Antitrust Quotes

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

And what these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in—think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them.

Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off. Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.

[The Sherman Antitrust Act,] which was intended to abolish the primary trust . . . has merely driven it into a new and utterly impregnable position [the corporation].

The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine: Which shall rule — wealth or man? Which shall lead — money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic freemen or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became

True market fundamentalists in the economics profession are few and far between. Not only are they absent from the center of the profession; they are rare at the “right-wing” extreme. Milton Friedman, a legendary libertarian, makes numerous exceptions, on everything from money to welfare to antitrust: Our principles offer no hard and fast line how far it is appropriate to use government to accomplish jointly what is difficult or impossible for us to accomplish separately through strictly voluntary exchange. In any particular case of proposed intervention, we must make up a balance sheet, listing separately the advantages and disadvantages.

The new monopolists of the Gilded Age preferred to believe that they were not merely profiteering, but building a new and better society. They were bravely constructing a new order that discarded old ways and replaced them with an enlightened future characterized by rule by the strong, by a new kind of industrial Übermensch who transcended humanity’s limitations. The new monopolies were the natural successor to competition, just as man had evolved from the ape.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.

From the beginning, Microsoft had proven the mantra that good artists copy but great artists steal. Its first operating system (MS-DOS) was actually a clone of CP/M, another operating system.* Microsoft Windows was a rip-off of the Apple Macintosh operating system; Microsoft Word and Excel were copies of Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3, respectively.

During one hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that Twitter and Facebook now have power that is much greater than that of any other company that has ever existed in the United States, and that’s including the ones that have been broken up by antitrust laws. According to the rules of the free market, you need to have competition. Otherwise, the company that controls the whole thing becomes lazy, corrupt, or worse. This is what is happening right now with big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Because they’re so big and because they’re almost 100 percent liberal, they have the power to tilt the national conversation to the left and literally block the voices on the right.

The tale of America coming out of the Great Depression and not only surviving but actually transforming itself into an economic giant is the stuff of legend. But the part that gives me goose bumps is what we did with all that wealth: over several generations, our country built the greatest middle class the world had ever known. We built it ourselves, using our own hard work and the tools of government to open up more opportunities for millions of people. We used it all—tax policy, investments in public education, new infrastructure, support for research, rules that protected consumers and investors, antitrust laws—to promote and expand our middle class. The spectacular, shoot-off-the-fireworks fact is that we succeeded.

President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement. (Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt’s attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a “bureaucratic bastard.”) When White entered the bureau, it still had only a few hundred agents and only a smattering of field offices. Its jurisdiction over crimes was limited, and agents handled a hodgepodge of cases: they investigated antitrust and banking violations; the interstate shipment of stolen cars, contraceptives, prizefighting films, and smutty books; escapes by federal prisoners; and crimes committed on Indian reservations.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

Když například firma sníží cenu, jde o konkurenci nebo pokus o monopolizaci? Když firma získá tržní podíl, jde o důkaz efektivnosti či ohrožení konkurence? Když zákon omezuje spojování podniků, je konkurence zvýšena nebo omezována? Když firma realizuje nákladný výzkum a inovace, které konkurence nedokáže snadno napodobit, jde o monopolizaci? Chybný teoretický přístup k těmto otázkám může vysvětlit útok veřejné politiky na ekonomickou efektivnost ve jménu zachování konkurence.

In the late 1800s a certain man taught Sunday school for over 20 years in a Baptist church; he eventually became the wealthiest man in the world. He also did not pay tithes. He was not generous toward anyone, quite the opposite, he was the reason that journalists came up with the term, "Robber Baron." The man was John D. Rockefeller. He engaged in ruthless and illegal business practices and built an oil company called Standard Oil that was so large that, when it was broken up by antitrust laws, several major oil companies were created from that one company. Over one hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller was worth over one billion dollars, which would be 50 to 100 billion dollars in today’s money. If he did pay tithes it would have meant an income of 100 million dollars (5 to 10 billion today) to his local church. It was not God that "blessed" him with great wealth; it was Satan, the god of greed. God does not lead people to engage in ruthless and illegal business practices in a desire for more, more, more. Even in his old age, he displayed his greed by giving away dimes. He always had dimes in his pocket so he could generously give one to people he met! What lessons are we to learn from this? One very important thing is that very often Satan will give people lots of money because Satan knows that money is very deceitful and can make even the most devout Christian materialistic and greedy. Let's take a look at another example. There is today a man who planned to become a missionary when he was young, but he not only turned against his calling, he turned against Christianity. Do you suppose that God has blessed this man? He is today a multi-billionaire, media-mogul. The man is Ted Turner, who started CNN and is a partner in Time-Warner and other media companies. Can we use him as an example that God blesses a righteous man? No, actually, the opposite is most likely true, that Satan prospers those who turn from the straight way.

When you're responsible for half the planet's military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You're the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you're the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don't be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court--or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. If you've got uniformed infantryman and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you're too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you've got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an "improvised" explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet's most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it's living in?

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, contemplating the communication problem in a nonindustrial context, has said, “Actually, the breakdown is between the person and himself. If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?” Suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the owner of a company who orders his subordinates to obey the antitrust laws has such poor communication with himself that he does not really know whether he wants the order to be complied with or not. If his order is disobeyed, the resulting price-fixing may benefit his company’s coffers; if it is obeyed, then he has done the right thing. In the first instance, he is not personally implicated in any wrongdoing, while in the second he is positively involved in right doing. What, after all, can he lose? It is perhaps reasonable to suppose that such an executive might communicate his uncertainty more forcefully than his order. Possibly yet another foundation grantee should have a look at the reverse of communication failure, where he might discover that messages the sender does not even realize he is sending sometimes turn out to have got across only too effectively.

The power of the big fish in general to regroup is hardly restricted to banking. When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the immediate effect was to replace a national monopoly with a number of regional monopolies controlled by many of the same Wall Street interests. Ultimately, the regional monopolies regrouped: In 1999 Exxon (formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) reconvened in one of the largest mergers in US history. In 1961 Kyso (formerly Standard Oil of Kentucky) was purchased by Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California); and in the 1960s and 1970s Sohio (formerly Standard Oil of Ohio) was bought by British Petroleum (BP), which then, in 1998, merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana). The tale of AT&T is similar. As the result of an antitrust settlement with the government, on January 1, 1984, AT&T spun off its local operations so as to create seven so-called Baby Bells. But the Baby Bells quickly began to merge and regroup. By 2006 four of the Baby Bells were reunited with their parent company AT&T, and two others (Bell Atlantic and NYNEX) merged to form Verizon. So the hope that you can make a banking breakup stick (even if it were to be achieved) flies in the face of some pretty daunting experience. Also, note carefully a major political fact: The time when traditional reformers had enough power to make tough banking regulation really work was the time when progressive politics still had the powerful institutional backing of strong labor unions. But as we have seen, that time is long ago and far away.

The second point is that, in the key industries we have studied, the state failed as an economic developer. It failed first as a subsidizer of industrial growth. Vanderbilt showed this in his triumph over the Edward Collins' fleet and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in the 1850s. James J. Hill showed this forty years later when his privately built Great Northern outdistanced the subsidized Northern Pacific and Union Pacific. The state next failed in the role of an entrepreneur when it tried to build and operate an armor plant in competition with Charles Schwab and Bethlehem Steel. The state also seems to have failed as an active regulator of trade. The evidence in this study is far from conclusive; but we can see problems with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-trust Act, both of which were used against the efficient Hill and Rockefeller.

Conhecimento e técnicas. 'Que aspectos seus você pode mudar?' Conhecimento. Um conhecimento factual desse tipo não garantirá a excelência, mas a excelência é impossível sem ele. 'O modo de uma pessoa se engajar na vida pode não se alterar muito. Mas o foco da pessoa sim...'Para onde quer que olhemos, podemos ver exemplos de gente que mudou seu foco mudando seus valores: a conversão religiosa de Saulo no caminho para Damasco...Se quer mudar sua vida para que outros possam se beneficiar de seus pontos fortes, mude seus valores. Não perca tempo tentando mudar seus talentos. A aceitação de algumas coisas que nunca podem ser transformadas - talentos. Não mudamos. Simplesmente aceitamos nossos talentos e reordenamos nossas vidas em torno deles. Nós nos tornamos mais conscientes. Técnicas. 1. Anote qualquer historia, fato ou exemplo que encontre eco dentro de você. 2. Pratique em voz alta. Ouça a si mesmo pronunciando as palavras. 3. Essas histórias vão se tornar suas 'contas', como de um colar; 4.Só o que você tem a fazer quando dá uma palestra é enfileirar as contas na ordem apropriada, e sua apresentação parecerá tão natural quanto uma conversa. 5. Use pequenos cartões de arquivos ou um fichário para continuar adicionando novas contas ao seu colar.As técnicas se revelam mais valiosas quando aparecem combinadas com o talento genuíno. O talento é qualquer padrão recorrente de pensamento, sensação ou comportamento que possa ser usado produtivamente.Qualquer padrão recorrente de pensamento, sensação ou comportamento é um talento se esse padrão puder ser usado produtivamente. Mesmo a 'fragilidade' como a dislexia é um talento se você conseguir encontrar um meio de usá-la produtivamente. David Boies foi advogado do governo dos Estados Unidos no processo antitruste...Sua dislexia o faz se esquivar de palavras compridas, complicadas.As diferenças mais marcantes entre as pessoas raramente se dão em função de raça, sexo ou idade; elas se dão em função da rede ou das conexões mentais de cada pessoa. Como profissional, responsável tanto por seu talento por seu desempenho quanto por dirigir sua própria carreira, é vital que adquira uma compreensão precisa de como suas conexões mentais são moldadas. Incapaz de racionalizar cada mínima decisão, você é compelido a reagir instintivamente. Seu cérebro faz o que a natureza sempre faz em situações como essa: encontra e segue o caminho de menor resistência, o de seus talentos. Técnicas determinam se você pode fazer alguma coisa, enquanto talentos revelam algo mais importante: com que qualidade e com que frequência você a faz. Como John Bruer descreve em The Myth of the First Three Years, a natureza desenvolveu três modos para você aprender quando adulto: continuar a reforçar suas conexões sinápticas existentes (como acontece quando você aperfeçoa um talento usando técnicas apropriadas e conhecimento), continuar perdendo um maior número de suas conexões irrelevantes (como também acontece quando você se concentra em seus talentos e permite que outras conexões se deteriorem) ou desenvolver algumas conexões sinápticas a mais. Finalmente, o risco do treinamento repetitivo sem o talento subjacente é que você fique saturado antes de obter qualquer melhora.Identofique seus talentos mais poderosos, apure-os com técnicas e conhecimento e você estará no caminho certo para ter uma vida realmente produtiva.Se as evidências mais claras sobre seus talentos são fornecidas pelas reações espontâneas, aqui vão mais três pistas para ter em mente: desejos, aprendizado rápido e satisfação. Seus desejos refletem a realidade física de que algumas de suas conexões mentais são mais fortes do que outras.Algumas tiravam satisfação de ver outra pessoa obter algum tipo de progresso infinitesimal que a maioria de nós nem perceberia. Algumas adoravam levar ordem ao caos.(...) havia as que amavam as ideias. Outras desconfiavam d

Apple Settles E-Book Antitrust Case Reuters

Separately, a second Chinese antitrust agency said Wednesday that it would punish Audi AG and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV's Chrysler arm after an investigation found the two car makers had pursued monopolistic practices, in Hubei province and Shanghai respectively. Under China's antimonopoly law, the companies could face fines of as much as 10% of their sales from the preceding year. The companies have said they are cooperating, though they declined to release further details.

In 1958 AT&T, the owner of Bell Labs, was served with an antitrust court order that forbade it to ever enter the computer business and that forced it to license any non-telephone inventions to the whole world. This odd ruling turned Unix into a worldwide phenomenon, as it spread from one corner of the computer world to the other.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” He should have included defunct law professors. The state we find ourselves in today can be traced back to the economists of the Chicago School. We would not have highly concentrated industries if it were not for Robert Bork and the Chicago School. Like all revolutions, an organized group of ideologues developed the ideas and spread them zealously. The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman and George Stigler, was the vanguard of attack against antitrust laws. The great irony is that they decried monopolies and concentration of power, but in practice they created all the conditions necessary for them.

The collapse of startups should be no surprise. Ever since antitrust enforcement was changed under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, small was bad and big was considered beautiful. Murray Weidenbaum, the first chair of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, argued that economic growth, not competition, should be policymakers' primary goal. In his words, “It is not the small businesses that created the jobs,' he concluded, ‘but the economic growth.” And small businesses were sacrificed for the sake of bigger businesses.34 Ryan Decker, an economist at the Federal Reserve, found that the decline is even infecting the high technology sector. Americans look at startups over the years like PayPal and Uber and conclude the tech scene is thriving, but Decker points out that in the post-2000 period, we have seen a decline even in areas of great innovation like technology. Over the past 15 years, there are not only fewer technology startups, but these young firms are slower growing than they were before. Given the importance of technology to growth and productivity, his findings should be extremely troubling. The decline in firm entries is a mystery to many economists, but the cause is clear: greater industrial concentration has been choking the economy, leading to fewer startups. Firms are getting bigger and older. In a comprehensive study, Professor Gustavo Grullon showed that the disappearance of small firms is directly related to increasing industrial concentration. In real terms, the average firm in the economy has become three times larger over the past 20 years. The proportion of people employed by firms with 10,000 employees or more has been growing steadily. The share started to increase in the 1990s, and has recently exceeded previous historical peaks. Grullon concluded that when you look at all the evidence, it points “to a structural change in the US labor market, where most jobs are being created by large and established firms, rather than by entrepreneurial activity.”35 The employment data of small firms supports Grullon's conclusions; from 1978 to 2011, the number of jobs created by new firms fell from 3.4% of total business employment to 2% (Figure 3.2).36

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and its companion, the Clayton Act of 1914, were designed not only to improve economic efficiency by reducing the market power of economic giants like the railroads and oil companies but also to prevent companies from becoming so large that their political power would undermine democracy. Trustbusters during the first decades of the twentieth century tamed American industry and arguably saved capitalism from its own excesses.

His order cited "credible evidence" that a takeover "threatens to impair the national security of the US".Qualcomm was already trying to fend off Broadcom's bid.The deal would have created the world's third-largest chipmaker behind Intel and Samsung.It would also have been the biggest takeover the technology koo50 sector had ever seen.The presidential order said: "The proposed takeover of Qualcomm by the Purchaser (Broadcom) is prohibited. and any substantially equivalent merger. acquisition. or takeover. whether effected directly or indirectly. is also prohibited."Crown jewelSome analysts said President Trump's decision was more about competitiveness and winning the race for 5G technology. than security concerns.The sector is in a race to develop chips for the latest 5G wireless technology. and Qualcomm was considered by Broadcom a significant asset in its bid to gain market share.Image captionQualcomm has already showcased 1Gbps mobile internet speeds using a 5G chip"Given the current political climate in the US and other regions around the world. everyone is taking a more conservative view on mergers and acquisitions and protecting their own domains." IDC's Mario Morales. vice president of enabling technologies and semiconductors told the BBC."We are all at the start of a race. and you have 5G as a crown jewel that everyone wants to participate in - and every region is racing towards that." he said."We don't want to hinder someone like Qualcomm so that they can't provide the technology to the vendors that are competing within that space."US investigates Broadcom's Qualcomm bidQualcomm rejects Broadcom takeover bidHuawei's US smartphone deal collapsesSingapore-based Broadcom had been pursuing San Diego-based Qualcomm for about four months.Last week however. Broadcom's hostile takeover bid was put under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. a multi-agency led by the US Treasury Department.The US company had rejected approaches from its rival on the grounds that the offer undervalued the business. and also that any takeover would face antitrust hurdles.Earlier this year. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei said it had not been able to strike a deal to sell its new smartphone via a US carrier. widely believed to be AT&T.The US also recently blocked the $1.2bn sale of money transfer firm Moneygram to China's Ant Financial. the digital payments arm of Alibaba.

and from the enactment in 1890 of the Sherman Act, the first of the great federal antitrust statutes. And

Shapiro’s and others’ research in industrial organizations influenced the Department of Justice’s efforts to write antitrust policies for networked markets, and they created a new language, too. Terms like compatibility, dynamics, and openness began appearing in articles. And successes in digital media businesses have necessitated more-recent changes in language. Product quality and creative marketing have given way to terms like networks, communities, and conversation. The language for success in media, as in technology, is less and less about content and more and more about connections.

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

Indeed Republicans were the progressive party, comfortable with the application of federal power in behalf of major national goals: protecting the voting rights of blacks, curbing antitrust abuses, bolstering domestic industry through intrusive

LOL and touché, clever contemporary conservative, for using nostalgia as a political pejorative, the way liberals have always done, the way a lot of us got into the bad habit of doing in the 1970s and ’80s about FDR and organized labor and antitrust and thereby became useful idiots for you and the evil geniuses of the right.

In other words, the Sherman Antitrust Act wouldn’t be used against U.S.

In other words, the Sherman Antitrust Act wouldn’t be used against U.S. Steel.

What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic consider would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases following by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet's fundamental profit model. At this point it's clear that collapse will almost definitely come first.

What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases following by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet's fundamental profit model. At this point it's clear that collapse will almost definitely come first

A new green economy can easily suffer from the same predatory form of capitalism that created the global economic meltdown. As Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers notes, "The world is suffering from the perverse incentives of 'unnatural capitalism.' When people say 'free market,' I ask if free is a verb. We don't ave a free market but a highly managed and often monopolized market. We used to have somewhat effective antitrust laws in the United States. Now we have banks and companies that are 'too big to fail,' but in truth are too big not to fail. The resulting extremes of concentration of wealth and political power are very bad for business and the economy (not to mention the environment, human rights, and democracy). One result is that small companies can't advance too far against the big players with their legions of lawyers and Capitol Hill lobbyists, when in truth it's small and medium-sized companies that provide the majority of jobs as well as innovation.

The justification for the antitrust laws that would ultimately break up Standard Oil is that monopoly prevented competition. Preventing competition was bad because the monopoly could charge outrageous prices. Well, every single big company in American history that had gotten big through the free market rather than legislative largesse, got that way by keeping prices low and quality high. If it were to stay that way, assuming no helping hand from the legislature, it would have to keep prices low, quality and service high.

Verified and traced all the shell corporations myself. Every major bank in the US is owned by a handful of European aristocrats who are all related to each other by birth." "Why haven't the antitrust regulations been triggered?" "Come on, Luke, you know the answer to that. It takes special access to some deeply-buried information to put it together. Security agencies have it, but they're all busy monitoring for terrorism these days.

Why don’t we pass a law that says when you borrow money to buy somebody else and cannibalize him, the interest payments on those loans are not deductible? That would get the excesses out of the system pretty fast. Right now, if you want to buy up a competitor, generally you can’t. That would violate the antitrust laws. But if you want to buy a company that does something else entirely, that’s okay. Where’s the sense in that?

Nearly everything about the way the digital giants conduct their operations smacks of antitrust violations, or at least violations of the spirit in which the relevant statutes were passed a century ago.

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google By Brody Mullins, Rolfe Winkler and Brent Kendall | 1277 words WASHINGTON—Officials at the Federal Trade Commission concluded in 2012 that Google Inc. used anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals, a far harsher analysis of Google’s business than was previously known. The staff report from the agency’s bureau of competition recommended the commission bring a lawsuit challenging three Google practices. The move would have triggered one of the highest-profile antitrust cases since the Justice Department sued Microsoft Corp. in the 1990s.

My advice is to sell any high tech company when the United States brings an antitrust suit, not because the company will be harmed by the suit, but because by the time the government understands a tech business well enough to sue it, the world has moved on.

The story of American history that most students have encountered for at least the past several decades amounts to a series of drearily predictable clichés: the Civil War was all about slavery, antitrust law saved us from wicked big business, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Depression, and so on. From the colonial settlements through the presidency of Bill Clinton, this book, in its brief compass, aims to set the record straight.

Google’s access to high-ranking Obama administration officials during a critical phase of the antitrust probe is one sign of the Internet giant’s reach in Washington.

Writers are tough sons-of-bitches. It’s hard enough to write a book. Then you have to wade into this street fight we call the publishing industry and start pitching your project. The tweed jacket crowd is gone, replaced by Darwinian corporate mergers, staff churn, the e-book earthquake, anti-trust pricing scuffles, and book platforms multiplying like rabbits. You have to sort through too much personal information on too few agents, searching for a hook, parsing what they love, and what they want, and exactly how they want it presented. Your pitch letter has to be pitch perfect, a polished gem. You gotta sell more than a well-wrought paragraph; only Clancy and Cussler get a promo budget. You gotta show them you’ve got a social media game – tweet, facebook, link-in, chat, blog. You gotta help them sell your book. So what. I wouldn’t trade this trade for anything. Thanks, Gutenberg, for inventing this game I love.

heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.

Harl is a tenacious advocate for antitrust action against agribusiness, but he’s not optimistic that without pressure from consumers, the government will go after these huge monopolies that control our food. “There’s a huge amount of money and a lot of pressure applied whenever someone in Washington tries to do something about this,” he told me. “That pressure is applied in the form of messages like ‘Look, if you let this go on, we’re going to diminish our support for your campaign.’ When things get bad enough that consumers rise up, that’s when we’ll get another era of antitrust.” How much money is involved?

The [antitrust] law in the United States is couched in vague, indefinable terms, permitting the Administration and the courts to omit defining in advance what is a "monopolistic" crime and what is not. Whereas Anglo-Saxon law has rested on a structure of clear definitions of crime, known in advance and discoverable by a jury after due legal process, the antitrust laws thrive on deliberate vagueness and ex post facto rulings. No businessman knows when he has committed a crime and when he has not, and he will never know until the government, perhaps after another shift in its own criteria of crime, swoops down upon him and prosecutes.

billionaires had accrued their wealth and power at the expense of the government and of the people themselves, that their genius and efficiency lay in shirking taxes, suppressing wages, militating against antitrust reform, busting unions.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court’s newest member, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the union had pursued peaceful, legal means to a legitimate end; that miners who joined the union had no intention to injure their employer’s business; and finally that the UMWA could not be judged an illegal organization under an antitrust law Congress had aimed at monopoly corporations. In Brandeis’s view, the court’s majority naively assumed that Hitchman’s miners freely chose to sign yellow dog contracts. Like his fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Brandeis believed there could be “no liberty of contract where there was no equality of bargaining position.” Under modern industrial conditions, Holmes had written, it was natural for a worker to believe that he could not secure a fair contract unless he belonged to a union. On this basis, Justice Holmes and one other member of the high court joined in Brandeis’s dissent.

Yet the most powerful argument in favor of antitrust law is one that is rarely made: antitrust law reduces the political power of firms.

Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast, something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn’t possibly have imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected entities (the world’s computer users), making decisions on their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large phenomenon (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot be made sense of through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; people who try, end up going crazy, forming crackpot theories, or becoming high-paid chaos-theory consultants.

As former secretary of labor Robert Reich wrote in 2015, “Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.

Keeping knowledge from others for self-preservation is an ancient and evil practice.Truth, trust and transparency have always been the most dangerous anti-tradition. The hardest part about innovation and change is rarely unconventional, it’s that conventional people have built walls that they protect with war-like tactics. Progress is the product of openness, not shallowness.

My investing advice is simple: I only invest in unregulated monopolies. They aren’t supposed to exist, but our antitrust laws were written in the era of steam engines, and enforcement has been nonexistent.

Like a French Revolution in reverse—one in which the sansculottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy—the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, farther to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing economic nostrums from history’s dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4 As

Unlike most of the other economic changes I’ve discussed, like shareholder supremacy and ending antitrust and defeating organized labor, this wasn’t part of the original strategy of big business and the right. But for them it isn’t exactly collateral damage either, because it has been a political boon. So far they’ve brilliantly managed to redirect the anger of most of the (white) left-behinds to keep them voting Republican, by reminding them that they should resent the spoiled college-educated liberal children and grandchildren of the acid amnesty abortion liberal elite who turned on them and their parents and grandparents in the 1970s.

FOR MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS, AT&T had remained intact at the pleasure of the United States government—always, as the economist Peter Temin points out, “operating at the limit of what the antitrust laws would allow.

Bundling eventually stopped working for Microsoft. After the antitrust investigation, the company maintained its dominance on the PC operating systems market, but it lost control of many other markets. Eventually the industry jumped from PC to mobile. Microsoft tried to exactly replicate the network effects it had before—an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers who paid a licensing fee to run Windows Mobile, and app developers and consumers to match—but this time it didn’t work. Instead, Google gave away its Android mobile OS for free, driving adoption for phone makers. The massive reach of Android attracted app developers, and a new network effect was built, derived from a business model where the OS was free but the ecosystem was monetized using search and advertising revenue. Microsoft has also lost the browser market to Google Chrome, and is being challenged in its Office Suite by a litany of startup competitors large and small. It continued to use bundling as a strategy, adding workplace chat via Teams to its suite—but it hasn’t achieved a clear victory against Slack. If bundling hasn’t been a sure thing for Microsoft, it’s an even weaker strategy for others. The outcome seems even less assured when examining how Google bundled Google+ into many corners of its product, including Maps and Gmail, achieving hundreds of millions of active users without real retention. Uber bundled Uber Eats across many touchpoints within its rideshare app, but still fell behind in food delivery versus DoorDash. Bundling hasn’t been a silver bullet, as much as the giants in the industry hope it is.

So what was the Bell System waiting for? Kelly acknowledged that the phone company would capitalize on the transistor long after “other fields of application” such as the home entertainment industries.4 The recent Justice Department antitrust suit, which was now moving forward, was a stark reminder why: The phone company was a regulated monopoly and not a private company; it had no competitors pushing it to move forward faster. What’s more, it was obliged to balance costs against service quality in the most cautious way possible. “Everything that we design must go through the judgment of lots of people as to its ability to replace the old,” Kelly told an audience of phone executives in October 1951.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

The battle for world domination is on. If Google’s Larry Page worries about any competitor, it is probably Mark Zuckerberg. While Facebook began as a way to make social networks visible and to ease communication between them, it is now—like Google—in the surveillance marketing business. Facebook and Google sell the data you give them to marketers. Google gets the data through your search history. Facebook gets it through your social media posts. The scale of the Facebook ecosystem—which includes WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram—is astonishing: 1.6 billion users of Facebook itself; 1 billion on WhatsApp; 900 million on Messenger; 400 million on Instagram. Facebook controls more than 75 percent of US mobile social media platforms. Under any normal antitrust regime this would be considered a monopoly. Like Google, Facebook has taken to presenting itself as a public service. “Don’t be evil.

The US chief technology officer and one of her deputies are former Google employees. • The acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division is a former antitrust attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the Silicon Valley firm that represented Google. • The White House’s chief digital officer is a former Google employee.

Since he had figured out every conceivable way to restrain trade, rig markets, and suppress competition, all reform-minded legislators had to do was study his career to draw up a comprehensive antitrust agenda.

But in 1933 he was a towering figure who was supposed to have discovered something worth study and imitation by all world artificers everywhere. Such eminent persons as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler6 and Mr. Sol Bloom,7 head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House, assured us he was a great man and had something we might well look into for imitation. What they liked particularly was his corporative system. He organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The anti-trust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to combine.

official U.S. policy in the spring of 1945 favored strict measures to remove ideologically committed Nazis and their diehard supporters from positions of influence; a limited economic reform similar to U.S. antitrust measures intended to break up German cartels; and preservation of a competitive, private-enterprise economy.

Harlan read the Sherman Act as a literal ban on trusts, which, as he would later say, presented the danger of a “slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.

In this era before railroad regulation and antitrust legislation, the SIC contract didn’t violate any obvious laws, only a universal sense of fair play.

He preferred compromise to antitrust cases, which were slow, time-consuming, and fiendishly difficult to win.

Wealthy people and corporations often give money to both sides in an election. They do this for insurance, because they cannot afford to offend the people who win political power. It is often an error to say they “put Hitler in power,” etc. People with assets need to avoid offending ambitious politicians. The wealthy contribute to many politicians if only to safeguard their interests. It is dangerous to be the target of government prosecution, antitrust, etc. All businesses are potential targets of government. J.R.Nyquist

He also advocated Archbold’s ouster, but Senior thought it impossible to fire Archbold in the midst of the antitrust suit.

Precisely because he lost the antitrust suit, Rockefeller was converted from a mere millionaire, with an estimated net worth of $300 million in 1911, into something just short of history’s first billionaire.

They used the façade of Bork’s pinched academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust.

The military-industrial complex came about as a result of government’s power to use stick-and-carrot methods to rule business (which was just one part of the politicians’ efforts to rule everyone). For a stick, the politicians use anti-trust laws, interstate commerce laws, pure food and drug laws, licensing laws, and a whole host of other prohibitions and regulatory legislation. Many years ago, the government succeeded in making regulatory legislation so complex, contradictory, vague, and all-encompassing that the bureaucrats could fine and imprison any businessman and destroy his business, regardless of what he did or how hard he tried to obey the law. This legal chicanery gives the bureaucrats life-and-death control over the whole business community, a control which they can and do exercise on any whim, and against which their victims have very little defense. For a carrot, the politicians hold out large and lucrative governmental contracts. By crippling the economy with regulations and bleeding it by taxation, the government has drastically cut the number of large and profitable contracts available from the private sector, which forces many businessmen to get such contracts from the government or do without them. To stay in business, businessmen must make profits, and many of them have simply accepted government contracts, either without bothering to delve into the ethical questions or with the comforting thought that they were being patriotic. Government’s stick-and-carrot control of business has been going on for so long that most businessmen accept it as normal and necessary (just as most people accept taxes as normal and necessary).

What’s the “best” trade-off? Such decisions typically are buried within antitrust or antimonopoly laws, as enforced by administrative agencies and interpreted by prosecutors and courts.

Economists have their glories, but i do not believe that antitrust law is one of them.

AI will bring that same monopolistic tendency to dozens of industries, eroding the competitive mechanisms of markets in the process. We could see the rapid emergence of a new corporate oligarchy, a class of AI-powered industry champions whose data edge over the competition feeds on itself until they are entirely untouchable. American antitrust laws are often difficult to enforce in this situation, because of the requirement in U.S. law that plaintiffs prove the monopoly is actually harming consumers. AI monopolists, by contrast, would likely be delivering better and better services at cheaper prices to consumers, a move made possible by the incredible productivity and efficiency gains of the technology.

An aggressive enforcer of antitrust laws could win a court victory that forced the giant to relinquish market share, although the giant’s army of litigators would probably halt any such assault, and its legislative allies would discourage the assault to begin with. The more likely threat to one of the giants comes from another giant seeking to expropriate its market.

To fill two and a half times as many seats, an airline needs two and a half times as many passengers. Pan Am’s lock on international travel, however, had been weakening. Congress had launched an antitrust investigation of Pan Am’s monopoly on foreign routes in the 1950s. Populist voices complained that regulators were protecting industry giants rather than consumers. Some of the loudest complaints came from startups—Texas Air, Braniff, and, eventually, Southwest Airlines. The startups also brought new ideas to the industry. Hub and spoke. Flying to secondary airports. Reducing turnaround times to 20 minutes. Like Sam Walton’s supersized stores far outside cities, none of the ideas involved new technologies. They were all small changes in strategy that no one thought would amount to much. They were all S-type loonshots.

Kline’s reputation, from his days in the Kansas house, is that of a fanatical tax-cutter; for those who can write big checks he has done massive favors over the years. The answer surprises even cynical old me. What Kline was referring to, his press secretary tells me, is the Microsoft antitrust suit. Kansas, he informs me, is one of only a handful of states that still hasn’t settled with the software monopolist, hinting that this is because the outgoing attorney general (a Mod) received campaign money from Oracle and various other Microsoft competitors.

It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, “Yours in solidarity.

Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4

What Hill ultimately deplored more than tariffs and subsidies were the ICC and the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Congress passed these vague laws to protest rate hikes and monopolies. They were passed to satisfy public clamor (which was often directed at wrong-doing committed by Hill's subsidized rivals). Because they were vaguely written, they were harmless until Congress and the Supreme Court began to give them specific meaning. And here came the irony: laws that were passed to thwart monopolists, were applied to, thwart Hill.

Waters spoke of the many ways that Facebook had “utterly failed.” The company had failed on diversity and inclusion. It had been caught in “redlining,” when housing advertisements were not shown to users of particular races — which Facebook was being sued for both by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and privately by housing charities. Antitrust investigations were active in 47 states and the District of Columbia. The company had been fined $5 billion by the FTC over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook had enabled the government of Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.

Unions, as we have seen, pushed for and won legislation that legitimized collective bargaining. Small farmers got federal price supports and a voice in setting agricultural policy. Farm cooperatives, like unions, won exemption from federal antitrust laws. Small retailers obtained protection against retail chains through state “fair trade” laws and the federal Robinson-Patman Act, requiring wholesalers to charge all retailers the same price regardless of size and preventing chains from cutting prices.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called.

America’s laws have not been updated to track the changes in America’s monopoly landscape. Our Congress refuses to do it. Our enforcement tools are getting rusty. Our competition enforcers don’t have enough resources to effectively take on multibillion-dollar, much less trillion-dollar, companies. And America’s courts are increasingly populated by conservative judges, including on the U.S. Supreme Court, who interpret the antitrust laws so narrowly that their decisions have created a dampening effect on the ability of the government and private plaintiffs to litigate antitrust claims.

I proposed limits to tech’s addictive design features and reforms to confront tech’s political censorship. This followed from my efforts as Missouri attorney general to investigate Facebook (and Google) for antitrust and consumer protection violations. I was the first state attorney general in the nation to launch such a probe. Facebook, Inc. was not amused.

Today’s Big Tech barons have benefited from lax antitrust enforcement and outdated antitrust laws, from cozy relationships with supposed regulators, and from special protections in the law. All this must end.

Antitrust has become a legal backwater in recent decades. But the curse of bigness is back, and antitrust enforcement must come back with it, updated to perform its original, republican function: protecting the independence of the American people from oligarchic control.

Procedural Posture Appellant challenged the orders of the Superior Court of San Diego County (California) directing indemnification of respondent for his expenses incurred in defense of a cross-complaint in the underlying litigation between appellant and appellant's franchisee and in his proceedings seeking indemnification for attorneys' fees and costs under Cal. Corp. Code § 317. California Business Lawyer & Corporate Lawyer, Inc. is a Civil Attorney Orange County Overview Appellant's franchisee sued appellant, respondent and others, for, among other things, an antitrust claim on behalf of all of appellant's franchisees. Respondent was later dismissed as appellant's president and chief executive officer and filed a lawsuit for breach of his employment contract. Following a judgment favorable to respondent in his employment contract suit, appellant filed suit seeking a declaratory judgment that it did not have to indemnify respondent in the litigation with its franchisee. The trial court found that respondent acted in good faith and in a manner he reasonably believed to be in the best interests of appellant, and thus he should be indemnified by appellant pursuant to Cal. Corp. Code § 317. The trial court also awarded respondent attorneys' fees and costs incurred as a result of litigation. On appeal, the court affirmed. There was no factual finding in appellant's franchisee's suit that appellant, under respondent, had engaged in illegal practices. Substantial evidence supported the trial court's finding of respondent's good faith. Also, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in its determination and award of attorneys' fees. Outcome The court affirmed the orders of the trial court because substantial evidence supported the trial court's finding that because respondent acted in good faith and in a manner he reasonably believed to be in appellant's best interest, he was entitled to indemnification from appellant. Also, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by awarding respondent attorneys' fees and costs.

The Antitrust Paradox, a book responsible for entirely reframing our ideas about corporate competition and the benefit to the consumer, a book described as the most cited work on its subject in American history.

On introducing his antitrust bill in 1890, Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio thundered, “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” Sherman’s

What happened? The law is currently suffering from an overindulgence in the ideas first popularized by Robert Bork and others at the University of Chicago over the 1970s. Bork contended, implausibly, that the Congress of 1890 exclusively intended the antitrust law to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers. That theory, the “consumer welfare” approach, has enfeebled the law. Promising greater certainty and scientific rigor, it has delivered neither, and more importantly discarded far too much of the role that law was intended to play in a democracy, namely, constraining the accumulation of unchecked private power and preserving economic liberty. Forty years ago, the famed Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky warned that it is “bad history, bad policy, and bad law to exclude certain political values in interpreting the antitrust laws.” He was right.

The dire situation had been aggravated by elected officials who, a quarter century into the Internet age, had managed to pass exactly zero legislation to protect anyone. Democratic institutions that we hold dear had crumbled in the face of what all this digital engagement has wrought: no privacy protections, no updated antitrust laws, no algorithmic transparency requirement, no focus on addiction and mental impact. It is breathtaking to think that there are no significant guidelines governing these areas. However flawed, there are laws for everything but tech companies.

A renewed economic nationalism around the world blames immigrant workers, foreign products, or elite conspiracies for the diminishment of the middle class.