SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
monopoly
Congress Must End Ticketmaster’s Monopoly
When a company gains too much control over essential critical goods and services, the government has a responsibility to step in and restore competition.
Jun 06, 2026
If you’ve ever been to a concert or sporting event, you’ve probably dealt with Ticketmaster.
And if you have, you’ve probably overpaid.
Ticketmaster is the closest thing the live events industry has to a monopoly. It controls the ticketing market at most major American venues and has used that power to squeeze fans with higher prices and limit competition, ultimately making live entertainment more expensive for everyone.
That is why recent legal action against Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, was so encouraging. A jury ruled in April that it is an operating illegal monopoly. Remedies will follow; the question is when.
Fans should not have to skip seeing their favorite band, team, or performer because a monopolistic corporation has found another way to extract money from them.
For millions of Americans who have watched ticket prices climb due to hidden fees, service charges, and processing costs, this ruling felt like long-overdue accountability.
But one court case alone will not fix a broken marketplace.
The larger problem is not just one company’s conduct in one courtroom. It is a business model built around control. Live Nation and Ticketmaster dominate ticketing, promotion, venues, and resale in ways that make it harder for competitors to enter the market and harder for consumers to find alternatives.
Fans see the results every day. A ticket advertised at one price suddenly costs far more at checkout. Consumers are pushed into one platform with few other options. Artists and venues face enormous pressure to work within the same closed system. The result is a marketplace where one corporation can act as gatekeeper for much of American live entertainment.
That is not how a competitive market is supposed to work.
Of course, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are fighting to protect their monopolistic practices. Company executives have already made clear that they oppose a breakup and intend to challenge court efforts to unwind their power. In all likelihood, the monopoly’s legal challenges will lead to a lengthy appeals process that could lead to consumers not seeing remedies for years.
A breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster may ultimately be necessary, because one big player will ultimately squeeze out any competitors in the marketplace.
America has taken similar action before when monopolies became too powerful and too harmful to consumers. Two perfect examples are Standard Oil and the Bell Systems, and the lessons from each are clear: When a company gains too much control over an essential critical goods (like oil) and services (communications), the government has a responsibility to step in and restore competition.
But even before the courts finish their work, Congress can take action right now.
The most important step is to attack the exclusivity arrangements that keep Ticketmaster in control.
Today, venues and artists are locked into deals that leave fans with limited options. If you want to see a major concert or sporting event, Ticketmaster is frequently the only choice—even before the sale begins.
That gatekeeping power is the foundation of Ticketmaster’s monopoly.
Congress should require an open ticket marketplace. Fans should be able to buy tickets through the platform of their choice, not be forced into one company’s ecosystem.
Of course, much of the modern economy already functions this way. Consumers can compare flights, hotels, rental cars across competing platforms, just to name a few. The ticketing industry should work the same way.
Open distribution will give consumers more choice, put downward pressure on fees, and create room for competitors to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance. It would not be a full breakup, but it would deliver the same benefits while courts continue to consider broader remedies.
Congress should also keep its promise to pass the bipartisan TICKET Act, which would require ticket sellers to display the full price upfront and guarantee refunds for canceled events. Consumers deserve transparency before they buy, not surprise charges after they have already committed.
Fans should not have to skip seeing their favorite band, team, or performer because a monopolistic corporation has found another way to extract money from them.
However, this issue is about more than Ticketmaster. Congress is willing to stand up to concentrated corporate power when it harms consumers.
The live events marketplace should reward competition, transparency, and choice. Right now, it rewards control.
Congress has an opportunity to change that and put fans first. It should take it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why the US Media Is in Crisis and How to Rescue It
What we’re witnessing isn’t a singular breakdown, but discrete and cascading layers of “media capture” by capitalists, oligarchs, and authoritarians that produce censorship, exclusion, and democratic failure.
Feb 17, 2026
From the recent gutting of the Washington Post to the rightward lurch of CBS, the sheer proliferation and variation of media failures and attacks on the press during Trump 2.0 are difficult to grasp. Regulatory bodies have become political weapons. Major news organizations have complied and retreated. Media ownership has consolidated in the hands of a few feckless billionaires. Taken together, these developments endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy. Yet they resist easy synthesis.
This essay offers a schematic for making sense of the chaos. I argue that what we’re witnessing isn’t a singular breakdown, but discrete and cascading layers of “media capture” that produce censorship, exclusion, and democratic failure. This analysis is a necessary first step towards structurally reforming—and, ultimately transforming—our media institutions and infrastructures to privilege democratic needs over profit and power.
The polycrisis afflicting our media necessitates a political economic analysis that focuses on ownership, control, and market structure. It also calls for critical analyses of how law and policy determine such power relationships—both how they’re weaponized against democracy and how they could be deployed to create a more democratic media system.
To understand contemporary media failures, we must tease apart overlapping but distinct forms of capture. There’s often a tendency to focus on state capture of media, especially in countries experiencing democratic backsliding, where both public and private media systems fall under government influence and control. US media failures, however, require a broader lens. Here, authoritarian encroachment is dependent upon preexisting forms of media capture—capitalistic and oligarchic. Below, I analyze how these layers build on each other but require different interventions.
Capitalistic Capture
Extreme commercialization has long defined the US media system. The US newspaper industry became highly commercialized in the late 1800s with its increased reliance on advertising revenues. US broadcast media followed a similar hyper-commercialized path when policymakers in the early 1930s essentially privatized the public airwaves instead of building a public media system. As a result, several corporate media networks came to dominate radio and flooded it with advertising-supported programming.
Television replicated radio’s hyper-commercialized model, with the very same corporations dominating another lightly regulated medium. Although the US eventually established a public broadcasting system in the late 1960s, it remained chronically underfunded—literally almost off the chart compared to other democracies in federal funding per capita. And Congress entirely rescinded even that paltry support last year.
Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for less than half of what he paid for his superyacht, and now he’s dismantling the paper while currying favor with President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the few public interest protections that were installed to protect media diversity from unfettered capitalism—like the long-dead Fairness Doctrine—were gradually weakened or jettisoned altogether. The “Postwar Settlement,” a social compact which allowed commercial media to remain lightly regulated if they practiced social responsibility, has come undone over the ensuing decades as commercial logics overwhelmed public interest protections and professional norms.
The commercialization of US digital media began in earnest in the 1990s when the internet’s infrastructure, originally funded by the National Science Foundation, was privatized with little public debate. Today, capitalist logics permeate the entire digital stack, from the wires that deliver internet services to our homes (if we can afford the exorbitant rates from the “broadband cartel”), to the targeted advertising that operates as the internet’s core business model. Artificial intelligence is now following this same well-worn path.
In the extremely inegalitarian US, where billionaires command disproportionate power, treating our media as private commodities instead of public services all but guarantees concentration in the hands of oligarchs. To give one glaring example, Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for less than half of what he paid for his superyacht, and now he’s dismantling the paper while currying favor with President Donald Trump. With primary media organizations reduced to the playthings of plutocrats, media oligarchy becomes the dominant paradigm.
Oligarchic Capture
As ownership concentration accelerates, US information markets tend toward monopolies and oligopolies. This trend, endemic to lightly regulated capitalist systems, has only increased with the erosion of media ownership restrictions, from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to more recent “deregulatory” moves during two Trump administrations.
Extreme corporate consolidation creates a wide range of social hazards and harms. It has allowed Trump-aligned right-wing oligarchs to take control of vast media empires, from the Murdochs to the Ellisons. This kind of capture also manifests in algorithmic gatekeeping, such as Elon Musk’s X selectively amplifying and suppressing political speech. In Canada, Meta is blocking news media on its platform to avoid paying for content. More recently, concerns have risen that TikTok, following its acquisition by Trump-friendly owners, has begun to censor political expression.
Such oligarchic capture is the predictable culmination of what’s essentially a pay-to-play system where the highest bidder takes all. Under this regime, what Americans hear, see, and read is increasingly dictated by a handful of billionaires with their own agendas. These private tyrannies have the luxury of treating their media assets as a kind of “loss leader” for broader political and economic goals. Our hyper-commercialized media system was ready-made for this kind of weaponization, making authoritarian capture easy.
Authoritarian Capture
Highly concentrated media systems are structurally vulnerable to authoritarian capture. This is essentially the Viktor Orban model: Autocrats needn’t take over newsrooms at gunpoint; instead, they can count on friendly oligarchs to police the media for them. As a result, screens and airwaves are flooded with uninterrogated official narratives that flatter the administration in power.
In addition to arresting individual journalists, the Trump administration has engaged in various forms of regulatory intimidation. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman, Brendan Carr, who’s been known to sport a gold lapel pin featuring Trump’s profile, recently informed Congress that the FCC is not an independent agency. As if to prove the point, Carr has shamelessly used the FCC to carry out Trump’s agenda, often by punishing—or threatening to punish—perceived enemies. He has used mergers as leverage to extort major news companies and influence media coverage favorable to Trump.
If capitalist capture is the foundational condition that turns our media against democracy and enables other types of capture, then the most transformative remedy must confront that root problem.
In other cases, the administration has threatened regulatory intervention against recalcitrant media companies and individual commentators, such as the comedian Jimmy Kimmel. Recently, the FCC has threatened to apply the “equal time” rule—requiring that broadcast media organizations give equal airtime to competing political candidates—against late-night and daytime television shows, which previously had been exempt from this rule. As the Trump administration bullies the media, many organizations have capitulated.
While shifts in media ownership and conglomeration are often narrated as natural developments—often featuring dramatic twists and turns of individual protagonists and business interests—it’s important to remember that our media institutions are human-made, structured, and maintained through law and policy. They’re subject to change if we as a society so wish. We must resist any sense of inevitability and dare to imagine democratic alternatives.
What’s To Be Done?
One line of defense against authoritarian media capture is public interest regulation. But decades of regulatory capture—where government agencies internalize the logics and imperatives of the industries they purportedly regulate—have hollowed out such normative foundations, rendering them vulnerable to co-option and “discursive capture.” With anti-democratic tendencies already entrenched, new federal policies are nonstarters for the near term, though targeted state and local initiatives may still be viable.
A frequently invoked—though rarely realized—solution to media conglomerates is to simply break them up. Moreover, antitrust arguments have gained prominence amidst a growing anti-monopoly movement, exemplified by Lina Khan’s admirable work chairing the Federal Trade Commission. Such anti-corporate and anti-oligarchic politics clearly resonate with broad swaths of the public and should be encouraged. But this strategy can be overly reliant on competition policy, presupposing that trust-busting a few corporate giants will return social responsibility to the marketplace.
No doubt, preventing or dismantling media conglomeration is critical. We’ve seen the dangers of these vertically and horizontally integrated firms, with tentacles across advertising, content production, distribution, and data extraction. If nothing else, shrinking them and diluting their political and economic power would be real progress.
But dealing with systemic media market failures requires a more fundamental intervention. Competition alone won’t bring local journalism back to news deserts, eliminate surveillance advertising, or guarantee affordable broadband. Furthermore, smaller, profit-driven media entities are likely to exact some of the same social harms as larger ones. Many of these problems are capitalism problems, not just monopoly problems.
Fortunately, the anti-monopoly toolbox contains instruments that do more than tame capitalist excesses through market discipline. For example, the public utility regulatory tradition offers a diverse set of policy tools, ranging from robust public oversight to institutional arrangements approaching municipal and public ownership. These models can directly challenge corrosive capitalist logics at the level of media governance, reflecting a more democratic vision of ownership and control.
If capitalist capture is the foundational condition that turns our media against democracy and enables other types of capture, then the most transformative remedy must confront that root problem. We should endeavor to create non-capitalist information and communication infrastructures. The clearest antidote to hyper-capitalistic media—an argument I’ve made in these pages before—is to remove media from the market altogether and create public alternatives. A “democratic capture” of our media would ensure these institutions serve us all, not just the wealthiest few.
Such a policy program is decidedly ambitious and long-term. It requires not just a Project 2029 but a Project 2050 for structural media reform. Despite such distant projections, we must begin to clearly articulate these plans now. It’s precisely during dark political times that we must assert bold policy visions for a democratic future.
This piece was originally published on the LPE Blog.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Investigation Shows How Decades of Corporate Consolidation Have Devastated US Cattle Ranchers
"The marketplace is fundamentally broken," one rancher explained.
Dec 23, 2025
Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure—and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry.
Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by "four meat packers controlling 80% of the market."
"It's there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals," Bullard said.
To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar.
"That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken," Bullard told More Perfect Union.
Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS—in hurting US ranchers.
Writing on her Substack page earlier this month, Huffman zeroed in on Tyson's recent decision to close one of its meatpacking plants in Lexington, Nebraska to demonstrate the outsize power that big corporations have over the US food supply.
The Lexington plant employs more than 3,000 people and is capable of processing 5,000 head of cattle a day, and its closure is expected to both devastate the local economy and have a major impact on US ranchers throughout the region.
Huffman noted a report from the Associated Press estimating that the Lexington plant's closure, combined with projected job cuts at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, could cut national beef processing capacity by up to 9%.
"Ranchers were already dealing with high costs, drought, and years of uneven prices," Huffman wrote. "Now they face even less competition for their cattle. When there are fewer packers active in the market, ranchers have less bargaining power, and cattle prices fall even as beef prices in grocery stores stay near record highs."
Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign, and on Monday he released a video explaining why he spends so much time talking about monopolies, particularly in the agricultural industry.
"If you're a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies," he said. "Sygenta, Chinese-owned company you've got to buy your seed from, they control and manipulate that market. And then when your production's over and you're selling it, you're selling it to monopolies as well."
Want to know why I talk about MONOPOLIES all the time? This is why. 👇 pic.twitter.com/MuYh0gZRVr
— Dan Osborn (@osbornforne) December 22, 2025
Osborn said that the trend of industry consolidation wasn't just limited to agriculture, but is now moving forward with major railroad and media mergers.
"We need to create an economic environment in this country that favors competition," he said. "That's what a free market is. A free market isn't three or four big people or big corporations controlling everything."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Experts Warn TikTok Deal Supplants Fake Threat of 'Chinese Propaganda' With Real Threat of MAGA Propaganda
"People can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for US government propaganda," said the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Sep 23, 2025
As a prospective deal takes shape to hand partial ownership and control of social media giant TikTok to US tech giant Oracle, progressive critics are warning that it could soon become a source of pro-Trump propaganda while giving right-wing oligarchs another powerful media mouthpiece.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, the current plan is to put TikTok's US business under the control of a consortium that will include Oracle, as well as investment firm Silver Lake, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Oracle was founded by Larry Ellison, who was one of Trump's first backers in Silicon Valley. Andreessen Horowitz's Marc Andreessen donated $2.5 million to Trump's super PAC during the 2024 election campaign and he currently serves as an economic adviser to the president.
In addition to those two, right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and computer pioneer Michael Dell are also rumored to be part of the consortium.
The idea of the world's most popular video platform in the world being under the control of billionaire Trump allies has set off alarms among critics who warn that it could be used to sway public opinion with a barrage of MAGA propaganda.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed to statements made by Trump allies to warn that the TikTok deal could greatly damage the free flow of information in the US.
"If the concern had been that TikTok could be a conduit for Chinese government propaganda—a concern the Supreme Court declined to even consider—people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for US government propaganda," EFF said. "An administration official reportedly has said the new TikTok algorithm will be 'retrained' with US data to make sure the system is 'behaving properly.'"
New Yorker journalist Clare Malone wrote in a recent article that "the supposed national-security concerns of TikTok will go largely unaddressed" under the proposed deal, which she argued would do more to "bolster an emerging media conglomerate, under the auspices of the Ellison family, who are assiduously friendly to Trump."
To put this into perspective, wrote Malone, the Ellison family could soon "own a movie studio, multiple television streamers, two news networks, and have a significant stake in the world’s fastest-growing social-media platform, all while hosting the data of millions of users and providing much of the cloud-computing infrastructure that powers corporate America—a level of vertical integration that, even in an age of rapid consolidation, is unprecedented."
Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich also noted that TikTok isn't the only media platform being eyed by Ellison.
"[Ellison's] media company owns CBS News and is plotting a bid for Warner Bros., which owns CNN," he wrote. "When billionaires take control of communication platforms, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy."
This major consolidation also caught the attention of former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he had serious concerns about the Ellisons buying up his one-time employer, as well as potentially owning CNN as well.
“I do think... without preaching about it, but that we, all of us, all the Americans, have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets,” Rather said. “This is not healthy for the country, and it is something to worry about... It’s pretty hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of the Ellisons buying CNN.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Judge's Ruling on Google Search Monopoly Decried as 'Slap on the Wrist' for Tech Giant
"You don't find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot," said one critic.
Sep 03, 2025
A federal judge's Tuesday ruling on tech giant Google has drawn criticism from anti-monopoly advocates who say that it let the company walk away without having to give up its economic stranglehold over online searches and advertising.
As reported by The New York Times, Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google had to share some of its data with competing search platforms, while also placing restrictions on the company's ability to pay to ensure its search engine receives preferential treatment on web browsers and phones.
However, these remedies fell far short of measures requested by the US Department of Justice, which had asked that Google be forced to share more of its data with competitors and to sell off its Chrome web browser.
Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, offered a scathing assessment of Mehta's ruling, and she urged the government to appeal and push for harsher penalties against Google.
"You don't find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot," she said. "Similarly, you don't find Google liable for monopolization and then write a remedy that lets it protect its monopoly. This feckless remedy to the most storied case of monopolization of the past quarter century is a complete failure of his duty and must be appealed."
She went on to describe Mehta's decision as "bizarre" given that he had "found Google liable for maintaining one of the most consequential and damaging monopolies of the internet era."
Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, accused Mehta of letting Google get away with a "slap on the wrist" given the scale of the damage it has caused.
"Google for years has wielded its vast power over all layers of the digital economy to crush competitors, halt innovation, and rob Americans of their right to read, watch, and buy what they want without being manipulated by one of the most powerful corporations in human history," he said. "Judge Mehta's order that Google share search data with competitors and cease entering into exclusive contracts does nothing to right those wrongs."
Like Hegde, Lynn also urged the government to appeal the ruling.
Elise Phillips, policy counsel at the freedom of expression advocacy group Public Knowledge, took aim at Mehta for letting Google maintain control of both Chrome and the Android mobile operating system, even though he concluded that Google had abused its market power to stifle competition.
Phillips also suggested that elected officials needed to pick up the slack when it comes to holding giant corporations accountable for their actions.
"Judge Mehta's remedies decision signals why the courts cannot be the end-all, be-all of antitrust," she said. "Google's anticompetitive behavior, and behavior like it, can and must be confronted by legislation that targets conflicts of interest, self-preferencing, and discrimination online. The American people need sector-specific legislation that addresses these harms and breaks down barriers of entry into online markets, fostering competition, innovation, and choice."
Agnès Callamard, secretary general of human rights organization Amnesty International, also weighed in to express disappointment with Mehta's decision.
"This ruling was a missed chance to rein in Google's power," said Callamard. "Google's toxic business model is built on pervasive surveillance. By tracking people across the web and monetizing their personal data through targeted advertising, the company has severely undermined our right to privacy."
Google was first sued for antitrust violations by the DOJ in 2020 under the first Trump administration, and then again in 2023 under the Biden administration.
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Ratepayers Launch a National Escalation for Utility Justice
From the Sun Belt to New England, over two dozen coordinated actions were held in 17 states to fight back against monopoly utility companies’ rate hikes and greenwashing.
Aug 20, 2024
Across the country, families rely on utility companies to provide the power we need to heat and cool our homes, cook, bathe, and charge the devices we rely on. But instead of focusing on delivering clean, affordable, reliable power to ratepayers, for-profit utility companies are hiking rates on working families while doubling down on fossil fuels. As temperatures rise and utility bills soar, working families have had enough.
This month, ratepayers launched a nationwide escalation for utility justice. From the Sun Belt to New England, over two dozen coordinated actions were held in 17 states to fight back against utility rate hikes and greenwashing. This is a powerful beginning to a locally led, national movement to demand clean, renewable energy from for-profit utility companies, and stop rate hikes for dirty power.
In New Hampshire, climate activists are opposing a 16% rate hike that has been proposed by Eversource, which serves over 70% of the state. The increase is currently under review by the public utilities commission (PUC). The governor-appointed public utilities commission approved the rate hike, as they have with every cost increase that the utility companies have proposed in the last three years. After grassroots organizers stopped Liberty Utilities, another New Hampshire utility company, from building the Granite Bridge fracked gas pipeline in 2020, Liberty attempted to recoup more than $7 million they spent toward the proposal by raising electricity rates. The public utilities commission denied Liberty’s outrageous request, but this is not the first time a utility company has tried to put their expensive failed fossil fuel projects in ratepayers’ utility bills.
There is a long precedent of publicly-owned, democratically-controlled utility companies in the United States and around the world, and no reason why we should assume dirty, corporate-controlled utility companies relying on energy sources of the 1900s have to be our future.
The fights happening in New Hampshire with utility companies are familiar across the country. From Buffalo, New York to the Bay Area of California, ratepayers are protesting and organizing to hold for-profit utility corporations accountable for squeezing ratepayers to pad their pockets while burning the planet.
In Nevada, working families, ratepayers, and climate activists are fighting to stop NV Energy from nearly tripling its monthly fixed service charge on electric bills from $16.50 to $44.40 while lowering the volumetric charge. This regressive policy means ratepayers who use less energy will be charged more, while heavy energy users, like wealthy corporations, will be charged less—it’s wrong. Nevada is one of the fastest-heating states in the nation, and relies on electricity to keep communities comfortable. With NV Energy’s monopoly power and rising temperatures, Nevadans feel like the odds are stacked against them.
Like many for-profit utility companies, NV Energy is raising rates and burning the planet, instead of capitalizing on the plentiful solar capacity of the Sun Belt state it serves. Nevadans are pushing the Public Utilities Commission to stand up for clean, affordable, reliable energy. With an unprecedented $369 billion in federal investments unlocked in the two-year-old Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support the transition to clean energy, utility corporations have no excuse, besides greed, to keep charging ratepayers for dirty, expensive, unreliable power.
While companies have raised electricity prices nearly 31% since 2021, and over of a quarter of Americans struggle to pay their utility bills, activists are fighting to stop rate hikes, stop expansions of dirty power, and pressure lawmakers to stop taking political contributions from the utility corporations they are responsible for regulating.
Local communities are right to hold utility corporations accountable for raising costs on families and stalling action on clean energy. But the underlying structure of monopoly utility companies is not sustainable. When given a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transition to a sustainable energy future through the IRA, they opt to expand gas lines and invest in dirty power. Utility Corporations are failing to reimagine how growing electricity needs could be met with wind, solar, geothermal, energy efficiency, and energy conservation efforts.They have no incentive to lower costs for families, and every incentive to use their massive lobbying power to influence policy and raise rates.
Despite the money we pay each month, for-profit utility companies are not accountable to us, and their monopoly power leaves us with no alternatives. The system is rigged, but it does not have to be this way.
Together, we can change the rules. There is a long precedent of publicly-owned, democratically-controlled utility companies in the United States and around the world, and no reason why we should assume dirty, corporate-controlled utility companies relying on energy sources of the 1900s have to be our future. Now is the time to demand utility justice, to ensure clean, affordable, and reliable energy for all in a way that puts people and the planet first.
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'
"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," said a federal judge in the decision.
Aug 05, 2024
A federal judge left no room for ambiguity Monday in a landmark ruling in a case brought by the Justice Department and states against tech giant Google, in which the government argued the company had illegally monopolized the search engine and advertising market.
"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," said Judge Amit Mehta, who sits of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In U.S. et al. v. Google, Mehta found that Google has "violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining its monopoly in two product markets in the United States—general services and general text advertising—through its exclusive distribution agreements."
The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) called the ruling a "tremendous win for consumers, innovation, and the entire tech industry."
During a 10-week trial last year, the DOJ argued Google had used exclusionary contracts to block its competitors from reaching potential users. The company's deals with web firms such as Mozilla and cell phone companies like Apple and Samsung have made Google the default search engine on millions of people's phones and computers, as has its contracts with other major tech firms and service providers.
The trial revealed that Google shares 36% of its search ad revenues from Safari with Apple and paid the company $20 billion in 2022 to ensure Google's search engine would have default status for Apple customers.
While paying billions of dollars per year to maintain its default status, Google has been using its dominance over ad space to collect more data about users and improve its search engine, while its rivals have been cut off from that ad space.
"If that's what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn't the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?" asked Mehta.
The Justice Department proved to the court that Google had ensured its search engine would conduct nearly 90% of all web searches.
Vanderbilt University law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth told The New York Times the ruling represents "a very prominent test of the Biden administration's new antitrust enforcement agenda."
The DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have also sued Apple, Meta, and Amazon for monopolizing the smartphone, social media, and online selling markets.
William Kovacic, former chairman of the FTC, told the Times in June that a victory against Google would create "momentum that supports [the government's] other cases."
U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was among those who applauded the ruling, saying the unfair practices Mehta outlined "are the exact behaviors that hurt consumers, competition, and small businesses."
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at AELP, said the ruling "strikes at the core of how hundreds of millions of Americans experience the internet."
"It illustrates how Google has become one of the most powerful companies in the world while undermining innovation and degrading the quality of its core product," said Hepner. "The remedy must match the court's striking verdict in this case. At a minimum that means an end to Google's exclusive default agreements and breaking up business lines that have allowed Google to extend its monopoly into every corner of the internet."
Google is expected to appeal Mehta's decision, but as it faces another antitrust case brought by the DOJ over its advertising technology business—set to go to trial September 9—AELP interim executive director Nidhi Hegde expressed hope that Monday's ruling "sends a resounding signal that the antimonopoly movement is here to stay."
"The promise of antitrust enforcement is that it will fully restore competition where it has been lost," said Hepner, "and we'll be advocating that the court use all of its power to do so."
Keep ReadingShow Less
EU Charges Apple With Restricting Competition Under New Antitrust Law
"For too long Apple has been squeezing out innovative companies—denying consumers new opportunities and choices," a European commissioner said.
Jun 24, 2024
European Union regulators on Monday filed preliminary charges against Apple for restricting competition in its App Store, the first case under a landmark antitrust law that came into full effect in March.
Apple's rules of engagement "prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternatives channels for offers and content," the European Commission (EC), the executive branch of the E.U. that handles antitrust regulation, wrote in a statement.
The commission's findings follow an investigation, announced in March, of Apple and other tech firms for non-compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which was designed to allow smaller tech companies to compete and lower prices for consumers.
"For too long Apple has been squeezing out innovative companies—denying consumers new opportunities and choices," Thierry Breton, a European commissioner responsible for digital markets, wrote on social media.
In a reference to Apple's slogan, "Think different," Breton quipped that it should be "Act different."
“Act different” should be their new slogan🍏
For too long @Apple has been squeezing out innovative companies — denying consumers new opportunities & choices.
Today we are taking further steps to ensure AppStore & iOS comply with #DMA pic.twitter.com/e741oV9r9l
— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) June 24, 2024
The DMA was designed to prevent Big Tech firms from using their market power to dominate the industry.
"In football terms, this is about getting your players onto the pitch. Imagine how easy it would be for one of the teams to win their game tonight if they made sure that the rival team couldn't even get into the stadium. This is in fact what we often see in the digital world: many companies get stuck in their changing room," Margrethe Vestager, an EC official in charge of competition policy, said in a speech delivered Monday about the law.
The DMA was also designed to give regulators a way to streamline antitrust efforts so they don't get bogged down in years of litigation, a process that could be tested in the current Apple case.
The EC sent its findings to Apple on Monday and the company now has a chance to respond to the charges, with the commission scheduled to reach a final decision by next March. Monday's action was akin to the "halfway stage" in a traditional antitrust lawsuit in which a company is issued a statement of objection and a chance to reform its practices, The Guardian reported.
If the findings are finalized, Apple would have one year to comply or face a penalty of up to 10% of global revenues. The company took in $383 billion last year. However, E.U. regulators aim for dialogue that leads to compliance, rather than issuing a penalty, according to The Guardian.
The DMA has kept the EC busy. In addition to the charges, the commission also announced on Monday a new investigation into Apple's iOS business terms, including the "core technology fee" it charges for every download of the app after 1 million downloads in a year.
"The developers' community and consumers are eager to offer alternatives to the App Store," Vestager, the commission official, said regarding the newest probe. "We will investigate to ensure Apple does not undermine these efforts."
Big Tech companies including Apple, which have been deemed "gatekeepers" by E.U. regulators, have challenged the DMA in court to try to limit the law's scope.
Apple's antitrust battles are not limited to Europe. "The charges underscore the risk to the company's business from increased regulatory scrutiny around the world," The New York Times reported.
The U.S. Department of Justice and sixteen states filed a landmark antitrust suit against the company in March alleging that the company "illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers." The United Kingdom and Japan have also recently investigated and taken legal action against the company.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'The Law Is the Law': EU Investigates Apple, Google, Meta for Anti-Monopoly Violations
"the days of these tech giants exploiting monopoly positions in different markets are over," said one expert.
Mar 25, 2024
The European Commission signaled Monday that it has no intention of waiting for powerful tech companies to change their practices in order to comply with a landmark anti-monopoly law passed by the European Union earlier this month, as officials informed Apple, Facebook parent company Meta, and Google parent company Alphabet that they were being investigated for potential violations.
"The law is the law," Thierry Breton, E.U. commissioner for internal market, told reporters at a press conference in Brussels announcing the probe. "We can't just sit around and wait."
The commission told the tech giants it is investigating whether Apple and Alphabet are complying with the Digital Markets Act's (DMA) measure requiring companies to allow users to be directed to offers available outside the firms' own app stores. The two companies may be imposing "various restrictions and limitations" on users to unfairly favor their own stores, including by charging fees to prevent apps from promoting offers outside the Apple and Google app stores.
The commission is investigating Meta's practice of allowing users to pay a monthly fee for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram, which allow them to avoid having their personal data used for ad-targeting.
"The commission is concerned that the binary choice imposed by Meta's 'pay or consent' model may not provide a real alternative in case users do not consent, thereby not achieving the objective of preventing the accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers," said the European Commission.
Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the commission, said in Brussels that the companies have announced some steps to comply with the DMA, which took effect on March 7, but that some of the measures "fail to achieve their objectives and fall short of expectations."
Compliance "is something that we take very seriously," said Vestager.
The DMA identifies Alphabet, Apple, and Meta as three of six digital "gatekeepers" that are required to end anti-competition practices. New regulations require the companies to allow third parties to operate with the gatekeepers' own services, allow business users to access the data they generate when using the companies' platforms, allow users to un-install any pre-installed software or app if they choose to, and treat their own services and products equally to those offered by third parties.
The commission has 12 months to complete the investigations and could fine the multibillion-dollar companies up to 10% of their global revenue if they find them to be in violation of the DMA.
John O'Brennan, professor of European politics at Maynooth University in Ireland, said the investigation signals that "the days of these tech giants exploiting monopoly positions in different markets are over."
The E.U. fined Apple $1.8 billion earlier this month for suppressing competition from rival music streaming apps such as Spotify. The company is also under scrutiny in the U.S., with the Department of Justice joining 16 states last week in filing a lawsuit accusing Apple of illegally monopolizing the smartphone market.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy