Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss Zillow’s aggressive strategy to expand its reach in the real estate market — and how its recent acquisition is facing heightened scrutiny from the FTC. 

🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:

• On Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Square, and PayPal to disclose information about their payment system practices by December 15, 2021. In a statement about the order, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra noted several key risks about Big Tech’s foray into payments, including the potential for financial surveillance, price discrimination, and potential coercion of small businesses. (Read the Open Markets statement on the CFPB action here.)
   

• Last week, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), with bipartisan support from 10 other senators, introduced a bill that aims to address market discrimination by vertically integrated retailers such as Amazon. The bill was derived from a similar bill that has been passed out of the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives.  (See the Open Markets statement on the bill here, and the Market Screener coverage of the statement here.).
   

• On Wednesday, the attorney general for the District of Columbia added Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg to a consumer protection lawsuit filed against the company in 2018. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, accused Facebook of purposefully failing to inform consumers that their data on the company’s platform would be used to sell to third-party developers, such as Cambridge Analytica. The addition of Zuckerberg to the complaint represents the first major effort to directly implicate him in the wrongdoing. (The New York Times)

• Open Markets released a statement urging the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets to use existing authority to address investor protection and systemic risk issues with stablecoins.
   
• Daniel Hanley was quoted in The Washington Post on Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s proposed solutions for neutralizing Facebook. “Haugen’s focus is misplaced because it doesn’t target the underlying business model that critics say is the root of Facebook’s abusive conduct,” Hanley told the Post. “‘We’re still trying to put Band-Aids on a leg that’s not even there, that’s been ripped off, so to speak,’ he said."
   
• Barry Lynn’s predictions about the dangers of centralizing manufacturing on supply-chain risks were included in a New York Times opinion piece by Paul Krugman and in an American Prospect article by Robert Kuttner. “Barry Lynn warned about supply-chain risks a long time ago,” Krugman wrote.
   
• Barry Lynn’s proposed “Rule of Four” solution to dangerous geographic concentration of industrial capacity and risk was citied by Rana Foroohar in an opinion piece in the Financial Times. In the column, Foroohar cited Lynn’s recent article “Antimonopoly Power” in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs.
   
• The Open Markets-led coalition letter to congressional leaders on crypto climate regulations was mentioned in The New York Times DealBook newsletter. “This week, more than 70 nonprofits, including Sierra Club, the Open Markets Institute and the Action Center on Race and the Economy, urged Congress to factor crypto’s energy use into any new rules for the sector.”
   
• Nikki Usher’s latest book, News for the Rich, was spotlighted in a New Republic article about how newspapers have deserted their civic mission and skimped on local coverage. “As publications increasingly rely on subscription revenue for their income, they are available to fewer and fewer people and find themselves with audiences who are much wealthier than the mass audiences they once engaged; increasingly, Usher notes, publications are ‘prioritizing the audiences that can and will pay.’”
   
• Zephyr Teachout cited Barry Lynn’s 2010 book, Cornered, in a NY Daily News piece about the need to ban noncompete agreements. “Lynn used Omnicon as an example of monopolies in white-collar work, noting that the extreme concentration in advertising made advertising and public relations far less innovative and dynamic, because when you went up the food chain, the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the industry were effectively working for one of just two guys.”
   
• Nikki Usher was featured in an Illinois Newsroom article about controlling misinformation on Facebook. The feature was also mentioned in Illinois Newsroom’s “217 Today.” “The biggest ways that we can get at Facebook that I see as most politically tenable really have nothing to do with speech – but more with thinking about how we break up big tech,” Usher says.
   
• Open Markets was mentioned in a Law 360 piece about Lina Khan’s recent appointment for senior advisor on rulemaking and emerging technology. [Article text not available.]
   
• Anthony Pahnke’s op-ed in The Progressive Magazine citing Open Markets’ report on agricultural consolidation was republished in West Hawaii Today. “It’s this system, as documented in a report from the Open Markets Institute, that allowed the four largest poultry processing firms to go from controlling 35% of the market in 1986 to 51% in 2015.”
   
• Johnny Ryan was quoted in Vice calling out Ireland for holding back European enforcement against Big Tech. “’Some 98 percent of the cross-border cases for which Ireland is responsible remain unresolved. No GDPR enforcer in any other EU member state can intervene because Ireland is the lead authority. Ireland is the bottleneck of GDPR enforcement against Google, Facebook, and big tech for all of Europe," Ryan said.

📈 VITAL STAT:

$69.6 billion

The fine imposed on Facebook by U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority; the corporation allegedly failed to comply with reporting requirements during a review of its proposed acquisition of Giphy. 

📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:

• “From the Ashes: Imagining a Post-Commercial Future for Media” (Victor Pickard, The Political Economy of Communication): Pickard analyzes how the Trump administration accelerated many of the media-related crises that produced hospitable conditions for fascistic movements. In light of this, he argues that to create a better future, fundamental reforms are needed in the media industry. 

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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