FEATURED: Biden Should Embrace Economic Populism After Series of Anti-Monopoly Victories

As the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly agenda continues to both produce wins across the economy and gain in popularity with the public, Economic Liberties remains at the forefront of shaping the media narrative. We’re urging the administration to tout the impact of their policies and enforcement actions, and pushing back and countering the spin emanating from corporate monopolies. 

An excellent piece from The New Yorker earlier this week makes all this crystal clear. It features Senior Advisor Bharat Ramamurti emphasizing that the administration should take significant pride in its corporate power agenda — an agenda that’s paying off for working families by lowering prices, and putting people above profits. At a time when consumer sentiment about the economy is in flux, leaning into the administration’s work to crack down on exploitative corporate monopolies is not just good policy, but popular too. As Senior Advisor Faiz Shakir noted in Politico, “Biden is taking a lot of that populist fight and making it real — he’s doing it through policy and on a whole variety of scores.”

Wall Street and big business clearly understand the power of antimonopoly. Corporate America is attacking and pushing back hard on the administration’s efforts to ban junk fees, eliminate noncompetes, lower credit card fees, and reduce prescription drug costs — as we detail in our Corporations vs. The People tracker. While conservative political leaders like Hawley, Vance, and Gaetz (a self-described Khanservative) are challenging corporate power, Trump is muting his critique. Research Director Matt Stoller recently wrote in BIG that Trump has been shifting his tone away from 2016-era economic populism and listening to big business CEOs. 

At the debate tonight, President Biden should lean into economic populism and champion the administration’s competition agenda. As Senior Fellow Elizabeth Wilkins aptly pointed out to the Guardian, “This is stuff that people want, but … it’s also stuff that big corporations have been getting away with for a long time.” 

Learn more about the extensive  accomplishments of Chair Khan and the Federal Trade Commission, AAG Kanter and DOJ Antitrust, and Director Chopra and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to deliver tangible results for Americans.

State Legislative Sessions Close with Significant Anti-Monopoly Wins: With most state legislative sessions winding down for the year, we’re celebrating several anti-monopoly wins. They include: a new Minnesota law to ban anti-competitive junk fees; new laws to rein in Big Tech’s addiction and surveillance model in New York; and groundbreaking cases against algorithmic price-fixing in the rental housing market filed by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Arizona. 

We’ve continued to cultivate and support new anti-monopoly state champions and we’re playing a key role to organize the state and local anti-monopoly movement from Virginia to Arizona. Major areas of work include our End Junk Fees campaign which stretched across 13 states this year, bringing together diverse coalitions to combat deceptive pricing practices. Partnering with Local Progress, we crafted a memo on the problem of algorithmic price fixing in rental housing markets and have been advising state leaders on how to combat it. We also released a new brief and model legislation for states to complement the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed ban on noncompete agreements, ensuring workers across the economy are protected from these abusive contracts. Read more from our own Pat Garofalo and labor expert Terri Gerstein on how states can protect workers from monopoly power in a recent op-ed in The Hill.

Big Retail Ratchets Up Fight Against Decades-Old Price Discrimination Law: With reporting that the FTC will soon resuscitate the century old Robinson-Patman Act (RPA) to launch a suit against the largest U.S. alcohol distributor, Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits, the biggest retail companies are getting nervous. As we explained in our 2022 report, the RPA was passed to prevent big box companies from using their size to force suppliers into giving them discounts, while small businesses have to pay higher prices. While independent businesses have been cheering the anticipated suit, companies like Walmart have launched a lobbying campaign, passing around fact sheets on Capitol Hill to misinform members of Congress. In response, we released our own myth-fact sheet to set the record straight and have been engaging with policymakers to help them understand that reviving the Robinson-Patman Act is an essential part of reviving Main Streets across the country and lowering prices. 

Embedding Anti-Monopoly in the AI Regulatory Framework: As artificial intelligence technology continues to quickly evolve, it’s crucial that governments champion a regulatory framework that doesn’t allow a handful of dominant tech companies to control this new technology. Rethink Trade Director Lori Wallach was invited to testify in Congress at a U.S. House AI Taskforce meeting, where she emphasized the need to recognize the role international preemption via trade agreements play in creating fair and safe AI guidelines. And amid efforts in California to regulate AI, we weighed in with the lead sponsor of SB 1027 with concrete suggestions to improve the bill and ensure it fosters fair market access and beneficial inventions—from adding a private right of action and whistleblower protections to prohibiting conflicts of interest. All this activity comes on the heels of the FTC and DOJ’s investigations into Big Tech platform’s de-facto acquisition of AI startups, which we’ve been advocating for with vigor. 

Fighting Google’s Powerful Lobbying Arm: While we all wait for the decision on the  US v Google search trial, and for the DOJ’s suit against its adtech monopoly to begin in September, we are continuing to highlight the company’s abuses and how it is using its extensive resources to influence legislative initiatives. We sent a letter calling attention to Google’s capture of a California commission tasked with recommending reforms to the state’s antitrust laws, which got a full page write up in Politico’s California Playbook. In another letter, widely circulated in Reuters, we called on the Department of Justice to investigate YouTube’s alarming market dominance and anticompetitive practices. Our US v Google website also has new research exposing how Google’s “unbiased experts” are actually raking in grant money from the monopolist, which can’t be a coincidence. This follows a blockbuster exposé on consumer welfare standard-defender Josh Wright, who Google retained and paid for almost a year after they learned of his abhorrent behavior.

Exposing the Most Profitable Hidden Monopoly: Economic Liberties sent to two letters to the NTIA and DOJ to end VeriSign Inc. and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) government-designated monopoly over core internet domain names. As coverage in the American Prospect, Bloomberg, and Capital Forum noted from our work, these monopolists or ‘economic termites’ have raised prices while their costs to improve service have only gone down. We called on NTIA to not automatically renew its contract with Verisign, open up a fair bidding process, and implement a price cap. We also urged the DOJ to withdraw 2018 interagency guidance that enabled the Trump administration’s NTIA to remove contractual protections against price-gouging, and to examine VeriSign’s kickback arrangement with ICANN as a possible violation of antitrust laws.

Taking the Anti-Monopoly Agenda On the Road: Since our Summit, our team has been traveling to various conferences and events to expand the tent of the anti-monopoly movement. Here are just a few recent examples:

• Senior Legal Counsel Lee Hepner joined the National Independent Venue Association’s annual conference to discuss the DOJ’s case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, seen here in the featured photo of the related Billboard story.
• William J. McGee, our Senior Fellow for Aviation and Travel discussed how to create a fairer airline industry at the American Society of Travel Advisor’s national conference last month.
• Our Director of Policy and Advocacy, Morgan Harper, was invited to testify at a joint CFPB-DOT hearing on airline travel credit card reward points, amid calls to bring transparency and accountability to the consolidated industry.
• Nidhi Hegde, Interim Executive Director was featured on a panel at the Consumer Federation of America’s Consumer Assembly, where she spoke to the latest efforts and strategies to crack down on Big Tech.
• Matt Stoller, our Research Director, spoke at the Federalist Society’s 2024 Freedom of Thought Conference, where he participated in a panel called “The Challenge of Citizens United.”
• Rethink Trade Research Director Daniel Rangel testified in front of the US Trade Representative last month, where he discussed ways to promote supply chain resilience. 

Must Read Quick Hits:

• Research Director Matt Stoller wrote a hit piece on the “economic termites” that subtly raise prices via hidden tollbooths across the economy, and discussed it on Slate’s What Next podcast.
• Director of State and Local Policy Pat Garofalo wrote an excellent piece tying together the various ways corporate power is distorting housing markets—from algorithmic price fixing to private equity buying up housing supply.
• Our Rethink Trade team has been leading the charge to call on POTUS to close the de-minimis loophole. Watch this viral reel by associate Katie Hettinga on how companies like Temu exploit the loophole.
• Managing Editor Helaine Olen wrote about private equity roll-ups of veterinary clinics for The Atlantic.
• The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board has now published 100 hit pieces on FTC chair Lina Khan, according to our tracker—one every 11 days.

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