POLITICO's Steve Overly writes about Silicon Valley's antitrust troubles in Washington and the confluence of probes America's biggest tech companies are facing. He reports that enforcers "have met with Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute." He also interviews Lynn who argues that strong antitrust action can alter the digital business models that have given rise to issues like disinformation.
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Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn is cited by AP reporters Mae Anderson and Tali Arbel about the implications of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger. “Americans across the country will likely pay higher prices for worse service in a wireless market dominated by AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile,” said Lynn. “The problem is especially bad for poor and rural customers.”
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Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard published an op-ed on CNN Business on the Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion settlement with Facebook and asserts that the company needs a new business model. “Instead of fines, changing destructive business models and anticompetitive practices is the only way to lessen the platforms’ harms,” Hubbard writes. “These fixes fall into four main buckets, spelling out the acronym PAIN: privacy, antitrust, interoperability, and non-discrimination.”
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Enforcers and policymakers should pay particular attention to FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra’s powerful dissenting statement. Chopra condemned the Facebook settlement, writing, “This framework does not protect the public — it protects Facebook” and “ratifies Facebook’s governance structure instead of changing it.”
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Reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin and Tony Romm report on former Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes' campaign to break up Facebook. Hughes has "become one of the company’s biggest problems," they report. They also wrote that lawmakers and regulators have also held meetings with other antitrust experts, according to those leaders, such as Barry Lynn from the Open Markets Institute.
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The Open Markets Institute denounces the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) official $5 billion settlement with Facebook.
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PBS Newshour speaks to Open Markets Senior Fellow Matthew Stoller about the Federal Trade Commission's $5 billion settlement with Facebook. “There should be structural solutions to force competition into the social networking market,” Stoller said. “One of the angles for competition is privacy. They will compete to make a safer space to retain their user base.”
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Yahoo Finance Associate Editor Katie Krzaczek reports on an interview of Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard by Yahoo Finance's YFI AM on the recent news that the Department of Justice is launching an antitrust review of big tech. Hubbard told Yahoo Finance’s YFI AM that “there is plenty there for enforcers to go after,” especially in its retail practices.
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Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan speaks to the AP's Barbara Ortutay and Rachel Lerman about Google as they report on Washington's growing antitrust scrutiny. In regards to Google's dominance, Google might argue it doesn't have an obligation to do business with its rivals at all — an argument that other companies have made when faced with similar challenges, said Vaheesan.
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In this third and final part of his three-part series on the resurgence of antimonopoly for Pro-Markets, Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller explains how the election of Donald Trump helped bring antimonopoly thinking back to the forefront of political discourse. “The most important political figures in the return of antimonopoly politics are Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump,” asserts Stoller. “There are many people in Europe, India, and Australia making critical policy choices, but in terms of setting the boundaries of what is possible, it is Warren and Trump who have re-politicized this area.”
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Today, LSC Communications and Quad/Graphics, the two biggest magazine and book printers and distributors in America, abandoned their plans to merge.
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Mashable editor Stan Schroeder reports on Facebook facing trouble for its Libra currency proposal before it's launched. He cites the Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Revolving Door Project urging members of the Libra Association (which includes Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Coinbase, eBay, and others) to leave the project.
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In this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection on Pro-Market, Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The real policy for which Obama will be known is not Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis and helping Americans and the rest of the world understand that liberal democratic rhetoric was really an ornamental cover for a system of concentrated financial and political power.
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This week, livestock farmers and advocacy groups from across the country flew to Capitol Hill to share stories of exploitation by large meatpackers and call for greater farmer protections. At issue is a pending rule by the USDA that will clarify farmers’ grounds to sue meatpackers for retaliation, discrimination, and other abusive practices.
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