Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we break down the House antitrust subcommittee’s report on Big Tech and showcase Barry Lynn’s keynote speech to the OECD exposing the damage done to the world economy by neoliberal ideology.

🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:

• The European Commission settled a lawsuit with U.S. chipmaker Broadcom last week to end its exclusive dealing agreements to supply computer chips to manufacturers of TV set-top boxes and internet modems. The commission had found that Broadcom used its market power to coerce manufacturers to sign these agreements. The commission concluded that the agreements marginalized dependent manufacturers and excluded new entrants from the chipmaking market. (European Commission)
   

• The Department of Justice fined chicken producer Pilgrim’s Pride $110 million on Wednesday for fixing the prices of broiler chicken products. This is the third time since June that a chicken producer was caught price-fixing by the department. (Industry Week)

• Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of UFCW Local 1500 Welfare Fund v. AbbVie, Inc. AbbVie was sued for violating patent law by building a thicket of patents around the rheumatoid arthritis medication Humira — the world’s bestselling drug — to prevent generic competition for decades, far beyond the legal limits of patent protection. Read more in our press release.
   
• Open Markets Institute joined a long list of organizations filing an amicus brief in support of California’s pro-worker case against Uber and Lyft. The brief emphasizes how Uber and Lyft’s misclassification of drivers subjects the drivers not just to serious financial hardship, but also to harassment, assault, and even safety violations. Read more in our press release. 
   
• Sally Hubbard published a piece in Pro Market analyzing how digital markets would look if they were open and competitive. 
   
• Daniel Hanley published an article in the Washington Monthly explaining how the Federal Communications Commission has several anti-monopoly powers that it can use to invigorate competition in the telecommunications sector.
   
• Sally Hubbard was interviewed by Yahoo! Finance about her testimony before Congress and the importance of antitrust enforcement. 
   
• Barry Lynn was quoted in CNET discussing how the surging anti-monopoly movement has shaped the 2020 presidential campaigns. "No matter who wins in November, this fight against Google, Facebook and Amazon, this anti-monopoly movement, has reached a level of maturity. There's almost nothing the folks in Washington could do to stop it," Lynn said. 
   
• Sally Hubbard was quoted in Reuters saying that she did not want a potential Biden administration to repeat the Obama administration’s hands-off approach to antitrust enforcement. 
   
• Sandeep Vaheesan was quoted in an article in Barron’s arguing for a racially diverse Biden administration that doesn’t rely on corporate personnel. Vaheesan was quoted saying that a popular movement against corporate domination would “redistribute power downward from a class of mostly white economic royalists to the multiracial majority in American society.”
   
• Open Markets Institute was mentioned in The Washington Post, in an op-ed by Katrina vanden Heuvel, as an organization that had provided the intellectual and policy scholarship underpinning the conclusions of the House report.   
   
• Daniel Hanley and Sally Hubbard’s report, Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power, was mentioned in a Forbes article about Amazon workers going on strike in a German warehouse. 
   
• Open Markets Institute was mentioned in MSSP Alert as a co-signatory of an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The letter demands that Amazon Web Services transparently explain “at least three cloud security breaches involving voter data from dozens of states and agencies to which it supplies election services.” 
   
• Sally Hubbard was mentioned in articles in The Guardian and S&P Global about how regulators could use the House report in a lawsuit against Google. Hubbard said the report “helps build that political will and the political momentum for enforcement of the laws that we do already have."
   
• Barry Lynn’s new book, Liberty from All Masters, was mentioned in InterConNews Outlet, which explained the harmful effects of Big Tech monopolies.

📈 VITAL STAT:

$1 billion

The amount of money that the Department of Justice has collected from settlements with pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, that violated anti-kickback prohibitions in recent years. Pharmaceutical corporations pay kickbacks to providers to ensure continued purchases of brand drugs, entrenching Big Pharma monopolies in individual drug markets.

📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:

• “Could Existing Water Pipes Replace Dirty Energy Utilities?”, by Lilli Ambort and John Farrell, Institute for Local and Self Reliance: Ambort and Farrell analyze the possibilities of replacing heating and cooling systems powered by fossil fuels with geothermal water mains. They argue that the transition to this potentially cost-effective system could substantially reduce greenhouse gasses in urban environments. 

• “Essential Platforms,” by Nikolas Guggenberger, Stanford Technology Law Review: Guggenberger argues for revitalizing and extending the essential facilities doctrine to apply to digital platforms, to neutralize their monopoly power.

St. Martin’s Press has published Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn’s new book, Liberty from All Masters. 

Liberty is Lynn’s first book since 2010’s Cornered. In his new work, Lynn warns of the threat to liberty and democracy posed by Google, Amazon, and Facebook, because of their ability to manipulate the flows of information and business in America. Barry then details how Americans over the course of two centuries built a “System of Liberty,” and shows how we Americans can put this system to work again today. Lynn also offers a hopeful vision for how we can use anti-monopoly law to rebuild our society and our democracy from the ground up.

Liberty from All Masters has already made waves for its empowering call to restore democracy by resurrecting forgotten tools and institutions. “Very few thinkers in recent years have done more to shift debate in Washington than Barry Lynn. In Liberty from All Masters, he proves himself as a lyrical theorist and a bold interpreter of history. This book is an elegant summoning of a forgotten tradition that can help the nation usher in a new freedom,” says Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind and national correspondent for The Atlantic.

You can order your copy of Lynn’s book here. 

Simon & Schuster will publish Monopolies Suck by Sally Hubbard on Oct. 27. The book is the first by Hubbard, who is Open Markets’ director of enforcement strategy. Hubbard examines how modern monopolies rob Americans of a healthy food supply, the ability to care for the sick, and a habitable planet, because monopolies use business practices that deplete rather than generate. Monopolists also threaten fair elections, our free press, our privacy, and, ultimately, the American Dream, Hubbard shows. In Monopolies Suck, Hubbard reminds readers that antitrust enforcers already have the tools to dismantle corporate power and that decisive action must be taken before monopolies undermine our economy and democracy for generations to come. In Monopolies Suck, Sally provides an important new view of America’s monopoly crisis and of the political and economic harms of concentrated private power. Pre-order your copy here. 

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