Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we celebrate OMI’s own Claire Kelloway for being named a finalist for a James Beard Award, explore how the Trump administration is helping Elon Musk’s Starlink to cement a monopoly on space, and welcome recent speeches by the DOJ’s Gail Slater and the FTC’s Mark Meador.
Open Markets’ Claire Kelloway Finalist for James Beard Award for Reporting on Farm Bill
The Open Markets Institute was thrilled to learn this week that Claire Kelloway was named a finalist in the 2025 James Beard Media Awards for her reporting in “The Farm Bill Hall of Shame,” part of a series on the Farm Bill published by the Food & Environment Reporting Network and Mother Jones. Kelloway, who runs OMI’s food and farming program, wrote about harmful policy choices in past farm bills that drove farm consolidation, pushed Black farmers off the land, and transferred federal farm support from the many to the few. Kelloway’s work at Open Markets has informed federal actions, including USDA initiatives to address anti-competitive practices in meatpacking and retail markets. “Claire’s nomination is a testament to her fearless journalism and deep commitment to exposing the corporate power structures that weaken our food system, an important measure of a healthy democracy,” OMI executive director Barry Lynn said.
Trump Administration Turbocharges Musk’s Space Ambitions
Austin Ahlman
Since taking power, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to entrench Elon Musk’s monopoly over low earth orbit communication. An alarming report in the Washington Post indicates the Trump administration is escalating that effort even further by using Trump’s threats to impose enormous tariffs to push foreign nations to adopt Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink.
Investors have taken notice of the administration’s maneuvering. Despite the broad chaos unleashed by Trump’s trade war, the stock price of SpaceX, of which Starlink is a subsidiary, has surged 80% since election day. Those gains also reflect other regulatory moves that are set to sharply raise the amount of direct federal funding Starlink receives, expand its ability to partner with cellular communications providers, and greatly increase the number of satellites the company can maintain in limited low earth orbit space. Those actions stand to greatly expand Musk’s already pervasive influence over U.S. and international information systems. (Musk also owns the social media platform X.)
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission also took a step toward boosting Musk’s monopoly by opening a proposed rulemaking process. The action came in response to a petition by Starlink seeking to relax limitations on signal frequencies, potentially bolstering the speed and reach of Starlink’s current fleet of satellites—by far the largest network in the world. The petition was opposed by most of Starlink’s potential global competitors.
The new rulemaking process follows recent comments by FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who told the Financial Times in April that U.S. and European competitors to Starlink are not progressing quickly enough. Carr also said other nations need to choose between U.S.- and Starlink-dominated system or a Chinese alternative.
In March, the Department of Commerce signaled its intention to reverse course and award Starlink as much as half of the over $40 billion set aside by former President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill to increase rural broadband access. Opting for subsidized satellite delivery in underserved areas over expansions of fiber optic networks will greatly tilt the playing field toward the former delivery method for years to come.
Earlier in March, the FCC boosted Starlink’s ability to partner with cellular communications providers by significantly increasing the power limit on connections between Starlink satellites and cellular devices. As cellular providers move to eliminate coverage dead zones altogether by further integrating with satellite networks, Musk’s Starlink monopoly stands to give him considerable leverage over legacy cellular services.
Looming behind these recent changes is a second, even more radical, Starlink proposal. Another open petition seeks to increase the number of satellites Starlink is allowed to maintain in low earth orbit over four-fold, from around 7,000 today to nearly 30,000 over the next few years. If Starlink does manage to launch that many satellites, it is unclear whether another entrant could ever create a competitive network, given hard restraints on the number of objects in low earth orbit. As with the recent proposal to increase Starlink’s connection strength, the move is opposed by most of Starlink’s potential competitors in the U.S. and Europe.
In particular, Amazon’s Project Kuiper stands to lose significantly. Last month, the corporation partnered with United Launch Alliance to launch its first fully functional set of satellites into low earth orbit as part of plans to build a network of over 3,000 in the coming years. Notably, the Musk rival had previously indicated an interest in broadening partnerships in Europe.
The Biden administration took a more restrained yet broadly hands-off approach to regulating low earth orbit satellite markets. Biden’s Department of Commerce demurred on giving Starlink access to the same rural broadband funds the Trump administration appears ready to funnel its way. And according to a source familiar with the failed acquisition talks, the Biden Department of Defense maneuvered to block Blue Origin from acquiring United Launch Alliance last year, a move that would have merged SpaceX’s only two domestic heavy launch competitors. But then-FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel declined to use the Commission’s broad authority to investigate Starlink’s growing monopoly, though she did decline to rubber stamp its requests as Carr is now doing.
The Trump administration’s aggressive advocacy for Starlink illustrates the need for more urgency from lawmakers and regulators wary of Musk’s growing power over the world’s communications networks. The European Commission and individual European governments must promote alternative players in the market, including by continuing to scale up their own low earth orbit capacities. They should also exercise tighter oversight of Starlink’s operations and partnerships on the continent. In the U.S., meanwhile, Congress should begin fundamentally rethinking its stance toward Musk’s space empire, potentially by breaking up SpaceX and Starlink or pursuing a regulatory framework that treats satellites in low earth orbit as the essential public infrastructure they are.
Enforcers in US and Europe Consolidate Antimonopoly Revolution
A little more than 100 days into the Trump Administration, three speeches by a new generation of antimonopoly enforcers underscored the extent to which President Biden’s restoration of America’s true antitrust tradition not only lives on in the U.S. but is helping revolutionize policy in Europe.
In the U.S., both the new head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division Gail Slater and new Republican FTC Commissioner Mark Meador carefully recast the antitrust language used by Biden, as well as his top enforcers Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, into terms that better fit the thinking of President Trump. Slater, for instance, named her philosophy “America First Antitrust” while Meador spoke of “Antitrust Policy for the Conservative.”
More important were the ways in which both speeches veered sharply from the “consumer welfare” philosophy first introduced by President Reagan in 1982, which shaped thinking in Republican and Democratic administrations right through Trump’s first presidency. Slater, for instance, spoke eloquently of using antitrust law to protect the “liberty” of the individual to “shape their own economic destinies.” She also echoed the language of the new Biden-era Merger Guidelines published by the DOJ and FTC in 2023, saying the DOJ will prioritize “the original public meaning of the statutory text” over economic analysis.
Meador, for his part, took direct aim at the libertarian approach to power that has defined much of conservative thinking since the early days of Reagan. All conservatives, he said, agree “about the threat unchecked political power poses to individual liberty and self-governance.” But among many conservatives, he said, “there has been a willful blindness to how the acquisition and maintenance of economic power manifests in equally problematic ways. When economic relationships are shaped not by free exchange, but by coercion and exclusion, the distinction between private and public power erodes.”
Equally important, Meador presented a close reading of Robert Bork’s take on the history of antitrust law, which guided enforcement by both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats for more than four decades. Ultimately, Meador concluded Bork’s interpretation was “hobbled by a fatal flaw,” namely that “Congress’s vision” of antitrust “does not align with Judge Bork’s.”
The third speech was by European Vice President Teresa Ribera, who oversees competition policy for the Commission, at a conference last week. In language generally stronger than used by her predecessor Margrethe Vestager, Ribera laid down a marker for further action against U.S. tech corporations. “Protecting against excessive market power is also protecting our democracy,” she said. “We are now at a time in history where the power of certain corporations, especially in the digital realm,” threatens “our social cohesion, our mental health and our democracies.”
The main difference between the three speakers is how much support they enjoy from their boss. In the case of Ribera, her comments hewed closely to recent statements by European President Von der Leyen. In the U.S., as the Wall Street Journal made clear recently, both the DOJ and FTC must navigate the fact that President Trump could at any moment strike a deal with the corporations they are targeting, in exchange for some sort of favor.
That said, we were happy to see Meador’s recognition of the Open Markets Institute’s pioneering focus on the flaws in Bork’s reading of history and his broader approach to antimonopoly law. “When it comes to the purposes behind the antitrust laws, it turns out that progressives perceived something that Bork either missed or willfully ignored,” Meador said, “which is ironic because those purposes are fundamentally conservative in nature.”
Perhaps what was ironic, however, is that so many people who considered themselves to be “conservative,” for so long defended the actions of private corporations like Google and Facebook that are so clearly radical in their destruction of even the most established of social and political balances. What’s important, however, is we’ve all arrived at the same place.
Open Markets Hosts May 15 Webinar on Addressing Monopoly Control of Cloud Computing
Join Open Markets Institute for a webinar, entitled “Engineering the Cloud Commons: Tackling Monopoly Control of Critical Digital Infrastructure,” on Thursday, May 15. OMI will bring together leading experts to discuss these issues as well as potential solutions, drawing on our upcoming report Engineering the Cloud Commons: A Blueprint for Resilient, Secure, and Open Digital Infrastructure. We will explore the bold steps that are needed to create a true cloud commons, from public utility regulation and structural separation to investment in digital public infrastructure. Featured panelists include Vanderbilt University law professor Ganesh Sitaraman; Paris Marx, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast; Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute; Trey Herr, senior director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, among others. Register here.
📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
- Center for Journalism & Liberty director Dr. Courtney Radsch testified in support of an Oregon bill that would require Google and Meta to pay news publishers or donate to the Oregon Civic Information Consortium, an entity that would distribute grants to news outlets. Willamette Week quoted from her testimony in an article syndicated by The New Era Homepage, Albany Democrat-Herald, and The Source Weekly.
- OMI senior reporter Karina Montoya published an article in Tech Policy Press recapping the first week of Google’s remedies trial to address its dominance in search. “Google’s stance is that no one but Google can run Chrome, and that a spin-off will inevitably hurt other Google products and user security,” Montoya wrote, noting that the Department of Justice’s expert witness testified that the opposite was
true.
- OMI board member Rana Foroohar published a column in the Financial Times citing Open Markets executive director Barry Lynn’s observation that the European Commission’s willingness to tax Big Tech and even ban services like X was “as radical as Biden’s groundbreaking executive order on competition from July 2021 in the sense that Europe is moving away from a technocratic, consumer welfare idea of antitrust policy and towards something that’s about guarding against the disinformation and threat to democracy from these platforms.”
OMI executive director Barry Lynn lauded recent remarks by DOJ assistant attorney general for antitrust Gail Slater that appeared to suggest the Trump administration will pursue aggressive antitrust enforcement to support a level playing field that benefits the country’s consumers and workers. Lynn noted, however, that the Trump administration could only be trusted on antitrust once it reversed the unlawful firings of Federal Trade Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter.
CJL director Dr. Courtney Radsch coauthored a G7 policy brief on AI competition and consumer rights, in which she called for ensuring fair access to essential AI resources like computing power and data; increasing scrutiny of AI mergers, acquisitions, and exclusive partnerships; enforcing fair and equal access to GPUs and cloud resources; and holding companies accountable for AI-related harms. The brief helped shape the T7 Canada Communiqué, a summary of expert policy recommendations delivered to Canada’s G7 representative, which will guide discussion at the upcoming G7 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, next month.
Tech Policy Press quoted Europe director Max von Thun on how Europe’s fragmented landscape makes it harder for homegrown tech companies to challenge existing Big Tech players. “We still have 27 different member states with their own national regulatory regimes, generally with national capital markets rather than a European one,” he said. “If you’re a technology company, it’s just much harder to grow and scale across the continent.”
In a Washington Monthly book review, OMI editorial director Anita Jain looks at two new books that explore how technology shapes our lives. Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara is a mix of memoir, tech criticism, and experiments with AI, while Like: The Button that Changed the World by Bob Goodman and Martin Reeves tells the story of the “like” button and how it changed the internet. Jain found that the simpler, more focused approach of Like does a better job of explaining Big Tech’s real impact.
CJL director Dr. Courtney Radsch participated in an online discussion on President Trump’s first 100 days hosted by The Foreign Policy Centre and Leiden University. Dr. Radsch highlighted how the administration was raising concerns about the erosion of democratic norms and the role of the press in holding power to account.
Bloomberg Law quoted OMI executive director Barry Lynn on emerging bipartisan unity on regulating Big Tech as seen in the Meta and Google lawsuits, which were pursued by both parties. “You can hear pretty much the same analysis from Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, as from Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota,” said Lynn.
🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
- TikTok was fined $600 million by the European Commission over data transfer practices that were found to be in violation of the General Data Protection Regulation. Ireland’s data watchdog also penalized the platform. (Associated Press)
- A group of mobile application developers sued Apple in federal court following a ruling last week that found the tech giant had willfully ignored orders to expand alternative payment options for apps listed in its marketplace. (Reuters)
Washington became the first state to enact notification requirements for mergers regardless of sector, following the lead of other states that have adopted narrower enhanced filing requirements in recent months. (National Law Review)
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📈 VITAL STAT:
📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:
Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy — Economist and Facebook cofounder turned tech critic Chris Hughes analyzes the way American markets have been forged and reforged over the last century in response to various social and political goals and challenges. In doing so, Hughes debunks the myth that unfettered free markets are the engine of prosperity or conducive to liberty and democracy.
Order Sandeep Vaheesan’s book:
Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States examines the history—and presents a possible future—of the people of the United States wresting control of the power sector from Wall Street, including through institutions like the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electric cooperatives.
🔎 TIPS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS?
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