Welcome to The Corner. In this issue we discuss the important lesson to be learned from AT&T’s failed acquisition of WarnerMedia: Mergers need more scrutiny. 

🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:

• Last week, the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act unanimously passed in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill, introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley, would raise the fee that corporations have to pay from $280,000 to $2.25 million for deals worth $5 billion or more. The measure would also lower the fee for smaller mergers under $161.5 million from $45,000 to $30,000. The bill would also increase the budget of enforcement agencies, giving the FTC a budget of $418 million and the DOJ’s antitrust division $252 million. (Reuters)
   

• A group of attorneys general from 45 states and territories wrote to Congress last week asking for greater funding for their antitrust probes. The letter noted the need for greater antitrust enforcement in numerous industries, especially with regard to actions taken against Big Tech. (Reuters)




• Last week, FTC Acting Chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Commissioner Rohit Chopra announced a continuation of an investigation into 7-Eleven’s $21 billion purchase of 3900 Speedway retail stores from Marathon Petroleum Corp. The acquisition would give 7-Eleven a dominant position in the convenience store market in major metropolitan areas. The acquisition was closed last week after 7-Eleven agreed with the FTC to sell 293 stores. The deal, however, will continue to be investigated with the potential to be unwound. (Bloomberg)
   

• Last week German antitrust regulators launched an investigation into Amazon for abuse of market dominance. The Federal Cartel Office (FCO), the Bundeskartellamt, under a new amendment to the German Competition Act, would give the agency greater power to regulate the practices of digital companies. The FCO could ban practices such as self-preferencing, tying, bundling, and data processing relevant for competition purposes. (TechCrunch)
   

• Three House Democrats this week called for the FTC to investigate pharmaceutical corporation Abbvie for anticompetitive practices related to its pricing of rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira. The investigation focuses on pay-for-delay agreements Abbvie made in order to prevent lower-cost biosimilar drugs from entering the market to compete with Humira. (The Hill)

• A feature piece ran in The University of Connecticut’s news outlet, UConn Today, about Daniel Hanley and Jackie Filson for their monopoly-busting work at Open Markets: “The alums lead a growing anti-monopoly movement at the Open Markets Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit seeking to restore antitrust laws to ensure a fair and equitable distribution of opportunity, wealth, and power.”
   
• Claire Kelloway was interviewed by The Working Landscapes Lab in a podcast about agricultural consolidation. “Right now just a handful of very powerful, mostly investor-owned corporations make most of the decisions about how we produce food, how it's distributed, and what our food system looks like.”
   
• Open Markets’ report on Amazon’s worker surveillance was mentioned in The Washington Post as evidence of the invasiveness of surveillance and punishment of workers. “A 2020 study by the Open Markets Institute found that Amazon relies on an ‘extensive worker surveillance infrastructure,’ including an AI-enabled camera in Prime vehicles, wristbands, thermal cameras, security cameras and intelligence analysts.”
   
• Barry Lynn was mentioned in The Telegraph speaking about Big Tech’s dominance and the relationship it has had with government officials. “Think tank Open Markets Institute’s executive chairman, Barry Lynn, rejects the theory that Obama felt he owed Schmidt’s data wizards anything. If anything, Google was pushing at an open door.”
   
• Sally Hubbard was mentioned in Wired for publicly stating that Apple has long had monopoly power in the App Store. “US law defines monopolies by their power to control prices and exclude competition. ‘So when Apple is unilaterally setting the 30 percent commission that is direct evidence of monopoly power, because that's the power to control prices.’”
   
• Claire Kelloway’s Food & Power piece ran in The Washington Monthly. It reports on why independent grocery stores are calling for enforcement of anti-monopoly laws like the Robinson-Patman Act to protect them from grocery goliaths such as Amazon and Walmart. “Discrepancy in buyer power has dramatically expanded with grocery consolidation. As recently as 1997, Americans bought 20 percent of all groceries from the top four retailers. By 2019, the top four retailers claimed 43 percent of all sales, with Walmart alone capturing 1 in every 4 dollars spent on groceries. Amazon’s online grocery sales also tripled during the pandemic, just as the e-commerce goliath expands its network of brick-and-mortar Amazon Fresh grocery stores.”
   
• Open Markets was mentioned in JD Supra and Mondaq for petitioning the FTC to ban noncompetes and exclusionary contracts. “Already, the Open Markets Institute (in conjunction with other advocacy groups) has put two proposals before the agency. The first petitions the FTC to prohibit employers from requiring or enforcing non-compete clauses with regard to their workers, whether employees or independent contractors.”
   
• Barry Lynn was quoted in CQ Researcher speaking about Big Tech's gathering and use of personal customer data. “Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, a Washington-based advocacy group that works to rein in corporate power, says Amazon's algorithms allow it to offer different prices to different customers, to its own advantage. ‘They know you don't really pay attention to pricing, so they might charge you $2.29 for a can of beans,’ he says, ‘Someone else who really shops around, maybe they'll charge less.’”
   
• The Washington Monthly ran Claire Kelloway’s Food & Power piece about how tech giants are trying to create a monopoly middleman on grocery deliveries. “[Tech giants and their investors] are willing to burn cash on cheap, unprofitable delivery to corner this market.”

📈 VITAL STAT:

$300

The monthly estimated amount per house that monopolies in industries across the economy cost American households. 

📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:

• “Soaring Private Equity Investment in the Healthcare Sector: Consolidation Accelerated, Competition Undermind, and Patients At Risk” (American Antitrust Institute, Laura Alexander, Dr. Richard Scheffler): The authors discuss the growth of the private equity industry and the threat it poses to the quality of health care in the United States. The authors also examine how the private equity sector increases corporate concentration and the prevalence of predatory and exclusionary practices in the health care industry. 

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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