The Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and other national retailers, wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission last week demanding that the FTC examine “persistent oligopolies in other parts of the retail ecosystem.”
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The Open Markets Institute welcomes its inaugural fellows for its Louis Brandeis Law and Political Economy Fellowship. The fellowship aims to attract the best and the brightest young minds to advance the wider anti-monopoly movement through antitrust law and policy initiatives.
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This settlement is a capstone on the FTC’s record of failing to police America’s markets and privacy abuses. Congress should no longer tolerate the FTC’s failures as an enforcer, which have led to its crisis of legitimacy.
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Sally Hubbard on How Monopolies are "Destroying the American Dream" – Why Walmart Wants Antitrust Scrutiny of Amazon
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Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy talks to Jon Ward, host of Yahoo's Long Game Podcast on the case for regulating Facebook and Google. “The amount of data that Facebook and Google are collecting about the average person is absolutely insane, massive, widespread, ubiquitous, and I think honestly, a fraud on the American people that the people don't understand that this is happening,” said Hubbard.
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Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan blasts the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association v. Thomas arguing that the decision nullifies the 21st Amendment’s will that states control their alcohol market, and paves the way for monopolistic retail corporations such as Amazon and Walmart to overrun the markets for beer, wine, and spirits.
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Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard speaks to POLITICO about Google's acquisition of DoubleClick and how regulators failed to stop a merger that had a clear anti-competitive impact. “The DoubleClick merger is one of those deals you look back on and say, 'That was a mistake," Hubbard said.
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Walmart sells 50 percent or more of all groceries in one in every ten metropolitan areas and nearly one in three “micropolitan” areas across the country, according to a report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, out last week. In 38 of these regions, Walmart sells 70 percent or more of all groceries.
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NBC News speaks with Open Markets Senior Fellow Matthew Stoller on the reaction of think tanks and advocacy groups backed by big tech to Senator Josh Hawley's proposed legislation aimed at the Silicon Valley giants. Stoller said last time he “saw this kind of collective temper tantrum by all their trade groups was" during the legislative battle over a pair of bills aimed at curtailing sex trafficking online, which altered Section 230.
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Vanity Fair's Alison Durkee speaks with Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn about Congress' latest move against Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency, Libra. “This is a corporation that’s got fires all over the world with regulators. It’s only going to get worse,” said Lynn.
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Bloomberg reporter Mike Dorning reports on how leading 2020 Democratic candidates view "antitrust action as long overdue" and that industries in the US could see a tougher stance from an incoming Democratic president. "Democratic presidential hopefuls are coming out in force against the rapid pace of corporate consolidation, a message to 2020 voters that gained volume during their first debates in Miami last week. They’re expanding their pledges to take on big tech, including Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc., to other industries."
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Open Markets Institute Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard has published a piece on CNN Business describing the extent of the concentration crisis in America and how monopoly is killing the American Dream. While big tech remains in the crosshairs for lawmakers and the 2020 presidential candidates, as seen during the first night of the Democratic debate, Hubbard emphasizes that the monopoly problem extends far beyond tech, crippling economic growth, raising prices, depressing wages, and making life increasingly harder for average Americans.
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AP Reporter Matt O’Brien profiled House Antitrust Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline. This year he hired Lina Khan, a top attorney at Open Markets, to serve as a counsel to the subcommittee.
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NPR's Tim Mak talks to Open Markets Deputy Director Sarah Miller about how lawmakers are changing their perceptions about Silicon Valley's biggest corporations. "They had always been perceived by progressives as doing a social good, as socially progressive, as being from areas represented by progressives. ... So there really wasn't a perception that these companies were dangerous," said Miller.
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Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, the problem with Facebook’s new Libra currency and why Facebook’s and Google’s power over digital media doesn’t mean the US should tolerate other powerful corporations.
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Open Markets Senior Fellow Matthew Stoller and Lucas Kunce published a feature on The American Conservative exposing the devastating history of military monopolization in America. They describe how Wall Street has given foreign rivals such as China growing leverage over our defense industry by usurping what used to be American manufacturing, not only in telecommunications but in various sectors which are key to our national security.
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