Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss the implications of the Epic Games v. Apple decision and our recent webinar on the power, potential, and fragility of the news industry.

🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:

• On Sept. 13, President Joe Biden nominated privacy expert and Georgetown University law professor Alvaro Bedoya to the Federal Trade Commission. Bedoya is the founding director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. In a statement, Open Markets applauded the nomination as indicative of Biden’s “commitment to breaking Big Tech’s power and control over the U.S. economy and democracy.”
   
• Last week, the FTC stepped up scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions by withdrawing support for the FTC’s lax Trump-era approach to vertical mergers, as detailed in guidelines adopted in 2020 by the FTC and Department of Justice. The guidelines discussed the benefits of vertical mergers and its pro-competitive effects. The vote to withdraw fell along partisan lines, 3-2. (The Wall Street Journal)
   
• The Justice Department and attorneys general for six states and the District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit Tuesday against American Airlines and JetBlue, arguing that a partnership between the two airlines is anti-competitive and would hurt customers. The partnership would allow the companies to sell each other’s seats on routes at airports in the Northeast. (The Washington Post)
   
• On Tuesday, Lupin Pharmaceuticals, an Indian generic drugmaker, agreed to settle antitrust claims with grocery stores and drugstores for its role in a pay-for-delay scheme with pharmaceutical companies Bausch Health Cos. and Assertio Therapeutics. The scheme involved Lupin delaying the introduction of a generic drug to treat Type 2 diabetes that would have competed with Bausch and Asserio’s drug Glumetza. The lawsuit claims Glumetza’s price rose by 800%. Lupin will pay $150 million to the defendants. (Reuters)
   
• Last week, District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine amended the District’s antitrust complaint against Amazon. The amended complaint goes into further detail on the anti-competitive effects of a practice carried out by the company known as Minimum Margin Agreements. The new complaint explains how the practice results in sellers increasing prices when selling products outside of the Amazon platform. (CNBC)

• Claire Kelloway was featured on NPR’s “Morning Edition” commenting on the dangers of food supply consolidation. “Between these recent price shocks and the pandemic and ongoing allegations of price fixing, that argument for consolidation is falling apart. And there's increasing evidence and suspicions that this market power has gone too far and is beginning to hurt consumers.” Kelloway’s quote was also included in a subsequent NPR written story, on WLRN, and on WITF.
   
• Barry Lynn was quoted in The Financial Times asserting that Big Tech’s recent buying spree and increasing market consolidation is detrimental and was predictable. “This was entirely foreseeable — in hard times, the companies which are already entrenched get that much more entrenched…This dealmaking is bad because it makes these corporations that much more powerful. It increases their power over the people who work for them, over capital markets and investors, and it blocks off the kind of competition that can bring innovation.” The story also ran in Insider Voice, Knews UK, News 7H, and Newsbreak.
   
• Nikki Usher continued receiving wide coverage on her book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue, including an interview with Mike Stephen at WGN Radio and a Medium story by A Road to Pluralism’s Joy Mayer: “I’ve been reading Nikki Usher’s fantastic new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. It points out some key, unavoidable truths about newsrooms. Journalists are of course whiter than their communities — a well-established problem that is not getting better nearly fast enough.”
   
• Alexis Goldstein was quoted in The Washington Post about Janet Yellen failing to use the financial review process to advance measures to curb polluting banks. “’Climate risk impacts all the firms that the financial regulators supervise. As a convener of regulators, Treasury needs to do more than acknowledge it — it should urge each financial regulator to use every tool at its disposal to tackle climate risks,’” she said.
   
• Sandeep Vaheesan was quoted in ProMarket for his description of the movement to stop monopoly power and protect democracy. “The term ‘transformation’ expresses the movement’s main ambition: what Sandeep Vaheesan has called a ‘root and branch reconstruction’ that aligns doctrine and policy with an egalitarian vision of citizen welfare and strives to dissolve monopoly power.”
   
• Barry Lynn’s 2010 book, Cornered, was mentioned in Open Democracy as a keystone of early efforts to change the public conversation about corporate power.
   
• Alexis Goldstein was cited in a Truthout podcast about what has changed 10 years after the Occupy Wall Street protests: “But in thinking about where we were in the pre-Occupy days and where we are now, I remember something from your book, Necessary Trouble, when Alexis Goldstein who worked in the financial industry back then said she kind of marveled out loud at work at the destruction the industry had caused and said, ’How will the public ever forgive us?'”
   
• Johnny Ryan was mentioned in The Irish Examiner, The Financial Times, and EMarketer for calling on the European Commission to intervene on the EU’s failure to regulate data protection along with his group, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. “Johnny Ryan said Ireland was the ’worst bottleneck’ for enforcement of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).” Ryan was also interviewed about the report in Una and Andrea’s United Ireland podcast.
   
• Daniel Hanley was quoted in Mashable maintaining that the Epic v. Apple lawsuit both reinforces the need for more sweeping policy reform instead of cumbersome lawsuits, and proves that there is major energy for stopping Big Tech’s monopolistic practices, especially on the state level. "’I think this case will have huge implications on state regulatory efforts,’ Hanley said. ‘The case clearly shows that state regulations matter and they can have a real effect on what practices are allowed or prohibited, despite any shortcomings of federal regulations.’"
   
• Nikki Usher was featured in a Washington Post article about how Fox News’ Sean Hannity show has created a platform for Trump supporters as a means of testing out political messages and holding the interest of conservatives.
   
• An Open Markets’ Food and Power report from 2019 continued to receive coverage in outlets such as My Stateline after the Biden administration relied on it when forming its food chain policy. “The Biden administration points to a 2019 study from the Open Markets Institute, which found the four largest beef packing companies control 82-percent of the market.”

📈 VITAL STAT:

$3.6 trillion

The value of global deal volumes, which are on track to hit an annual record. 

📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:

• “The Alston Case: Why the NCAA Did not Deserve Antitrust Immunity and Did not Succeed under a Rule-of-Reason Analysis” (Michael A. Carrier and Chris Sagers, George Mason Law Review): The authors discuss the Supreme Court’s recent holding in NCAA v. Alston and analyzes the faults in the arguments put forth by the NCAA to justify its conduct. 

Nikki Usher, a senior fellow at Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism & Liberty, has released her third book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism. In her latest work, Usher offers a frank examination of the inequalities driving not just America’s journalism crisis but also certain portions of the movement to save it.

“We need to radically rethink the core functions of journalism, leverage expertise, and consider how to take the best of what the newspaper ethos of journalism can offer to places that have lost geographically specific news, “ says Usher, an associate professor at the University of Illinois-Champaign. “The news that powers democracy can be more inclusive.”

Usher is also the author of Making News at The New York Times (2014) and Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (2016).

News for the Rich, White, and Blue, published by Columbia University Press, is available as a hardback, paperback and e-book. You can order your copy here.

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