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Kamala Harris Should Embrace—and Build Upon—Biden’s Antitrust Legacy
Harris should reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission, signalling that under her administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.
Sep 06, 2024
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket hasn’t just shifted the 2024 electoral calculus—it’s also reignited the battle for the party’s ideological soul. Just as progressives have outlined their hopes for a Harris administration, so too have bad faith actors looking to turn back the clock on the most significant progressive achievement of the Biden era: the reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.
The revival of anti-monopoly politics has been met with predictable ire from corporate interests that have got off scot-free for decades. This has been largely directed at Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair who has taken on some of America’s most entrenched monopolies. Rather than accede to the demands of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, Harris should embrace—and entrench—the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts.
It goes without saying that progressives have the right to be disappointed with the legacy of the Biden administration in many respects. Whether one lays the blame on the White House or congressional math, many of the most promising initiatives pushed in 2021 never made it to law. However, the early Biden administration’s focus on reinvigorating antitrust enforcement is one that has paid dividends in the years that followed. The Reagan-era defanging of antitrust helped pave the way for the present-day monopoly crisis, which has left its mark on everything from the tech sector to the rental market to grocery shopping.
The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.
The Biden administration deserves credit for breaking with his predecessors’ hands-off approach to taking on corporate monopolies. Both Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), have taken a tough line against anti-competitive behavior. Khan and Kanter’s efforts to block illegal mergers have been met with rage from corporate America’s worst offenders. This has resulted in frivolous demands for their recusals from key antitrust cases, as well as broader efforts to kneecap antitrust regulation itself. With a “changing of the guard” on the Democratic ticket, these same actors have taken to demanding Harris abandon Biden-era antitrust efforts, complete with a change in personnel.
Harris should reject these demands, and instead look to Khan and Kanter’s successes as a road map for enacting change in Washington. Time and time again, Khan and Kanter have delivered victories for consumers in the face of a hostile press and a right-wing judicial landscape. In August, the DOJ emerged victorious in its historic U.S. v. Google antitrust lawsuit, one that Kanter fittingly says belongs on the “Mount Rushmore of antitrust cases.” In the years following House Democrats’ 2020 report on monopoly power in the tech sector, Biden administration enforcers have filed antitrust suits against Amazon and Apple, along with a separate Google suit set to go to trial this month.
If successful, these lawsuits stand to rein in some of the tech sector’s worst abuses. But make no mistake: The FTC and DOJ’s antitrust efforts target far more than just the abuses of the “Big Tech” giants. This year, the DOJ launched a blockbuster antitrust suit against Ticketmaster, which was largely given a pass for its abuses in previous administrations. The DOJ Antitrust Division has stood with tenants by filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage over the company’s role in enabling rental price gouging. The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.
Antitrust enforcement is both crucial to building a fairer economy and broadly popular with the general public. For this reason, Harris should firmly reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission. Doing so would send a strong signal that under a Harris administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.
Instead of turning back the clock on antitrust, a Harris administration should build upon the progress of the last three years by launching other needed antitrust initiatives. This could include, among others, taking on YouTube-related competition issues, which advocates have sounded the alarm on. More broadly, the DOJ and FTC under a Harris administration should continue to probe would-be monopolists in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Given the scope of monopolistic behavior in today’s economy, regulators under a Harris Administration must take a vigilant approach to anti-competitive practices across sectors.Keep ReadingShow Less
Google-California Deal Should Be a Wake-Up Call: Digital Monopolies Hurt Journalism
Google is the sole winner of this deal, and this should be an example of what not to do to redress power and financial imbalances between news media and large digital platforms.
Sep 05, 2024
A California-Google deal that would provide $250 million for local journalism and an “AI accelerator” program was announced by California Gov. Gavin Newsom as a “major breakthrough” to ensure the “survival” of newsrooms across the state. In exchange, the state has agreed to kill the California Journalism Protection Act, a bill that would have forced the tech giant to share revenues with news publishers and which was deemed to be more transparent than similar legislation in Australia and Canada.
News publishers and other advocates focusing on the good side of the deal (more money) have also been cautious about celebrating it. Journalists’ unions and associations have been more straightforward in decrying it. Altogether, newsrooms are feeling the toll of elongating their “survival” mode, especially if the trade-off is to continue handing their future to those who helped create their crisis.
By eliminating legislation enforcing revenue-share agreements, California has reduced Google’s financial liability compared with Australia and Canada, where news outlets, including broadcasters, are compensated for creating value for Google. In addition, Google got the state of California to pick up an important portion of the $250 million bill using public funding. More significantly, the deal allowed the corporation to avert disclosing how much value news generates for Google’s search engine, which estimates put at $21 billion a year in the U.S. based on searches using news media content.
Concentrated market power is hurting the chances for a free and financially independent press to thrive.
Let’s be clear: Google is the sole winner of this deal, and this should be an example of what not to do to redress power and financial imbalances between news media and large digital platforms. If anything, it should be a wake-up call to the harmful effects of digital monopolies on the news media industry. Governments can no longer spare Google and other tech giants from their role in the financial crisis of journalism.
The recent ruling from a federal district court confirming Google’s monopoly over search tells part of this story. Although that case didn’t address the corporation’s impact on newsrooms, we learned that Google’s grip on advertising demand couldn’t have been achieved without a key illegal practice: its multibillion-dollar contracts with phone makers that were designed to squash rival search engines. Today, search advertising continues to be the largest channel capturing ad spend in the U.S.
Most importantly, this stranglehold enabled Google to constrain media’s bargaining power and prevent any meaningful discussion about the dollar value news content provided to its search engine—as the looming threat of permanently turning off news access would have hurt the press even more. Without significant challengers to Google’s search engine, newsrooms are beholden to Google’s whims for news discoverability and distribution on search results.
A separate trial starting next week tackling Google’s monopoly over advertising technologies (ad-tech) is likely to complete the story of this corporation’s role in this crisis. The ad-tech industry, once thought to help news publishers make revenue from digital, has become extraordinarily complex, opaque, and concentrated. At the same time, it is the backbone that connects advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads across the web—providing an alternative to search and social media ads, all of which drives a marketplace worth around $300 billion in the United States alone.
Besides controlling search ad revenues, Google also controls the ad-tech platforms upon which most ad sales by news publishers are made. Without getting too technical, in practice this means Google has eyes on the value of news publishers’ ad inventory, on advertisers’ preferences and perceptions about those publishers, and on the algorithms that connect the two to determine ad prices.
Also unchallenged, Google controls between 50% and 90% of transactions in each layer of this market, where it takes a cut of about 35% of each ad dollar spent. In the trial, the Department of Justice is expected to cut through the ad-tech complexity and show how Google has also manipulated ad prices to divert ad dollars away from news publishers into the tech giant’s own pockets. For the first time in many years, in this case the DOJ is seeking a breakup to redress Google’s harms.
As a counterargument, Google has been trying to push a story in which a “very competitive” market already exists, since multiple giants in various other sectors—Amazon, Walmart, CVS, etc.—are also competing for ad dollars. This view invites us to presume news publishers and journalists must be doing something wrong, so what else is there to do but to help them to “survive” in this brave, new world?
But nothing could be further from the truth. Newsrooms across the world have not stopped innovating, changing their revenue models, and adapting to audiences’ new habits. Journalists continue to defend their trade and the rights that ensure they can do their jobs safely. People still want to find reliable news. But when it comes to competition, how do we even call it that when a handful of players control not only where news is discovered and accessed, but also drive appetite to monetize audiences’ personal data, and ultimately assign value to a publisher’s ad inventory?
The fight for legislation in California that would redress these imbalances was the first step—not the ultimate fix—to coming out of the “survival” mentality that has been entrenched for far too long in journalism. Concentrated market power is hurting the chances for a free and financially independent press to thrive. As long as short-term fixes like the California-Google deal, obscure this reality, we will continue to allow the very same people we should be holding accountable to shape the future of democracy.
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3 Important Questions You Won’t Hear Asked in the Presidential Debates
We should not underestimate the power of debate questions to shape the political landscape.
Aug 28, 2024
In November 2020, Common Dreams published my op-ed “Three Questions That Didn’t Get Asked During the Presidential Debates (and Probably Never Will).” The article offered several probing policy questions that (I surmised) would never make it through the corporate media’s screening process. Sure enough, none of those issues were addressed in the widely televised debates in advance of the 2020 election.
But here we are again. As we approach the November election, I find myself once again reflecting on some of the urgent policy issues that always seem to get buried in the corporate media’s constant supply of irrelevant distractions. This includes but is not limited to endless and often relatively inconsequential and inconclusive polls, the character assassinations of the day, gratuitous speculation from talking heads supplying what one of my old college professors used to call “graceful monuments to the obvious,” and whole buckets of information overload that lack perspective and thoughtful analysis. The now nearly universal proclivity of large news organizations to emphasize horse-race politics combined with infotainment and political theatrics has produced conventions and debates that sometimes seem to have more in common with rock concerts or sporting events than venues offering the kind of thoughtful analysis of issues that are supposed to be the core of democracy.
In what is undoubtedly one of the oddest and most convoluted elections in U.S. history, we seem to be in the position of choosing not only two presidential candidates but two alternate realities.
Back in the day, all this character assassination used to be called muckraking journalism and it was primarily bottom-feeder publications that engaged in it. Now, we have supposedly well-regarded mainstream media outlets digging up as much dirt and negative trivia as they can find on candidates who are now expected to pass impossible purity tests. While, on the one hand, our reigning cultural amnesia almost guarantees that the lessons of the past will get memory holed, paradoxically, the unforgiving permanence of the digital realm and the internet also guarantees that no act or mistake on the part of any public figure is either forgotten or forgiven. It seems to go without saying that all of this turmoil generates far more heat than light. Given this sorry state of affairs and offered as a simple thought experiment, here are some questions that the corporate media should be asking candidates, not only in the presidential debates but also as a matter of course given the dizzying events of this most unusual presidential campaign.
Question 1: The Role of AI in the Economy and the Job Market
Although there’s a widespread public perception that AI was only developed by Big Tech, for many years the federal government has sponsored a huge AI development program working closely with and even funding the private sector. In 2024, Big Tech unleashed powerful but still poorly understood AI capabilities into the economy before their implications and impact on labor markets could be fully assessed. The federal government lagged even further behind industry in trying to come up with sound regulatory policies so that AI would not severely disrupt an already tenuous and unstable economic picture. It now seems abundantly clear that AI is indeed displacing all sorts of jobs ranging from customer service to professional positions in marketing, accounting, entertainment, and many other fields of endeavor.
Rather than facing and managing a problem that government itself helped create, Congress and the executive branch seem content to allow unelected technocrats such as Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, to formulate policy proposals and other much needed guardrails. In addition, it’s troubling that rogue AI is already acting as a chaos agent, can undermine the foundations of democracy by empowering hackers, and is further aggravating the crisis of information quality and validity that haunts our political landscape. In the larger picture, both robots and AI—with the apparent blessing of both corporations and government—are beginning to intrusively inject themselves into society, culture, and politics. Given all of these trends, what is your position on how AI and robotics will impact the economy and the quality of life in the U.S.?
Question 2: Privatizing the Healthcare System
The mass closings of Steward hospitals nationwide has dramatically highlighted state and federal governments’ failure in allowing for-profit and private equity companies to take over many aspects of the healthcare system. This company, which operated 31 hospitals in eight states, has now filed for bankruptcy and has been selling its hospitals to pay off creditors after years of mismanagement and profiteering by its executive team. Private equity firms have been making acquisitions in healthcare for years including ambulances, hospitals, and, more recently, primary care practices.
The corporate greed of these companies is appalling. They see the decline in healthcare offering opportunities for monetary gain even as they themselves contribute to that decline and government regulators do little to ameliorate the situation. Many citizens, through no fault of their own, are mired in medical debt. Reportedly, the largest use of gofundme in the U.S. is now for paying medical bills. In addition, the way that the Covid-19 crisis was handled—a topic now seemingly memory holed during the campaign—has also been a major factor in the downward spiral of healthcare quality. Given these realities, what is your plan for restoring reliable and affordable healthcare in the U.S. and getting for-profit companies out of the healthcare system?
Question 3: Out-of-Control Corporate Influence in U.S. Politics
The longstanding ripple effects from the Citizens United Supreme Court decision have dramatically altered the political landscape. Not only has it opened the door to outsized influence from dark money and billionaire donors but it has also allowed corporations to wield wildly disproportionate influence on government policies and legislation. This is a problem that threatens the very core of our democratic processes. Over the last few decades, corporate power has increased many times over and the takeover of U.S. politics has opened the door to corrupt practices and allowed corporations to place their interests over and above the collective interests and well-being of the public. Public opinion polls show this is one major reason why Americans now have such little faith in all three branches of government.
Because the most powerful and influential companies tend to be in the Big Tech sector, equally concerning is how technological control is being used to advance and consolidate this new “behind the scenes” power structure. We might view it as technologically-enhanced “back door” politics. The overall privatization of the public commons and the sweetheart deals that take place behind the scenes are now deceptively coded as “public-private partnerships.”
Many current and challenging societal problems can be traced to this corporate takeover. Further, a huge part of this scenario is the information control wielded by Big Tech and Big Media which have become our primary sources of political news and information. Given this situation, what is your position on the disproportionate control that corporations now exercise over our political system? What will your administration do to eliminate pay-for-play politics, and restore the kind of democratic governance that Americans deeply long for and deserve?
In what is undoubtedly one of the oddest and most convoluted elections in U.S. history, we seem to be in the position of choosing not only two presidential candidates but two alternate realities. It’s all the more important therefore that responsible and responsive probing of the top-of-mind existential issues faced by the American public be thoughtfully and proactively addressed by the media. Many Americans are already asking these hard questions in their minds and hearts. If this process can be broadened to embrace the public commons of debate and vigorous discourse, then perhaps we’ll see a glimmer of hope for real transformative change at this unprecedented crossroads in our nation’s history.
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