The Most Aggressive Big Tech Bill Yet. Described by the Wall Street Journal as “the most aggressive of the legislative proposals to rein in the power of Big Tech,” Republican Senator Mike Lee joined forces with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar to introduce a bill to break up Google’s monopoly over online advertising exchanges, which would also impact Facebook and Amazon’s ad businesses. Economic Liberties expressed support for the legislation, which adheres to our view that Congress should write bright line legislation that judges hostile to antitrust enforcement can’t undermine. (Read our roadmap for how to address Google and Facebook’s power through a regulated competition approach). Majority Leader Schumer committed to bringing additional tech-focused legislation, including an important bill that targets Amazon’s e-commerce business, to the floor for a vote in early summer.
The FTC’s New Anti-Monopoly Majority. Economic Liberties celebrated the long-awaited confirmation of the FTC’s fifth commissioner, privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya. With a new anti-monopoly majority in place, Sarah Miller spoke to The New York Times to share expectations for the agency. At the FTC’s first vote with a full slate of commissioners, the agency unanimously approved a policy statement that prohibits tech corporations that operate in the education space from harvesting schoolchildren’s data without parental consent.
The Department of Justice Eyes Private Equity. Last week, antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter told the Financial Times that private equity’s “business model is often very much at odds with the law and very much at odds with the competition we’re trying to protect,” noting also that it is “an extremely important part of our enforcement program.” Private equity spent more than $1 trillion on deals over the course of 2021, up 110 percent from 2020. Read Matt Stoller’s short history of private equity in his newsletter BIG.
The Financial Times Covers Economic Liberties and Balanced Economy Project’s Stakeholder Capitalism Report. Can a corporation like Google really be considered “just?” That’s the opening provocation in a new report by Economic Liberties Senior Fellow Denise Hearn and Balanced Economy Project Founder Michelle Meagher that pushes the stakeholder capitalism community to integrate a power analysis into its framework. The FT’s Rana Foroohar covered the report in her column “The Failures of Stakeholder Capitalism,” observing that ESG investing is missing the realities of market power.
USTR Takes Up Economic Liberties’ Petition to Protect Mexican Factory Workers. In a victory for upholding higher labor standards under USMCA, the renegotiated NAFTA agreement approved in 2020, USTR announced it would intervene on behalf of a petition from Economic Liberties’ Rethink Trade program and Mexican labor union SNITIS alleging worker abuse at a Panasonic plant. Read more in Bloomberg and Reuters.
