The Corner Newsletter: Revival of Fair Competition Principle, Our Op-Ed in the New York Times, & CJL’s Rebrand (June 2, 2026)
Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we look at efforts to reconnect antitrust enforcement to the idea of “fair competition,” which aims to prevent businesses from seeking competitive advantage through actions like reducing quality or exploiting workers. We also highlight our op-ed in the New York Times on the consolidated food industry.
New York Times Runs Op-Ed by OMI’s Vaheesan and Kelloway on Consolidated Food Sector
The New York Times published an opinion piece by Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and food program manager Claire Kelloway on how America’s consolidated food industry has fueled high grocery prices. The article, entitled “This Is Why Your Groceries Are So Expensive,” recounts how decades of lax antitrust enforcement informed by the misguided consumer welfare approach has led to a sector dominated by a handful of powerful corporations. “Without far-reaching change, the government, farmers and consumers will be doomed to fight an endless battle against corporate combines. Consumers will keep paying too much, and farmers will continue to get too little,” Vaheesan and Kelloway wrote. Read the article here.
States and Private Reformers Expand Fight to Use Antitrust to Promote Stronger Regulation
Brian Callaci
During the Biden administration, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission broke new ground in using antitrust policy to protect workers from corporate power and reestablish values of fair competition. They did so by reviving one of the most powerful principles of antitrust law — that no competitor should be able to gain an advantage over a rival through nefarious or socially unacceptable means.
While forward movement in antitrust has largely reversed due to the Trump adminstration’s corrupt misuse of the law, state attorneys general and private litigants have carried the fight forward on many fronts. One of the most important is a coordinated effort to build on the Biden Administrations restoration of the “fair competition” principle, including by emphasizing the concept’s deep roots in the American antimonopoly tradition.
The most ambitious of the recent cases was filed last November by the public interest group Jobs to Move America, charging Hyundai and Kia over widespread abuses of California competition law based on the use of incarcerated workers and child labor in their U.S. supply chain. Their lawsuit alleges that the abuse of these workers gave Hyundai and Kia an unfair cost advantage over law-abiding and high-road competitors for public contracts in California.
In another recent major case, the New Jersey attorney general in October 2025 challenged Amazon’s practice of outsourcing last-mile delivery to so-called “flex” drivers as an illegal misclassification of those workers as independent contractors. Crucially, the lawsuit accuses Amazon of engaging in unfair competition against law-abiding competitors, who properly pay their delivery drivers and respect their rights as employees under state unemployment, workers compensation, and wage and hour laws.
The New Jersey case builds on cases brought by rideshare drivers working with the public interest law firm Towards Justice, which has in recent years pioneered the use of antitrust litigation to protect gig workers from corporate domination and control, including by using state antitrust laws to challenge rideshare companies’ fixing of prices and wages.
These cases all foreground the notion, deeply rooted in the American antimonopoly tradition, of antitrust being concerned as much with the quality of competition (how firms compete) as with the number of competitors in the market. The goal is to ensure that firms focus on lowering prices, innovating better products, and operating more efficiently, rather than adulterating products, avoiding taxes, exploiting workers, or polluting.
This was one of the main concerns of Louis Brandeis, in the period before he was appointed to the Supeme Court. Asked to broker a labor dispute in the New York garment industry in 1910, he negotiated what came to be called the Protocol of Peace: a master contract between the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and hundreds of manufacturers enforced by neutral arbitrators. These rules were designed to stop competitors from creating sweatshop working conditions and instead to adopt high-road, innovative practices. (Unfortunately, these private contracts were difficult for workers to legally enforce, until the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 created an affirmative right for workers to organize).
After the election of Woodrow Wilson as president, Brandeis and other supporters of radical strengthening of America’s antitrust laws carried this thinking into the design of the Federal Trade Commission, established in 1914. As renowned jurist Learned Hand later described the effort, a core purpose of the FTC was to “discover and make explicit those unexpressed standards of fair dealing which the conscience of the community may progressively develop.”
These recent antitrust suits continue this tradition. The New Jersey case against Amazon, for example, points out that Amazon’s misclassification of delivery drivers as independent contractors does more than just deprive drivers of their employment rights. The suit claims Amazon’s misclassification scheme also “gives Amazon an unfair competitive advantage over employers who follow the relevant laws and provide all state-mandated benefits to their employees and all mandatory contributions to the State.”
Similarly, Jobs to Move America’s suit against Hyundai and Kia argues that “the ongoing and systemic violations of federal occupational safety and health law and the use of coercive prison labor, and resulting wage suppression from which Defendants profit, represent an incipient antitrust violation and provide Defendants with an unfair advantage in the California automotive market.”
Unfortunately, despite indicating early on that they would continue the previous administration’s work to combat corporate power through competition policy, Trump’s antitrust agencies have adopted a corporate-friendly approach to enforcement, and sometimes one that appears to sell enforcement outcomes to the highest bidder.
Nonetheless, as states attorneys general and private litigants carry on the nascent revival, begun by the Biden administration, of using antitrust policy to establish market-wide rules of fair competition, now is the time to prepare to build dramatically on these efforts in the next administration.
— With research from Open Markets senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley
Center for Journalism & Liberty Now Known as the Center for Media and Digital Governance
The Open Markets Institute announced that its Center for Journalism and Liberty will now be known as the Center for Media and Digital Governance, reflecting the Center’s expanded focus on how concentrated technology power, digital infrastructure, and artificial intelligence are reshaping journalism, information markets, democratic governance, and public debate. “When the Center was founded, the threat to democratic information systems was platform monopolies capturing journalism’s revenue and audiences and required a deep understanding of media markets and digital advertising,” Dr. Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Media and Digital Governance, said. “Today that threat runs through every layer of the stack — from cloud computing and AI development to satellite communications and data flows — even as media concentration remains an urgent concern.” Since its founding in 2019, the Center has produced research, policy analysis, testimony, and commentary on platform power, media concentration, AI governance, cloud infrastructure, AI content licensing, and the future of independent journalism.
Pope Leo XIV ’s Encyclical Denounces Private, Monopolistic Actors in First Encyclical Letter
Pope Leo XIV last week used his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), to forcefully reassert the primacy of humanity and popular democratic control over private interests and privately controlled technologies. The letter, designed to provide moral guidance on pressing contemporary issues, argues that Artificial Intelligence technologies must be made to serve human dignity and agency, and marked a powerful intervention into current debates over the issue. The encyclical begins by drawing a contrast between the authoritarian builders of the Tower of Babel, who sought to impose their dominating and dehumanizing will on all of humanity, with the democratic, cooperative project of rebuilding Jerusalem “brick by brick” as a “project of shared responsibility.”
Following a long tradition of Catholic social teaching, the encyclical emphasizes that technology is not in itself “antagonistic to humanity” and that its development is not determined by any inherent mechanisms. Rather, it urges people to focus on the human-created political economy — and the corporate and economic structures behind the technologies — to ensure they are not used to create poverty, exclusion, and oppression. Magnifica Humanitas also explores many of the other themes that animate modern debate over today’s technologies, including the exploitation of communities subject to “constant surveillance” and workers of the global south toiling in rare earth mines and labeling data sets for minimum wages. It also highlights the public good of truth, including that produced by “serious journalism,” and condemned the ways in which modern monopoly-controlled algorithms are undermining truth.
Magnifica Humanitas voices alarm that private, monopolistic actors are able to mobilize a form of private power “that surpass[es] those of many governments,” and denounces “the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few.” The problem with such political and economic structures, according to the encyclical, is that it leaves these dominant actors outside of popular democratic participation and control. With strikingly strong language, the encyclical urges democratic publics to “disarm” AI, adding that “to disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power “confers the right to govern.” For Pope Leo XIV, disarming AI goes beyond mere regulation. It also requires breaking the power of private interests controlling AI and making it accessible and welcoming to all.
(The Open Markets Institute engaged directly, in person, with the primary authors of the encyclical, at their request. To read the full encyclical, click here.)
📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets Institute released a joint white paper with the Washington Monthly Institute examining how AI is deepening the power imbalance between technology platforms and independent journalism. Written by CJL director Courtney Radsch, “AI and the Future of Independent Journalism: The Promise and Peril of Privately Controlled Data Markets for Media Content,” warns that while tools like crawler controls, bot verification, and pay-per-crawl systems could help publishers enforce consent and receive compensation, they could also create new chokepoints if controlled by a small number of infrastructure providers.
The Capitol Forum hosted a conference call with CJL@OMI’s Dr. Courtney Radsch to discuss her new report, “Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths,” which examines the emerging market for AI content licensing. The discussion explored how AI companies source and pay for content, the rise of a three-tiered licensing market, the growing role of intermediaries, and the risk that publishers and creators could become increasingly dependent on the same dominant platforms shaping the future of information access.
Open Markets Institute released a new “Industry Spotlight” report by Audrey Stienon, who directs OMI’s industrial policy program, examining how private equity increasingly shapes industries across the economy and outlining policy tools to better align the industry with the public interest. Building on Stienon’s earlier research into private equity’s impact on childcare, the report argues that private equity is no longer a niche financial practice but a major force influencing sectors from healthcare to housing, and calls for stronger transparency, accountability, worker protections, and antitrust enforcement to curb harmful practices and protect communities.
Claire Kelloway collaborated with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the Minnesota Farmers Union, and two rural Minnesota groccery store owners to lead a breakout session at the National Rural Groccery Summit in Fargo, ND. Their session highlighted the potential for federal- and state-level enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act to support independent, rural grocers, and empowered grocers to engage in advocacy.
OMI policy and advocacy lead Girogos Verdi spoke on a panel hosted by the German Marshall Fund on “The Global Governance of Digitalization.” In his remarks, Verdi highlighted how the EU’s position could be jeopardized by a deregulatory agenda that would further entrench the dominance of tech giants within the EU Single Market.
Open Markets senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley spoke at the University of Memphis law school’s event titled “Countervailing Power: Antimonopoly for Workers,” where he discussed how certain business practices like union-busting and obstruction of the unionization process can violate the antitrust laws and constitute unfair methods of competition in violation of federal and state law.
Open Markets policy counsel Tara Pincock participated on a panel on algorithmic pricing at the Informa Connect Antitrust West Coast conference, on which she discussed how algorithmic pricing is shaping competition dynamics and what it means for regulators and businesses alike.
CJL@OMI director Courtney Radsch was also quoted on the topic of AI-related compensation for publishers in the Seattle Times, in which she commented on Australia’s new proposal to force platforms to compensate publishers. Describing compensation related to AI models as a “huge hole,” she said the draft proposal still acknowledges “you can’t just take other people’s work and products and sell it, which is essentially what they’re doing.”
🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
New York and New Jersey attorneys general subpoenaed FIFA over its 2026 World Cup ticketing practices, including concerns about misleading seat locations, dynamic pricing, and sharply inflated ticket costs. The probe shows state enforcers stepping in to challenge exploitative pricing and opaque market practices in a major live-event market. (Reuters)
Fierce Pharma reported that Italy’s antitrust regulator opened an investigation into Biogen over allegations that the company tried to limit competition from Sandoz’s cheaper biosimilar multiple sclerosis drug. Regulators allege Biogen tied access to a required safety test to its own branded treatment, potentially blocking lower-cost alternatives and limiting savings for Italy’s public health system. (Fierce Pharma)
Finance News Network reported that Norway’s competition authority has opened a broad inquiry ahead of a formal market investigation into the country’s banking sector, citing concerns about low customer mobility, barriers to entry, and conditions that may make it easier for banks to coordinate interest-rate levels. (Finance News Network)
📈 VITAL STAT:
5.4%
The drop in share price of Norfolk Southern after the Surface Transportation Board said it was pausing the review of its $85 billion merger with Union Pacific as it seeks more information from the railroad operators. Shares of Union Pacific fell 4.2%. (Reuters)
📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:
Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States: This book by University of Pittsburgh professor Miranda Yaver does a deep dive into how health insurers use coverage denials to buffer profits while damaging patient health and fueling mistrust of the country’s inequitable healthcare system.