The New Republic's Maureen Tkacik writes the story of "WeWork's Adam Neumann and the great game of asset immolation." She cites Open Markets Fellow Matt Stoller's latest book, Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
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Open Markets Food & Power reporter Claire Kelloway covers how after U.S. and Chinese trade officials reached a deal to lift China’s five-year ban on U.S. poultry imports, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) submitted a final rule permitting China to export chicken to the U.S. from birds raised and slaughtered in China for the first time in the agency’s history. She argues that the only clear winners in this grand bargain are multinational meatpackers that can profit from selling the lowest cost poultry, no matter where it came from.
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The New York Times' Cecilia Kang and David McCabe report that California said Facebook had resisted or ignored dozens of requests for documents and internal correspondence about the company’s handling of personal data. Sarah Miller, the deputy director of the Open Markets Institute, one of the groups that asked to speak with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, expressed hopefulness that Mr. Becerra would join the antitrust investigations into the tech companies.
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"While the FCC’s rubber-stamp of the merger is disappointing but not surprising, the group of states challenging the merger in New York next month represents our best hope of protecting our markets and making up for this massive enforcement failure," said Open Markets Reporter and Researcher Matt Buck
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Washington Post's Rachel Siegel and Tony Romm report on Google's $2.1 billion acquisition of smartwatch maker Fitbit. Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard told them that regulators has been "slow to the game" when it comes to looking at how data fortifies the monopoly power of corporations such as Google. “That’s a source of their dominance,” Hubbard said.
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Open Markets Fellow Matt Stoller writes that American workers are increasingly bored and disillusioned, locked in increasingly centralized castles of lazy profit. Some are mistreated, but for even the most scientifically in demand, luxurious poké bowls don’t substitute for doing meaningful work. But he asserts it’s time to set American producers free once again to solve real problems. We’ve done it before. It’s called competition.
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Fast Company published an excerpt from Matt Stoller’s new book, ‘Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.’ In it, Stoller describes how Microsoft avoided the fate of IBM, which was constantly under threat by antitrust authorities.
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Last Friday, Facebook announced Facebook News, a tab for personalized news articles on the Facebook App. The feature includes content from 200 publishers, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and BuzzFeed, some of which Facebook will pay licensing rights to. Each user’s News tab will include a compilation of articles chosen by professional journalists and tailored content based on predicting user’s interests.
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New York Time's David McCabe writes that Attorney General Xavier Becerra is in Google and Facebook’s backyard. But unlike nearly all other state attorneys general, he won’t say whether he’s investigating them. McCabe reports that on Oct. 1, eight groups who have advocated more aggressive scrutiny of companies like Facebook and Google wrote to Mr. Becerra asking to discuss their concerns with him. Sarah Miller, the deputy director of one group, the Open Markets Institute, said they wanted “to offer to share our views, to hear his views and to help brief or provide educational support.”
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Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we share an amicus brief involving antitrust law and workers we filed with Change to Win, the National Employment Law Project, and three economics and legal professors. And we talk about why Facebook’s new News tab initiative does little to fix the threat the corporation poses to journalism.
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On October 17, 2019, Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn testified before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on 'The Nature of the Threats Posed by Platform Monopolists to Democracy, Liberty, and Individual Enterprise.’
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Today, the Open Markets Institute, Change To Win, the National Employment Law Project, and Professors Marshall Steinbaum, Sanjukta Paul, and Veena Dubal filed an amici curiae brief supporting current and former college basketball and football players in their antitrust suit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
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On October 30, 2009, Open Markets Institute, Change To Win, the National Employment Law Project, and Professors Marshall Steinbaum, Sanjukta Paul, and Veena Dubal filed an amici curiae brief supporting current and former college basketball and football players in their antitrust suit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
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Reuters reports Alphabet Inc's, Google's holding company's, quarterly results which are under the shadow of a major antitrust probe by over 40 U.S. attorneys general. Open Markets Director of Enforcement Strategy Sally Hubbard told Reuters five years later the Google practices concerning investigators has not abated. “But the political winds have shifted,” said Hubbard, who worked for the New York AG from 2005 to 2012. “There’s a lot more momentum to fix the situation.”
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Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief in support of PNE Energy Supply in its lawsuit against Eversource Energy and Avangrid, Inc. on October 25, 2019. The two energy corporations are accused of abusing their monopoly power to gouge prices for consumers in New England.
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Watch the full show from 10/23/2019.
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The Open Markets Institute calls on the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to open a review of TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, as well as it’s 2016 acquisition of Music.ly.
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