"The most important story is that on Monday, in a D.C. district court, Judge Amit Mehta started hearings on how to restructure Google to thwart its unlawful monopoly. Two floors down, Judge James Boasberg continued the antitrust trial between the government and Meta. Never before have two trillion dollar plus companies been put on trial at the same time, in the same court house.

And yet, on Thursday, Google had its quarterly investing call where it unveiled its gargantuan earnings of $34 billion in the past three months, and discussed its future prospects with Wall Street researchers. Not a single analyst even mentioned the risk of antitrust or asked a question about it. One of them noted a stat that came out of the trial, which is user pick-up of the search firm’s AI app, Gemini, so they are clearly paying attention to the trial. They just don’t seem to think it matters. That’s true for big investors in Meta as well.

Why does antitrust seem irrelevant to Wall Street? It’s certainly not the substance of the trials."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-google-generated

"According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.

Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

"Mark Zuckerberg called the head of the Federal Trade Commission in late March with an offer: Meta would pay $450 million to settle a long-running antitrust case that was about to go to trial.

The offer was far from the $30 billion that the FTC had demanded. It was also a fraction of the value of Instagram and WhatsApp, the two apps Meta had bought and were at the heart of the government’s case.

On the call, Zuckerberg sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC, said people familiar with the matter. The billionaire Facebook co-founder had been developing closer ties to Trump—his company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and settled a $25 million lawsuit—and had been pressing the president in recent weeks to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta upped its offer to close to $1 billion, the people said, and Zuckerberg led a frenzied lobbying effort to avoid the FTC trial.

It wasn’t enough. On Monday, the trial kicked off. The FTC called Zuckerberg—who privately expressed reluctance about taking the stand—to testify for four hours.

Zuckerberg was back on the witness stand Tuesday, where he faced questioning from an FTC lawyer over whether Facebook had paid $1 billion to buy Instagram to “neutralize” a competitor.

Asked if he would have preferred that Facebook’s own camera app would have grown faster, Zuckerberg responded, “I guess so, yeah. A billion dollars is very expensive.”

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company’s $450 million settlement offer was “delusional.”"

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/mark-zuckerberg-meta-antitrust-ftc-negotiations-a53b3382

"The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:

[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.
(...)
American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:
(...)
To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

"The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

"The trends for Walgreens aren’t good - it has closed a thousand stores since 2018, and plans to shut 1,200 more this year. And if you look at the gross operating income of the U.S. retail segment, it is collapsing.

I put these charts together based on data in Walgreen’s annual reports.
What’s going on? Well that’s simple. Margins are falling apart.

Galloway and Elson went back and forth on why Walgreens is flailing. The company hasn’t modernized in the age of Amazon. It has too many stores. Bad management. A dumb acquisition of VillageMD in 2021. Etc. And these would seem like reasonable causes, since lots of other retailers are dying in the face of low price competition.

But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens-collapsed

"The American Economic Liberties Project today released new research showing that at least 326 U.S. pharmacies have closed since Dec. 19, 2024, when Congress abandoned bipartisan, bicameral PBM reforms as part of a stopgap spending bill. The new data comes ahead of a vote in Congress tomorrow on a continuing resolution to fund the government, where the policymakers could include much-needed structural PBM reform.

“Despite later admitting that he does not know what a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is, Elon Musk successfully tanked PBM reforms with nearly unanimous House support late last year,” said Emma Freer, Senior Policy Analyst for Healthcare at the Economic Liberties Project. “As predicted, without Congressional intervention, the Big Three PBMs have continued to abuse their market power, squeezing at least 326 pharmacies – 237 of them independent – out of business in fewer than 10 weeks and stranding their most vulnerable patients in pharmacy deserts without access to lifesaving care. Given these high stakes, it is critical that Congress stand up to these healthcare monopolist middlemen and pass structural PBM reforms that will save their constituents’ time, money, and lives.”

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/326-pharmacies-have-closed-since-elon-musk-tanked-pbm-reform/

#USA Musk #DOGE #PBMs #BigPharma #Healthcare #Oligopolies #Competition #Antitrust

Probably the only acceptable choice made by Trump until now...:

"Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.

While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement — much to Wall Street’s chagrin.

In public remarks and written submissions to lawmakers, the 53-year-old Oxford graduate has expressed concern about market concentration and said enforcement should be focused on technology and sectors with a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks.

Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google."

https://www.ft.com/content/769709d5-f897-497d-a8f2-ce15a3c977ed

"I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

"Requiring AI developers to get authorization from rightsholders before training models on copyrighted works would limit competition to companies that have their own trove of training data, or the means to strike a deal with such a company. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition—higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks—as well as reducing the variety of expression used to train such tools and the expression allowed to users seeking to express themselves with the aid of AI. As the Federal Trade Commission recently explained, if a handful of companies control AI training data, “they may be able to leverage their control to dampen or distort competition in generative AI markets” and “wield outsized influence over a significant swath of economic activity.”

Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, widely considered to be the first lawsuit over AI training rights ever filed."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-and-copyright-expanding-copyright-hurts-everyone-heres-what-do-instead

"On a firm-by-firm basis, small businesses score an easy win, according to beautifully detailed Census Bureau data — the invaluable Business Dynamics Statistics — built from government records drawn from just about every private sector employer in the country. About 60 percent of American businesses have fewer than five employees, and 98 percent have fewer than 100 employees.

But we’re not sure about the utility of a measure that counts Goldman Sachs and Tariq’s #1 Halal Food equally — even if we can all agree that Tariq makes the superior chicken biryani.

If we weigh America’s businesses instead by the number of their employees, we see the trend Texas Pete feared: Before the Great Recession, most Americans worked for businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Today, it’s reversed, with 53 percent of us working for businesses with 500 or more workers.

The rule applies across the economy — the smaller the business, the slower the growth. But the real drivers of this economy-wide shift sit at the extremes: Businesses with fewer than 100 employees have steadily lost ground while business with more than 10,000 employees have gained."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/31/is-america-still-nation-small-businesses/

"Google on Tuesday updated its ethical guidelines around artificial intelligence, removing commitments not to apply the technology to weapons or surveillance.

The company’s AI principles previously included a section listing four “Applications we will not pursue.” As recently as Thursday, that included weapons, surveillance, technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and use cases contravening principles of international law and human rights, according to a copy hosted by the Internet Archive.

A spokesperson for Google declined to answer specific questions about its policies on weapons and surveillance, but referred to a blog post published Tuesday by the company’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, and its senior vice president for technology and society, James Manyika.

The executives wrote that Google was updating its AI principles because the technology had become much more widespread and there was a need for companies based in democratic countries to serve government and national security clients."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/04/google-ai-policies-weapons-harm/

"At the Federal Trade Commission, I argued that in the arena of artificial intelligence, developers should release enough information about their models to allow smaller players and upstarts to bring their ideas to market without being beholden to dominant firms’ pricing or access restrictions. Competition and openness, not centralization, drive innovation.

In the coming weeks and months, U.S. tech giants may renew their calls for the government to grant them special protections that close off markets and lock in their dominance. Indeed, top executives from these firms appear eager to curry favor and cut deals, which could include asking the federal government to pare back sensible efforts to require adequate testing of models before they are released to the public, or to look the other way when a dominant firm seeks to acquire an upstart competitor.

Enforcers and policymakers should be wary. During the first Trump and then the Biden administrations, antitrust enforcers brought major monopolization lawsuits against those same companies — making the case that by unlawfully buying up or excluding their rivals, these companies had undermined innovation and deprived America of the benefits that free and fair competition delivers. Reversing course would be a mistake. The best way for the United States to stay ahead globally is by promoting competition at home."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/opinion/deepseek-ai-big-tech.html

Journalist Nora Loreto sounds the alarm on the possibility of #Canadian capitalists using the Trump tariffs as an excuse to jack up prices and profiteer as they did during the pandemic.

We are going to need action against tariff profiteering by corporations.

#Canada #CanadianPolitics #cdnpoli #profiteering #monopolies #oligopolies

https://noraloreto.substack.com/p/ok-but-what-about-profiteering

"If Musk wanted to run DOGE as a force for waste-elimination, he wouldn't be attacking the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS (whose budget accounts for 0.012% of federal spending). He wouldn't be attacking federal fiber subsidies (he's mad that he can't get more subsidies for his dead-end satellite service that caps out at one ten-millionth of the speed of fiber). He wouldn't be attacking high-speed rail (which competes with his Tesla swasticars). He wouldn't be fighting with the SEC (which defends the public from costly stock swindles, which is why they've been investigating Musk for seven years).

He could, instead, go after private sector Medicare waste. 33 million seniors have been suckered into switching from federally provided Medicare to privately provided Medicare Advantage. Overbilling from Medicare Advantage (whose doctors are ordered to "upcode" patients to generate additional bills) costs the public $83b/year:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/27/beltway-bandits/#henhouse-foxes

"This is just #pricefixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing.
What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price…they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions.""

#Oligopolies #Inflation

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

"Lina Khan has warned of “catastrophic consequences” for America if Donald Trump’s antitrust officials fail to scrutinise private equity groups that are buying up chunks of the US economy.

The recently resigned chair of the US Federal Trade Commission told the Financial Times that private equity groups posed a threat to the country’s healthcare system.

Given “the stakes of our healthcare markets, it’s extraordinarily important that we are staying vigilant here”, said Khan.

“If enforcers want to decide that they want to look the other way, that’s going to have, I fear, catastrophic consequences for Americans.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/ed2ad30a-1e24-4f78-9f1d-4cfc8c170cba

"These companies have been hiking prices for years, but really started to turn the screws during the post-covid inflationary period. One of Schwenk's sources is Josh Saltzman, owner of the DC sports bar Ivy and Coney. Ten years ago, Saltzman charged $3 for fries; now it's $6 – and Saltzman's margins have declined. Saltzman has a limited number of suppliers, and they all get their potatoes from Big Potato, and they bundle those potato orders with their other supplies, making it effectively impossible for Saltzman to buy his potatoes from anyone else.

Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market, and any sector that large and concentrated is going to be pretty cozy. The execs at these companies all meet at industry associations, lobbying bodies, and as they job-hop between companies in the cartel. But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."

This is just price-fixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing. What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price. A Lamb Weston exec described the arrangement as everyone "behaving themselves," chortling that they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions.""

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

"These companies already rank among the richest and most powerful in history and need little help from Trump. The independent research firm Arete forecasts that five of them — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — will this year collectively increase their revenue to more than $2tn. In spite of laying out $300bn on capital expenditure, Arete predicts they will still record profit margins and generate free cash flow of $430bn.
Yet three things may yet check their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying between the biggest tech companies themselves as they all make colossal bets on AI and try to disrupt each others’ business models. “Big Tech can no longer deliver growth by staying in their respective lanes,” says Richard Kramer, Arete’s founder. “We expect more Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other’s ‘core’ business, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and ecommerce.”

That competition is also increasingly acquiring a legal dimension as tech companies attack each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he, and others, were duped into investing in the AI start-up because of its “fake humanitarian mission”. He also trolled the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: “They don’t actually have the money.”"

https://www.ft.com/content/ffcd84d1-822c-492c-94e2-07785cfe3524