Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we examine some of the dangers of the recently approved Schwab-TD Ameritrade merger, address the president’s executive order on Section 230, and highlight our recent conference discussing worker power.
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The Open Markets Institute has long held that a deeply flawed regulatory environment in the United States has allowed Google, Facebook, and other platforms to acquire a dangerous concentration of control over how Americans exchange ideas, opinions, and news. Moreover, the profits of these corporations are based in large part on building user “engagement” through false and inflammatory content while starving trustworthy and accountable information sources of ad revenue.
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Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss our response to the criticisms regarding a merger ban during the COVID-19 pandemic, commend newly proposed bills to ban micro-targeting, and highlight the release of professor John Kwoka’s latest book.
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PYMNTS reports on how Tech Giants, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, have 19 M&A deals in process in spite of COVID-19’s effect on the economy. “These companies are already extraordinarily powerful, but they’re well-positioned to emerge as the biggest winners of COVID-19 unless some legislative action is taken,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, OMI’s legal director.
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Financial Times’ Miles Kruppa and James Fontanella-Khan report on the increase of mergers and acquisitions among big tech companies and start-up businesses, further consolidating their power in the marketplace. “These companies are already extraordinarily powerful, but they’re well positioned to emerge as the biggest winners of COVID-19 unless some legislative action is taken,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, OMI’s legal director.
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The bills proposed by both Rep. Cicilline and Rep. Eshoo are critical first steps to preserving the integrity of our elections and stopping the manipulation of American voters. As I previously testified, Facebook and Google make a lot of money by renting out their manipulation machines to anyone who pays. These platforms surveil their users and then allow disinformation agents to target propaganda at users based on comprehensive and intimate data profiles.
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A new bill from Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strikes at the myths behind mergers.
In a webinar organized by COSAL and Rust Consulting and moderated by Hal Singer, Sandeep Vaheesan, along with OMI Academic Advisory Board Member Sanjukta Paul and Marshall Steinbaum, discussed how weak anti-merger law contributed to the loss of critical reserve capacity in health care and other sectors.
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Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss a new report that Amazon is exploiting its gatekeeper position to take other companies’ businesses, and we discuss the Open Markets proposal to use anti-monopoly law to address the COVID-19 crisis within America’s dangerously consolidated meatpacking industry.
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Forbes’ contributor Rebecca Bellan reports on The American Edge Project, an advocacy group that Facebook helped launch in an effort to frame technological innovators as “an essential part of the U.S. economic health, national security and individual freedoms.”
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HuffPost’s Zach Carter reports on the effort led by the American Economic Liberties Project and nine other organizations, including Open Markets, prompting the Federal Reserve to ban bailout funding for M&A activity.
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Proposal calls for repeal of executive order invoking Defense Production Act to keep slaughterhouses operating.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday used the Defense Production Act to declare meatpacking plants to be essential facilities and allowed the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to reopen plants shuttered due to outbreaks of COVID-19 among workers. The Open Markets Institute, Food & Water Action, and Family Farm Action Alliance, joined by the undersigned, share the president’s desire to ensure a robust supply of food to every American family. Unfortunately, we believe this order is the wrong way to do so.
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