poor quality recovering facilities. Google, Amazon and Facebook regularly enable scams and the sale and trafficking in counterfeit items.
Collectively, these firms control the livelihoods of many American small business owners and workers. They enable the rampant spread of misinformation, which has compromised our elections and the safety of our schools, communities, and even members of Congress. And they have almost entirely destroyed a core American institution- a free and vibrant press in the form of local newspapers.
II. Dominance not the result of skill, but exploitation of public policy gaps
The dominant tech firms did not achieve this market power only through ingenuity or business acumen. Rather, they exploited gaps in public policy, including the weakening of merger law and decades of lax monopolization enforcement, to build dominance by aggressively acquiring other businesses and employing anticompetitive tactics to squash competitors. Google has spent over $20 billion to buy more than 145 companies. One of these companies was DoubleClick, which enabled Google to control the infrastructure between advertisers and publishers in the display ad market. Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, eliminating their most serious competitors. In total, Facebook has acquired over 80 companies that triggered public reporting since its inception. Amazon has acquired at least 100 companies. And Apple's own CEO has told the media they acquire a new company every two to three weeks. Not a single acquisition was challenged by enforcers, and the Department of Justice did not bring a major Section 2 monopolization claim from 1998 until 2020.
This unquestionable dominance led this subcommittee to take on the important work of launching the most thorough investigation into monopoly power in 50 years. The subcommittee's report and recommendations made clear that a traditional, regulated competition approach, including structural separations, is necessary to rein in these corporations and restore freedom in the digital markets.
III. Our history of regulated competition
The United States has a tradition of using a regulated competition approach to limit corporate power and protect democracy. Congress has been especially attentive to corporations that play an infrastructure role and have integrated into adjacent markets that rely on their networks. By 1900, for example, the dominant railroad corporations had acquired coal mining businesses. After beginning to limit rail for coal operators whom they did not own, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, which prevented corporations from managing transportation and ownership of the companies using such transport.
Over the course of the 20th century, policymakers have used laws, regulations, or antitrust suits to break up aviation, banks, television networks, bank holding companies, electric utilities, data processing/telecommunications and telephone systems, often to eliminate conflicts of interest, encouraging resiliency, block concentrations of power and control, and promote diversity. The result was the most robust economy in global history, with high wages, high technology, and high business formation.
This approach has been especially important in communications industries, from the founding of the Post Office to telegraph regulation to the antitrust suits against AT&T in the 20th century that opened our telecommunications apparatus to both local control and competition. In the 1970s, the government sued AT&T, at the time a telecommunications giant operating local exchange calls, long distance calls, and telephone equipment. They eventually reached a settlement that required AT&T to divest Bell Operating Companies that ran local exchanges. Though many speculated about the feasibility of breaking up such a large company, the divesture arguably led to, "competition in the telecom sector and a burst of technological progress" as John Kwoka and Tommaso Valetti write. The most common result of break-ups of monopolies, in other words, is likely innovation.
IV. Why break-ups are necessary
As noted in the above examples, at the core of a regulated competition approach are structural separations or break ups. There are several reasons to break up dominant Big Tech platforms:
Some claim that break ups are infeasible and unduly burdensome, but available evidence does not support that claim. In fact, there is reason to believe that break ups, particularly in the case of undoing previously consummated mergers, might be easier to accomplish with a tech platform than some other commodity-based industries. Furthermore, companies commonly initiate self-imposed break ups. One study examining corporate activity in the 1990s found that over 1600 divestitures occurred, amounting to roughly two per year. They are widely recognized as a tool to streamline operations at many of the largest global corporations. Digital platforms similarly will adjust with changed business models after structural separations.
V. The Need for Regulation and Antitrust Law Updates
Structural separation will not entirely tame the problem of dominance. First, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple will still be very large corporations with substantial power to recreate their dominance, or to continue choosing who gets to participate in our commerce or politics. Dominant firms should be banned from discriminating against other firms. The same principle making railroads common carriers in the 1880s, should apply to the dominant platforms after structural separation. They should give market players equal access to their platforms and not pick winners or losers. Part of preserving this equal access will involve allowing users to communicate between different platforms and have access to their data in case they want to switch platforms.
Second, competition is not an unvarnished virtue. While it is possible to compete with better products and services, it is also possible to compete with lower standards for product quality or wages, or for more unwanted surveillance and monetization of fraudulent or defamatory content. Privacy rules such as purpose limitation of data, rules against deceptive search engines, do not track rules, labor and safety standards for workers, anti-counterfeiting measures, and/or bans on targeted advertising can recreate a high-trust, high-wage economy with strong business formation.
Finally, structural separation must be completed with changes to antitrust law to restore mid-20th century monopolization and anti-merger statutes. Breaking up firms is relatively useless if they can simply recombine. Bright lines rules against mergers based on size or market power, as well as specific bans on market conduct for dominant firms, would enable competition to work as a discipline against dominant firms. Similarly, banning arbitration agreements and easier methods to enable class action lawsuits would once again grant competitors, workers and customers access to the courts to seek redress.
It is important to reemphasize that this problem is fundamentally political, not technical. Regulation alone cannot stop the harms the digital platforms are causing, because it will not erode the political power that has allowed these firms to challenge the rule of law itself. Facebook is taking out full-page ads in The New York Times inviting regulation because its executives know that the true threat to their business model is a break-up. In fact, when the Australian government moved forward with a regulation forcing them to compensate news outlets for their content, far from welcoming the measure with open arms, Facebook announced it would ban all news. They are retaliating to scare other governmental bodies like this Congress from imposing even more aggressive remedies. Only structural separation can limit their power to enable effective regulation.
VI. Conclusion
The concentrated power of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple present systemic risks to our economy and democracy. When questioned about these impacts, executives from these platforms mislead. They lie to the media. They lie to their own customers. They try to divert attention away from detrimental impacts they are causing by making grand philanthropic gestures. They will give millions of dollars in the name of fighting for racial justice, but refuse to acknowledge how their platforms are the biggest threat to civil rights of our time. If we do not act quickly, the harms identified in your report will further erode the economic liberty of workers and small business owners. I encourage the subcommittee to continue to reassert your Congressional authority over monopolists who seek to govern commerce and key parts of society in your place.
Read Economic Liberties' "Addressing Facebook and Google's Harms Through a Regulated Competition Approach," here.
Learn more about Economic Liberties here.
The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America's system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.
"There must be accountability for this administration's dangerous disregard for our national security," said one Democratic congressman and former military prosecutor.
U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and members of his staff have created at least 20 group chats on the encrypted messaging app Signal to coordinate official work on sensitive policy issues around the world, four people who were added to such groups told Politico.
Waltz was already under fire for a group chat about the U.S. bombing Yemen when the report broke. Politico's Dasha Burns wrote on Wednesday that "none of the four individuals said they were aware of whether any classified information was shared, but all said that posts in group chats did include sensitive details of national security work."
The anonymous sources told Politico that the group chats involved policy issues involving China, Ukraine, Gaza, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. One of them said, "It was commonplace to stand up chats on any given national security topic," one of the four sources told the outlet.
The Politico article comes a day after The Washington Postreported that Waltz and other members of President Donald Trump's National Security Council conducted official government business via their personal Gmail accounts, which are far less secure than Signal chats.
The fresh revelations also come as "Signalgate"—in which Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other top Trump administration officials added a journalist to a Signal group chat about plans to bomb Yemen—still smolders.
Calls for Waltz's resignation or firing, which were already numerous in the wake of Signalgate, mounted Wednesday.
Resign.
[image or embed]
— Senator Ed Markey ( @markey.senate.gov) April 2, 2025 at 2:26 PM
"Waltz must resign. Hegseth must resign," Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on the social media site Bluesky. "There must be accountability for this administration's dangerous disregard for our national security."
Referring to the Signal group chats, Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) asked on the social media site X, "How many more are there?"
"Even Trump allies say this doesn't pass the smell test," he added. "National Security Adviser Waltz and Pete Hegseth need to be fired."
"He's taking a sledgehammer to the economy and pursuing unpopular, reckless trade policies that will do nothing to benefit workers and only serve to increase costs for consumers," warned one expert.
After U.S. President Donald Trump announced long-anticipated sweeping tariffs at the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, economists, labor leaders, American lawmakers, and other critics reiterated that the move will negatively impact people worldwide.
The president revealed that on April 5, he will impose a 10% tariff on all imported goods and additional penalties for dozens of countries, including major trading partners—ignoring warnings that, as Jeffrey Sachs wrote in a Common Dreams opinion piece, his "tariffs will fail to close the trade and budget deficits, raise prices, and make America and the world poorer."
Trump's related executive order states that he finds "that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and nontariff barriers, and U.S. trading partners' economic policies that suppress domestic wages and consumption, as indicated by large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States."
The order adds that the "threat has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States in the domestic economic policies of key trading partners and structural imbalances in the global trading system," and declares a national emergency.
NBC Newsreported Wednesday that "global markets reacted sharply and swiftly... with investors fleeing U.S. stock indexes and companies that rely on global supply chains seeing their stocks plummet." The outlet noted that Dan Ives, an analyst at the investment firm Wedbush Securities, wrote, "President Trump just finished his tariff speech at the White House and we would characterize this slate of tariffs as 'worse than the worst case scenario' the street was fearing."
Trump framed this step in his trade war as "liberation day" and claimed that the duties are "reciprocal," but economists pushed back. Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan said: "Trump announces his tariffs, which are (somehow?) related to the trade barriers other countries are imposing on the U.S. But... THE NUMBERS HE'S PRESENTING BEAR NO RELATION TO REALITY. It would be absurd to call these reciprocal tariffs. They're grievances."
Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens
said in a statement that "Americans have one simple request of President Trump: lower prices. Instead of answering the call, he's taking a sledgehammer to the economy and pursuing unpopular, reckless trade policies that will do nothing to benefit workers and only serve to increase costs for consumers."
"But Trump doesn't care about what happens to working families, as long as his billionaire donors and advisers are happy," she continued. "Republicans are already
chomping at the bit to use any potential tariff revenue to fund their next massive billionaire tax break."
Kobie Christian, a spokesperson for the national campaign Unrig Our Economy, similarly concluded that "there is no other way to say it—this is an out-of-touch policy designed by a billionaire and for billionaires."
"Virtually no one will benefit from these Republican-backed tariffs—except for the ultrawealthy who will get yet another tax break, paid for by working families," Christian added. "Small business owners will be forced to raise their prices to keep their businesses afloat, and Americans will have to pay even more for everyday goods. These tariffs could even push the economy into a recession. American workers need lower costs, not more tariffs and billionaire handouts."
American Economic Liberties Project's Rethink Trade director, Lori Wallach, declared that "the businesses that profiteered from our old broken trade system should pay for the necessary transition to more balanced trade, not American workers and consumers. President Trump must take immediate action to stop corporations from using the pretext of these tariffs to price gouge the very Americans already slammed by decades of bad trade policy and corporate greed."
Wallach was among those who pointed out that tariffs can be a vital tool. She explained that "Trump's announcement goes much broader, but tariffs against mercantilist countries like China, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to counter systemic trade abuses can help restore America's capacity to produce more of the critical products needed for American families to be healthy and safe and for our country to be more resilient and secure."
"But to deliver more American production and good jobs, the goal must be to balance trade, not equalize tariff rates, and tariffs must be consistent," she stressed. "Tariffs must be accompanied by other industrial policies like tax credits to build demand for U.S.-made goods, incentives for investment in new production capacity and bans on stock buybacks, and easier union formation so gains go to wages, not just profits."
The only thing being liberated today is money from the bank accounts of hard-working Americans.
— Robert Reich ( @rbreich.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest federation of unions, also said that "the strategic use of tariffs can be an effective tool to support our industries and protect jobs at home. But they must be accompanied by policies that invest in our manufacturing base and a strong commitment to promoting workers' fundamental right to organize trade unions and bargain collectively."
"Unfortunately, the Trump administration's attacks on trade union workers' rights at home, gutting of the government agency that works to discourage the outsourcing of American jobs, and efforts to erode critical investments in U.S. manufacturing take us backward," she asserted. "We will continue to fight for trade policy that prioritizes the interests of working people without causing unnecessary economic pain for America's working families."
Some congressional Democrats shared similar criticism. Michigan Congresswoman Debbie Dingell said that "when used strategically, tariffs are a critical tool to bring back jobs and support American workers and industries," but "I'm concerned about the chaotic and immediate implementation of these wide-reaching tariffs."
U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.)
wrote on social media that "Trump's dumb tariffs are going to drive up costs for real working people. Like the dad who is trying to save money by fixing his car at home. Those parts from AutoZone are made somewhere else and the prices will go up!"
As the White House circulated a multipage sheet of targeted countries, Gomez and Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) were among those who noticed that Russia—which is waging a yearslong war on Ukraine—is absent from the list.
Meanwhile, as critics including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick at the American Immigration Council highlighted, the list included the Australian territory of the Heard Island and McDonald Islands—even though the islands are "completely uninhabited."
"Population zero. I guess we're going to tariff the seagulls?" quipped Reichlin-Melnick. "It kind of feels like a White House intern went through Wikipedia's list of countries and just generated this list off of that with no further research."
Organizer Max Berger
wrote on Bluesky Wednesday, "I like how no one knows whether the president of the United States is going to tank the global economy because he's a fucking idiot—or if he's just doing a bit."
"Trump is clearly comfortable weaponizing Social Security for political purposes, and we fear that this is only the beginning," said one critic.
The top Democrat on the U.S. House Oversight Committee on Wednesday led calls for the resignation of acting Social Security Administration Commissioner Leland Dudek following the revelation of internal emails confirming that the SSA canceled contracts with the state of Maine as political payback after Democratic Gov. Janet Mills publicly defied President Donald Trump in support of transgender student athletes.
The emails—which were obtained by House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Gerry Connolly (D-Va.)—show that Dudek ordered the cancellation of enumeration at birth and electronic death registration contracts with Maine, even though SSAd subordinates warned that such action "would result in improper payments and potential for identity theft."
"These emails confirm that the Trump administration is intentionally creating waste and the opportunity for fraud."
Dudek—who is leading the SSA while the Senate considers Trump's nomination of financial services executive Frank Bisignano—replied to the staffer: "Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child."
He was referring to Mills, who stood up to Trump in February after the president threatened to suspend federal funding for Maine unless the state banned transgender girls and women from participating on female scholastic sports teams.
The termination of the enumeration at birth contract briefly forced Maine parents to register their newborns for a Social Security number at a Social Security office, rather than checking a box on a form at the hospital as is customary, before the SSA reversed its decision.
Connolly sent Dudek a letter demanding that he "resign immediately" and submit to a transcribed interview with House Oversight Committee Democrats. Connolly wrote that Dudek "ordered these contracts terminated" as "direct retaliation" for Mills' defiance, "even though you knew that doing so would increase improper payments and create opportunities for fraudsters."
Government accountability advocates also condemned Dudek's actions.
"These emails confirm that the Trump administration is intentionally creating waste and the opportunity for fraud—in this case, to punish Maine Gov. Janet Mills for not bowing down to Donald Trump," Social Security Works president Nancy Altman told Common Dreams.
"The people actually punished by these actions were exhausted new parents in Maine, forced to drag their newborns to overcrowded Social Security offices in the middle of a measles outbreak," she continued. "Thankfully, the Trump administration had to quickly reverse course after massive public outrage. But Trump is clearly comfortable weaponizing Social Security for political purposes, and we fear that this is only the beginning."
"Once again, we see Team Trump resorting to revenge to set domestic policy."
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told Common Dreams that "it does not surprise us at all that this administration would weaponize Social Security against anyone who disagrees with or challenges President Trump."
"It's one of the concerns that we have with Elon Musk and [the Department of Government Efficiency] having access to everyone's personal data without any defensible explanation for why they need it," he continued. "We and the American people have legitimate worries, not only that this information will be vulnerable to hackers, but also that it could intentionally be misused as a weapon against anyone who publicly disagrees with Trump."
"The fact that the acting commissioner himself publicly admitted that he didn't really understand the Maine contract, but canceled it anyway, proves that this administration is making reckless changes that affect real people for no legitimate reason," Richtman added. "Once again, we see Team Trump resorting to revenge to set domestic policy."
The revelation of Dudek's emails comes amid SSA turmoil caused by the termination of thousands of agency personnel in what Trump, Musk, and other Republicans claim is an effort to reduce waste and fraud. Musk—who recently referred to Social Security as the the "biggest Ponzi scheme of all time"—has proposed the elimination of up to 50% of SSA's workforce and has said that up to $700 billion could be cut from programs including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.