Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we explore how America’s largest utility, NextEra, used a range of hardball tactics to block a big clean energy project in New England.
Open Markets Calls for EU’s Cloud and AI Act to Confront Big Tech’s Cloud Monopoly
The Open Markets Institute submitted a formal response to the European Commission’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, warning the legislation will fail to protect European security or promote European economic growth unless it directly confronts today’s dominance by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s over cloud services. Open Markets Europe director Max von Thun, said, “Europe wouldn’t outsource its power grid to three foreign corporations—why accept that deal for the backbone of the digital future?”
OMI’s comment called on EU policymakers to: 1) ban anticompetitive practices such as exit fees, tying, and bundling of cloud products; 2) create standards to make it easy to move data between cloud providers; 3) ensure full interoperability; 4) require consistent and transparent pricing; 5) establish a single marketplace for computing resources (IaaS); 6) require cloud providers to report compute capacity and emissions, and; 7) use public procurement power to impose open standards, open source, and interoperability in public cloud contracts. Read the full submission here.
Barry Lynn Examines the Origins of Modern Liberty and Democracy in Out of Many, One
In Out of Many, One, a new anthology from American Futures spotlighting the thinkers shaping tomorrow’s democracy, Barry C. Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, traces today’s crisis of democratic freedom back to its spiritual and ideological origins. Titled “From Universal Light to Individual Liberty,” Lynn’s essay offers a deeply historical and philosophical argument: the battle against monopoly and autocracy is not just economic or political—it is also moral and even spiritual.
Lawsuit Opens Window Into How Big Utilities Block Clean Energy and Lower Prices
Madison Johnson
In 2020, the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities approved one of the most ambitious clean energy projects in the history of the Northeast: a transmission line to deliver surplus hydropower from Quebec to New England that would both reduce electricity costs and cut emissions. But according to a recent antitrust lawsuit, the largest utility corporation in the U.S. — NextEra — then successfully blocked the project to protect its collection of aging fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.
The New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) is a private development led by Avangrid, a regional energy distribution corporation. Avangrid says that after the project was greenlit by the utility commissions of Massachusetts and Maine, NextEra unleashed a wide-ranging campaign —including legal roadblocks, a public referendum, and strategic delays — to prevent NECEC from delivering cheaper, cleaner hydropower to Massachusetts customers.
Avangrid filed the lawsuit last November, and this May the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts heard arguments on a motion by NextEra to dismiss the case. The case offers an unusually candid view of how incumbent corporations obstruct clean energy when their dominance is at stake.
The dispute centers on the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire. Avangrid alleges that NextEra, which owns Seabrook, deliberately delayed upgrading a critical circuit breaker that needed to be replaced before NECEC could connect to the grid. The breaker acts as a key safety device, protecting both the plant and the grid from overloads. Although NECEC had state approvals, Massachusetts couldn’t compel NextEra to upgrade Seabrook equipment. That authority fell to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which ultimately ordered the upgrade, but only after a legal fight that added years of delay.
Avangrid also alleges that NextEra secretly backed a Maine referendum to block NECEC after it had cleared permitting. Although the project is designed to provide power only to Massachusetts, the transmission line crosses Maine. In 2021, 59% of Maine voters approved Question 1, banning high-impact transmission lines and requiring future projects to pass a two-thirds legislative vote. Avangrid successfully challenged the retroactive application of the referendum to the NECEC and resumed construction in 2023.
According to the complaint, NextEra funded advocacy groups and hired PR firms to promote the referendum while keeping its own name out of public view. What looked like a grassroots fight, Avangrid claims, was really a corporate blockade.
In its motion to dismiss, NextEra argues it had no legal duty to assist a competitor and that the litigation it pursued against Avangrid was lawful under the First Amendment, which protects the rights of persons — including corporations — to petition the government. It also argues that Avangrid failed to define a proper market or show monopoly power, so the case does not rise to the level of an antitrust violation.
Whether the court grants NextEra’s motion to dismiss the case, Avangrid’s allegations are worth paying attention to. As of today, the NECEC transmission line is largely built but not operational. NextEra did eventually upgrade the Seabrook breaker in late 2024, but by then the project was delayed by years and Avangrid’s costs had ballooned. As a result, Avangrid is seeking monetary damages for increased costs, an order declaring that NextEra’s behavior as unlawful, and for the court to bar NextEra from continuing this behavior.
NextEra is hardly the only incumbent utility company that has attempted to block clean energy to preserve its dominance. Dominant utilities have for years worked to slow or block the adoption of renewables like solar and wind. But Avangrid’s lawsuit is the first to specifically allege that a utility unlawfully blocked interconnection access.
There are ways out. Regulators can standardize interconnection rules and enforce them with teeth. Performance-based regulation can tie utility earnings to public outcomes like emissions reductions and grid access, not just capital spending. In Hawaii and New York, pilot programs have begun moving in that direction.
The first step is recognizing that Avangrid v. NextEra is part of a broader pattern, and a window into how powerful incumbent utilities block cleaner, cheaper energy.
📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
Open Markets chief economist Brian Callaci coauthored an article in Jacobin with labor economist Osman Keshawarz, arguing that rent control, a policy supported by NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, must be paired with increased housing supply, zoning reform, and public investment to meaningfully address the housing crisis. “Incentivizing the expansion of the total housing stock is a good way to counteract the effects of lower rents on the rental housing supply,” the authors wrote.
Courtney Radsch, director of Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets, wrote an article in Tech Policy Press on cybersecurity company Cloudflare’s game-changing policy to block AI crawlers by default. “In one move Cloudflare gave publishers back something they’ve been desperately trying to reclaim: control, consent, and compensation,” Radsch wrote.
Open Markets Institute’s food systems program manager Claire Kelloway published an article in The States Forum arguing that the decline of America’s farms and rural communities is due to policy failures—especially weak antitrust enforcement. Kelloway called for state-level action to restore competition through right-to-repair laws, fair grocery pricing, and stronger healthcare merger reviews. “From cracking down on repair monopolies to leveling the playing field for independent grocers, state lawmakers have many options to combat corporate consolidation and exploitation in rural America.”
Open Markets legal director Sandeep Vaheesan published a book review of Brett Christophers’ The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet in the Michigan Law Review. Vaheesan wrote that the book “persuasively argues that, under current institutional arrangements, the private sector is not equipped to decarbonize the power system—the single biggest task for arresting further climate change.”
Open Markets condemned the Federal Communications Commission's unprecedented use of its authority to pressure companies into abandoning DEI programs, in light of recent news that the FCC would grant T-Mobile approval for two merger deals based on such a condition. “Using antitrust authority as a cudgel to eliminate workplace diversity programs and manipulate the competitive process isn’t just regulatory overreach—it's a complete perversion of the FCC’s statutory mission: managing spectrum allocation, maintaining technical standards, and ensuring reliable communications infrastructure,” said Courtney Radsch, director of CJL@OMI.
Open Markets Institute’s Europe director Max von Thun spoke at an event in Brussels hosted by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the official think tank of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, on revising merger guidelines to better address how monopsony power harms workers. Von Thun focused on the role competition enforcement plays in protecting workers from rising market concentration and how the consumer welfare standard prevents these harms from being addressed or even seen. He called for adoption of a much broader approach that looks at how market concentration affects people as producers and workers not just consumers.
OMI welcomed the UK parliament’s landmark report on social media, which exposed critical flaws in the current Online Safety Act and laid out urgent steps to curb the dangerous amplification of misinformation on Big Tech’s social media platforms. "The findings are a stark warning: social media giants, underpinned by profit-maximizing algorithms and opaque digital advertising systems, continue to amplify false and harmful content—undermining public safety, social cohesion, and democratic resilience," OMI Europe director Max von Thun said.
Open Markets applauded the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s provisional decision to grant Google ‘strategic market status.’ “The CMA has taken an important first step in addressing Google’s monopoly over search and search advertising…We welcome especially the CMA’s analysis that the emergence of AI assistants do not pose a significant threat to Google’s market power in search,” the statement read.
OMI Europe director Max von Thun was quoted in Food Manufacture criticizing the UK's decision to appoint a former Amazon executive as the head of the country’s competition regulator. “Replacing the CMA’s chair with a former Amazon executive, at a time when a handful of U.S. tech monopolies are tightening their grip over AI, is a major strategic blunder that will harm, not help, growth and innovation in the UK,” von Thun said.
🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
The U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. ruled that President Trump’s removal of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter in March was illegal. Fellow Democratic FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya also challenged his removal at the time but he resigned from the agency in June, so his claims were dismissed. (New York Times)
France has opened an investigation into X and some unnamed individuals over interference in European elections and is looking in particular at two allegations, "alteration of the operation" and "fraudulent extraction of data" from a computer system "by an organized group." The computer hacking charge could lead to a prison sentence and a €300,000 fine. (Le Monde)
The French competition authority is opening an investigation into Meta's online advertising practices, specifically the conditions it uses to limit customers’ access to ad verification partnerships on the ad inventories it sells. It hopes for a hearing in December and a decision in early 2026. (Reuters)
The Department of Justice fined the top executive of Oak View Group, which manages sports venues, $15 million for a scheme to rig the bidding process at a public arena in Texas. The original indictment alleged that CEO Tim Leiweke offered subcontracts to a rival in exchange for standing down on a bid for a contract to the Moody Center at the University of Texas at Austin. (Houston Chronicle)
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📈 VITAL STAT:
20%
The percentage of internet traffic handled by Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company that announced it will block AI crawlers by default, reversing a longstanding status quo in which AI bots stripped content from news publishers with impunity, dramatically reducing referral traffic in the process. (Tech Policy Press)
📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream: This book by Megan Greenwell, the former editor of Deadspin writes about how the private equity’s vulturous business model has hurt American workers. Greenwall based her book in part on her own experiences watching private a new private equity owner destroy the popular sports news website where whe worked. With about 8% of the American workforce employed by a private equity-owned company, Greenwell tells her story through the voices of those workers whose livelihoods and communities have been destroyed by the industry.
Order Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan’s new book:
Sandeep Vaheesan, the legal director at the Open Markets Institute, published his first book Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States on December 3, 2024. Vaheesan 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.
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