Before we break down the work of the past couple months, Economic Liberties and partners are excited to announce the second annual Anti-Monopoly Summit on May 21, 2024 from 9:15am-5:30pm at the Westin Washington, DC Downtown, followed by a celebratory happy hour. If you attended our inaugural Summit last May, you already know this is an event you don’t want to miss. Make sure to secure your ticket ahead of time here.

There’s a reason we keep saying that competition, not consolidation, leads to lower prices and better products. When antitrust enforcers crack down on consolidation, markets work better, innovation surges, and consumers everywhere enjoy a little relief to their pocketbooks. From healthcare to housing, food and more, the past few weeks of antimonopoly victories are a clear example of that. 

The rent is too high because of price fixing: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes made a splash when she sued rent-setting software provider RealPage for facilitating de facto price-fixing by landlords in her state. This is just the latest development in the fight against “algorithmic price fixing,” an emerging threat across the economy that can have especially devastating consequences for housing. The DOJ is also tackling it in the meat industry, while private litigants take it on in hospitality and rental housing with support from the FTC and DOJ in both cases. As these suits and our recent joint brief with LocalProgress illustrate, policymakers have many tools to fight back against this new price fixing tactic. Keep an eye out for more antitrust action to bring down housing costs, as the DOJ has launched a criminal price-fixing probe into RealPage and a court recently ruled that the DOJ can reopen its investigation into the National Association of Realtors’ use of anticompetitive conduct to inflate commissions.

More inhalers get cheaper: AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, and GlaxoSmithKline announced they would lower out-of-pocket costs of their asthma inhalers from hundreds of dollars to $35. The reason why? A Federal Trade Commission enforcement action challenging bogus drug patents that Big Pharma uses to keep prices sky high—an action we advocated for in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services all the way back in 2021. After decades of exorbitant prices, this is a huge win for the more than 27 million Americans that suffer from asthma.

Keeping grocery prices down: In food and agriculture, scrutiny from the DOJ Antitrust Division led to the recent abandonment of a merger between vegetable subsidiaries of Chiquita and Dole—a deal that would have raised prices prices for food products purchased by 85% of American households. Just a few weeks prior, the FTC sued to block the Kroger-Albertsons mega-merger. As Economic Liberties has made clear in the public conversation, this merger would raise prices and reduce food and pharmacy access in many communities, while workers will lose bargaining power and potentially face lower wages, worse working conditions, and layoffs.

Ending excessive credit card late fees: The CFPB finalized a rule banning excessive credit card late fees—one we advocated for in a December policy brief and in outlets like CNBC. The rule caps the typical late fee at $8 instead of $32, saving consumers an estimated $10 billion annually. Naturally, big banks were unhappy that the government dared to check their profiteering, and promptly filed a lawsuit challenging the rule (and the very constitutionality of the CFPB). 

DOJ Brings Landmark Antitrust Suit Against Apple: The Department of Justice filed its much-anticipated monopolization suit against Apple last month, alleging the tech giant has illegally squashed competition and stifled innovation to keep consumers locked into its iPhone-centered ecosystem. The suit, hailed by legal experts as “even stronger” than expected, is a timely intervention as Apple’s empire subsumes an ever-growing assortment of industries—banking, automobiles, podcasts, and more—as Director of Research Matt Stoller recently explained on Breaking Points. The suit got an unexpected PR boost from none other than comedian Jon Stewart. Interviewing FTC Chair Lina Khan on The Daily Show, Stewart revealed Apple had blocked him from interviewing Khan on his AppleTV+ podcast in 2022. As we told the Washington Post, the viral segment underscored the urgency of the DOJ’s suit and spotlighted the antimonopoly movement on one of the biggest stages in television. 

Capital One-Discover Mega-Merger Should Be Blocked: Capital One’s proposed $35 billion acquisition of Discover is the largest financial services deal in recent history—and one that faces significant regulatory headwinds, according to a new transaction analysis from Economic Liberties. The analysis—as well as our joint letter sent to regulators, and Sr. Policy Analyst Shahid Naeem’s appearance before an elite audience at a Capitol Forum event—introduced a sober understanding of the deal’s harms and regulatory hurdles to a public discussion initially dominated by Capital One’s spin. As American Banker and others reported, the analysis shows that the merger would enable Capital One to access a regulatory loophole and charge merchants higher fees on debit transactions. 

Impact of the UnitedHealth Group Hack: As a cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group-owned healthcare payments exchange Change Healthcare paralyzed broad swaths of the US healthcare system, Economic Liberties published a factsheet to educate reporters on the crisis’ roots in consolidation—and sent a letter to regulators making clear that the broader resilience of our healthcare system is at stake. With a sweeping DOJ investigation into the healthcare giant underway, you can learn more about our perspective on the hack in Axios, Star Tribune, or on an episode of the healthcare podcast An Arm and a Leg titled “The Hack.” 

Quick hits:

• Corporate legal assaults on public-interest governance have been ramping up as the Biden Administration challenges private power across the economy, check out our tracker—“Corporations vs. The People”—to document this alarming trend.

   

• A new poll from us and Lake Research Partners shows that banning junk fees is a high priority across demographic and party lines—a finding that bodes well for the twelve states that have introduced such legislation in the current legislative session, many with the help and support of our “End Junk Fees” campaign.

   

• Rethink Trade Director Lori Wallach was featured on the the nationally syndicated radio show Here and Now, where she shined a spotlight on Big Tech’s attempts to to rig international trade agreements to preempt domestic oversight. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz also echoed these concerns about Big Tech’s sneaky “digital trade” strategy in a recent deep dive piece for Foreign Policy.

   

• With Epic Games submitting its request for relief today after winning its antitrust suit against Google, Sr. Legal Counsel Lee Hepner wrote last week about how the judge could break up the notorious tech monopolist this year—and how it could restore “the openness of the Android ecosystem for the benefit of all developers and consumers.”

   

• Want to look back on all the achievements from the Biden Administration’s revolutionary competition policy agenda so far? Here’s a factsheet we prepared in advance of the 2024 State of the Union.

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