Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss how Amazon is attempting to replace public libraries by refusing to sell them its eBooks and the nomination of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission.

🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:

• This week India’s antitrust watchdog, Competition Commission of India, announced an investigation into WhatsApp’s privacy practices. The CCI is investigating WhatsApp’s “take-it-or-leave-it” stance, which would ban users from being able to receive or send messages on the app if they don’t comply with its terms of service and privacy policy. The CCI notes WhatsApp has a dominant market position in India, which makes its use of the policy even more powerful. India’s director general is also investigating its updated 2021 privacy policy that gives third parties, like Facebook, access to user data. (Yahoo Finance)
   

• The U.S. Supreme Court this week turned down an appeal by Facebook over a $15 billion lawsuit filed by four individuals accusing the company of nonconsensual tracking between April 2010 and September 2011, violating the Wiretap Act. Facebook during that period tracked the visits of users to websites integrated with Facebook features. The case was dismissed in 2017 but revived by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. (NBC News)
   

• FTC Acting Chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, in her testimony before the House antitrust subcommittee last week, signaled a tougher approach to anticompetitive actions by calling for clear bright-line rules in antitrust enforcement. Slaughter also argued for the need to shift the burden of proof to merging companies and right-sizing the standard of proof, which would clarify what the competition agencies need to show to prove mergers are unlawful and protect markets. (FTC)

  The Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating Google’s upcoming plan to block cookies on its chrome web browser for privacy protection purposes. The DOJ is concerned that Google’s plan to block the web tracking tool would allow it to further cement its dominance over ad rivals while also allowing it to utilize cookies through loopholes for its own purposes. (Reuters)

• Lina Khan, former Open Markets legal director and employee of seven years, was nominated by President Biden to be a commissioner at the FTC. Open Markets was mentioned in NPR, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired, Barron’s, CNET, MSN, MediaPost, Yahoo! Finance, Vice, Law360, Broadband Breakfast, Protocol, Deadline, Apple Insider, Competition Policy International, PYMNTS.com, and Hindustan Times in stories about the announcement about Khan. “She has previously worked as an aide to FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra and at the left-leaning New America Foundation and its anti-monopoly spinoff, the Open Markets Institute.” 
   
• Open Markets was mentioned in The Guardian for the letter we sent along with Authors Guild, the National Writers Union and other writers’ groups urging the Justice Department to block Bertelsmann’s takeover of Simon & Schuster. “Bertelsmann’s plan to take control of Simon & Schuster poses multiple dangers to American democracy and to the interests of America’s authors and readers. By bringing three of the big six publishers under one roof, the deal will concentrate vastly too much power over the U.S. book market in the hands of a single, foreign-owned corporation.” Eminetra, News Chant mentioned Open Markets’ as well.
   
• Barry Lynn was mentioned in an announcement from The Tax Justice Network about a new newsletter, The Counterbalance. “We first came together in late 2020 when Barry Lynn [a leading light of the new US antitrust movement] sent Michelle [Meagher, a competition lawyer} an article by Nick [Shaxson of TJN,] entitled “If tax havens scare you, monopolies should too. And vice versa,” calling for a new antimonopoly movement outside the United States. We recognised our shared interests, and began working together almost immediately.”
   
• Claire Kelloway was mentioned in The American Conservative for her reporting on monopoly prices for fertilizers and pesticides. “But this lack of agribusiness diversity also hurts farmers: as Kelloway and others at the Open Markets Institute have demonstrated, consolidation of agribusiness often hampers the ability of farmers to make a fair profit.”
   
• Open Markets’ report on Addressing Monopolization in America’s Food System, was cited in an op-ed written by Gracy Olmstead in The New York Times about how to fix our food systems. “We must challenge agribusiness monopolies and acknowledge the harm unchecked consolidation has had on our food system. We should aspire, when and where we can, to restore the sort of healthy local food sources and interconnectedness that my Grandpa Dad knew and that once undergirded rural communities.”
   
• Barry Lynn was mentioned in The Washington Monthly in a piece about what Biden can do to stop monopolies. “At the top of the list, Barry Lynn argues, are a suite of anti-monopoly statutes already on the books that Biden can deploy to reshape the American economy. These laws have gone largely unused by every president since Ronald Reagan, with disastrous results.” 
   
• Sandeep Vaheesan gave a presentation at the LPE Project conference on Moral Economy After Consumer Sovereignty. “Congress should pursue a comprehensive legislative solution to contracts of dispossession. First, it should enact a comprehensive law banning these contracts of dispossession.” He also presented at a Stanford Cyber Policy Center event on Antitrust and Tech Platforms.
   
• Open Markets joined a coalition of more than three dozen national and international nonprofit organizations to launch a campaign to ban surveillance advertising. “There is no silver bullet to remedy this crisis—and the members of this coalition will continue to pursue a range of different policy approaches, from comprehensive privacy legislation to reforming our antitrust laws and liability standards. But here’s one thing we all agree on: It’s time to ban surveillance advertising.”
   
• Sally Hubbard was interviewed by #TechReg on what antitrust is and why it matters. “Tech platforms are finally being held accountable for illegal practices they’ve been engaging in for years that violate antitrust laws meant to protect open and competitive markets.”

📈 VITAL STAT:

15%

The commission Amazon imposes on third-party sellers. 

📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:

• “No-Hire Provisions in McDonald's Franchise Agreements, an Antitrust Violations or Evidence of Joint Employer?” (Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, Andrele Brutus St. Val): The author analyzes McDonald’s arguments defending its no hire provisions - which prohibits franchisees from hiring one another’s employees. The author concludes that McDonald’s arguments are inconsistent with its position on certain labor issues, specifically joint-employer liability. McDonald’s position effectively allows the corporation to obtain the benefits of exerting control on their franchisees while avoiding the liability that franchisees can incur if they comply with the parameters McDonald’s puts into its agreements. 

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 published 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. Order your copy here. 

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