[Lawmakers have tried to introduce legislation seeking to advance
antitrust reform. Google, Amazon, and Meta have spent millions
fighting it.]
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BIG TECH’S MONOPOLY ON CONGRESS  
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Chris Lehmann
December 22, 2022
The Nation
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_ Lawmakers have tried to introduce legislation seeking to advance
antitrust reform. Google, Amazon, and Meta have spent millions
fighting it. _

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc.,
arrives at federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, December 20,
2022. The Federal Trade Commission claims Meta’s plan to buy the
competitor will give it an unfair advantage., David Paul Morris /
Bloomberg

 

As lawmakers in Washington act to shore up the rickety foundations of
America’s formal democracy, via the pending update of the Electoral
Count Act
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the official report and criminal referrals of the January 6 select
committee, Congress is also poised to sign off on some preliminary
measures to rein in the top-heavy configuration of the country’s
political economy. In the omnibus bill to fund the government next
year, two pieces of legislation seek to reform the long-neglected
strictures on antitrust in American law. One bill significantly boosts
funding for antitrust enforcers in the Department of Justice and the
Federal Trade Commission by imposing new fees on merger filings; the
other greatly expands the jurisdiction of state attorneys general to
pursue antitrust actions.

Both measures seem at first glance to be stodgy and procedural fare,
focused on altering the behind-the-scenes legal playing field rather
than mounting frontal assaults on the gargantuan tech, financial, and
health monopolies choking off both market access for small-scale
enterprises and consumer choice. But in the enforcement-challenged
realm of antitrust, procedural reform counts for a lot—particularly
at a moment when the Biden administration is mobilizing executive
agencies like the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to
target monopoly control of the economy. “It’s the most important
antitrust reform since 1976—a huge deal,” says Matt Stoller,
director of research for the Economic Liberties Project. “What
we’re seeing is a revolution in antitrust enforcement.”

Stoller points to recent federal actions against oversize market
players as signs of the shifting climate. Just this week, Epic Games,
the makers of the video game _Fortnite_, agreed to a landmark
settlement of more than half a billion dollars
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of which is devoted to consumer refunds—to resolve an FTC case
against the company for deceptive marketing practices and other abuses
in the game’s software. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is embroiled in
another FTC suit
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to block the company’s acquisition of the virtual-reality fitness
company Within Unlimited, giving testimony that unconvincingly
downplays the platform’s ambitions to corner the VR market. Another
FTC suit filed just last week is challenging Microsoft’s $68
billion deal
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acquire the gaming company Activision Blizzard. And the CFPB won
a record $3.7 billion settlement
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Wells Fargo for company manipulation of auto loans, mortgages, and
customer deposit accounts.

Still, for all this welcome new activity on the long-dormant
battlefronts of antitrust, the package now before Congress is also
noteworthy for two bills it doesn’t include, which
specifically targeted the monopoly practices of Big Tech
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Both bills—intended to prevent companies from giving preferential
treatment to their own services and subsidiaries on their platforms
and from strong-arming third-party market players to ensure unilateral
platform control of the apps market—emerged out of extensive
congressional hearings, and both were dropped from the omnibus at the
behest of Senate majority leader Charles Schumer. Also left on the
cutting-room floor was a third bill that would insulate local
journalism outlets from the practices of Big Tech predation. “The
reason that these bills didn’t pass is Chuck Schumer,” Stoller
says. “He just lied about a lot of things. He said he’d allow a
vote and then he didn’t.”

The structural causes behind the mothballing of the Big Tech bills go
deeper than the shifty conduct of the majority leader. As the bills
started to gain more traction, Google, Amazon, Meta, and other marquee
tech monopolies spent more than $120 million
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attack ads targeting them. It also bears noting that Schumer has two
daughters employed by Big Tech
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brand of hardwired intrafamilial influence far more consequential than
the celebrity nepotism that obsesses the navel-gazing media industry
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“We’ve developed not only a movement outside Congress, but a
really good bipartisan coalition in the Congress on this issue,”
says Rhode Island Democratic Representative David Cicilline, chair of
the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, which
assembled a landmark congressional report 
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economic concentration in the tech sector. “If there’d been a
vote, all these bills would have passed, would have been sent to the
president’s desk. It’s important to recognize this was an
unprecedented effort by Big Tech, part of a half-a-billion-dollar
campaign devoted to spreading disinformation about the bills. And
that’s the problem with monopoly—with concentrated economic power
comes concentrated political power.”

Other strategists within the anti-monopoly movement argue that the
effort to create bipartisan support for the legislation suffered from
overly narrow conceptual framing and strategizing. “What culminated
in the failure of these two bills was failed bipartisan strategy,
first and foremost,” says Marshall Steinbaum, an assistant professor
of economics at the University of Utah who was involved in the early
planning for the antimonopoly offensive in the Democratic Congress.
“The named number of defendants”—i.e., the dominant platforms
targeted in the bills—“is very small, and the things we do to
those defendants in the legislation is very circumscribed. Even when
we’ve got these guys in hand, to strike a blow for the little guy,
we backed off…. I remember having conversations with Hill staffers
in May 2021, when this package of bills was being lined up in the
House Judiciary Committee. It was all very regimented, and it was
clear that only a few people and organizations were going to have
input into the process. The message was, ‘Your job is to sit down
and shut up while the adults take charge.’”

One sign of this damn-the-torpedoes quest for bipartisan accord,
Steinbaum says, was a largely symbolic bill that did make it into the
omnibus, restricting access to TikTok—an app with porous privacy
protocols and tight connections to the ruling regime in China—on
government devices. “That was a subsidiary flaw of this whole
strategy,” he says, “to raise up these nativist laws as an
antitrust reform. The targeting of TikTok is directly antithetical to
antitrust, since it’s a competitor to a monopoly platform.
Congratulations—you just helped get Mark Zuckerberg’s agenda
through…. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m thinking here of New
York Democrats—Kathy Hochul, Hakeem Jeffries, and Eric Adams—all
saying, ‘We have to be more anticrime and more pro-police than the
other side is.’”

As for the provisions that did make it past Schumer’s corrupt
gatekeeping, Steinbaum sees them as decidedly equivocal wins. What of
the claim that this is the first significant antitrust overhaul in
five decades? “That’s true,” he says. “But every time someone
says something like this that’s affiliated with Democratic politics,
my spider-sense goes off—there’s only so much of that that can be
tolerable when you’ve got the raw material for political success on
your side. Both bills succumbed to the Capitol Hill imperative of
making this a bipartisan effort, the low ambition of making the policy
conditioned on having a very small number of defendants. That’s
exchanging the giant strength of public opinion on the issue for an
insidery savviness.” The most telling weakness of this approach,
Steinbaum says, was letting the whole package fall under Schumer’s
sovereign direction in the first place: “If you don’t have another
card to play than putting pressure on Chuck Schumer, you’ve already
lost.”

Indeed, a collateral effect of Schumer’s underhanded horse-trading
is that the Republican case against Big Tech monopoly is gaining early
influence as the GOP is set to come into the majority in the next
session of Congress. “All the stuff we got in the omnibus was
written by Republicans,” Stoller says. “And the other stuff
that’s written by Republicans, that’s stuff the Senate is going to
consider. I think in the House, they’ve already said they’ll be
looking at app stores.” But Stoller insists that having the GOP
directing future antitrust legislation is not necessarily an obstacle
to substantive progress: “It will be hard for what [incoming House
Judiciary chairman] Jim Jordan was going to do; he was planning to
punish the people who’d pushed for antitrust. But now he can’t,
since the majority’s so narrow.” And with hostility to Big Tech
serving as one of the few issues binding together an increasingly
fragmenting conservative movement, Stoller sees the potential to build
on the successful reforms that survived the omnibus culling. “The
thing about the Republicans is that they’ll fight you, but when they
say they’ll do something, they do it,” Stoller says “Schumer
said he was going to allow a vote and just lied about it.

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Cicilline also sees the opportunity for additional legislative
breakthroughs ahead. “I think it’s always better for the Democrats
to be in control, but the narrow majority can be an advantage.
Republicans are going to be looking for things to actually move on,
and get things done.” Meanwhile, Cicilline says the broader momentum
behind the antitrust movement remains unchanged: “Public support is
building. The support from both sides of the aisle in Congress is
growing. It’s inevitable that we’re going to rein in Big Tech. As
someone put it, they’re losing in slow motion.”

_CHRIS LEHMANN is the D.C. Bureau chief for The Nation and a
contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor
of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most
recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the
Unmaking of the American Dream
[[link removed]] (Melville House,
2016)._

_Copyright c 2022 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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* Big Tech
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* U.S. Congress
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* Anti-trust
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* Google
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* Amazon
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* Meta
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* lobbyists
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* monopoly
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