Sandeep Vaheesan Calls for Building Worker, Small Business Power and Criticizes Abusive Contracts – Kochland Author Chris Leonard Talks Koch Brothers, Corporate Power
Read More
Open Markets Institute interviews Christopher Leonard, author of 'Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.' Leonard talks about the story of the Koch family and what it says about corporate power.
Read More
The New Yorker's Sheelah Kolhatkar profiles Elizabeth Warren's plans to break up big tech and how in early 2016 then-Open Markets' Lina Khan and Barry Lynn shaped her thinking in regards to antimonopoly policy. She reports that on June 29, 2016, Warren delivered a speech, titled “Reigniting Competition in the American Economy,” at an event for Open Markets. “Google, Apple, and Amazon have created disruptive technologies that changed the world, and every day they deliver enormous value,” Warren said. “They deserve to be highly profitable and highly successful. But the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors who want their chance to change the world.”
Read More
Steve Lohr of The New York Times offers four prominent ideas as to how big tech should be reined in from experts, including Open Markets Director Barry Lynn.
Read More
Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan asserts that fine print isn’t “voluntary” and we should overhaul our thinking about contractual agreements. In this piece for Current Affairs, Vaheesan explores how we are subject to a dense web of contracts that grant us—or (more often) deprive us of—rights. He argues that against corporate power, Congress must wield its power to ban abusive contractual provisions.
Read More
Will out-of-state investors own a sizable portion of Costco’s chicken production? One investor from North Carolina has applied for permits to build at least 132 chicken houses across nine locations in four Nebraska counties, according to public documents reviewed by Food & Power. Read Claire Kelloway's latest story on how one private equity fund could own a quarter of the chicken houses for Costco’s project in Nebraska.
Read More
Bloomberg's Sarah Frier writes a critical report about the Federal Trade Commission's $5 billion settlement with Facebook. She reports that the FTC’s antitrust investigation looks a lot less imposing given its privacy settlement with the company and speaks with Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller. “For any anticompetitive behavior they want to get away with, they’re going to say, ‘The FTC made us,’ ” Stoller told her. “That’s what they bought for $5 billion.”
Read More
“From Net Neutrality on down, Ajit Pai continues to side with massive corporations over the American people,” says Open Markets Research and Reporter Matthew Buck. “Today’s recommendation is no different.”
Read More
On August 9th, Open Markets Institute joined Public Justice and the American Association for Justice in filing an amicus brief in support of the consumer antitrust action against Qualcomm.
Read More
In this piece for The Atlantic, Nathan Schneider and Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan argue that tougher regulation will help to fight monopoly, but workers and small businesses also need the ability to join forces against corporate power. "Collective power—that is, allowing independent workers and small businesses to collaborate to negotiate better treatment from megacorporations, or to start enterprises of their own—should be a pillar of creating an equitable economy," they assert.
Read More
Public Justice, the American Association for Justice, and Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief on August 9 to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in support of a consumer antitrust class action lawsuit against Qualcomm.
Read More
The Verge reports on the FBI's plans to build a dragnet on Facebook demonstrating the incoherence of the government's approach to Facebook. "On one hand, it fines Facebook $5 billion for violating users’ privacy; on the other, it outlines a plan to potentially store all Americans’ public posts in a database for monitoring purposes." The Verge also reviews other Facebook news and cites Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller in regards to Facebook's ad network crashes: "How much of a monopoly do you have to be to literally not care if your cash register breaks? Oh I can’t take your money nvm I’ll get it later.”
Read More
Open Markets Opposes Megamergers Throughout Economy – What an Ongoing Lawsuit Says About Google's Power over Online Travel
Read More
On July 16, Google representative Adam Cohen argued to the House antitrust subcommittee that the tech giant was an afterthought when people start planning for travel. "When [people] are searching for places to travel, hotels and airlines, they start with dedicated specialist competitors,” Cohen said. Actually, they don’t. A full sixty percent of all travel searches today begin on Google and the corporation’s dominance - and its profits from this business - are growing fast.
Read More
Joel Winston writes a story for Fast Company about how Google is collecting your transaction data directly from your Gmail inbox and other Google services you use. He cites Open Markets Senior Fellow Matt Stoller's op-ed on The New York Times on Facebook's Calibra project raising the specter of big tech's ability to discriminate on pricing to consumers.
Read More
The Verge's Nick Statt speaks with Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard about Amazon's deal with Apple to bring direct iPhone sales to its platform for the first time. Hubbard believes the Amazon-Apple deal could be a violation of antitrust laws that deal with anti-competitive conduct like price-fixing and illegal market allocation.
Read More