"Never Seen Anything Like It:" The Biggest Month in Antitrust in 50 Years
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/never-seen-anything-like-it-the-biggest?r=b057c
The Google trial, an Amazon complaint, an attack on a private equity roll-up, a giant meat price-fixing suit, going after pharma cheating, and populist GOP antitrust nominations. Astonishing.
Honestly, this makes me beyond happy. I'm really hoping Lina Khan comes through with some huge wins that break up big tech.
congress is ... on it, in one of the most surprising twists of the 21st century https://www.lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-america-act
A consensus has very rapidly formed that reagan-era deregulation of monopolies, especially in big tech, is outmoded. I don't trust the republican's position here (it seems like they want to punish big tech companies for insufficient fealty to republican causes) but in at least the hands-across-the-aisle version, everyone agrees that facebook and google have to go
Very interesting read.! Always eye-opening to get the perspective of someone that is so focused on a specific angle. Like so many things lately, this takeaway at the end is both encouraging and simultaneously terrifying:
The irony of this remarkable month of antitrust activity is that it’s both astonishing, far more bigger [sic] than anything anyone expected, yet it’s also only a tiny fraction of what is necessary to reverse the damage monopolists have done to our society.
(emphasis added)
I love posting stuff from guys like these, it always a treat to see people's reactions to their stuff
Makes sense to me, as the big companies approach enshittification at the same time, the inevitable pushback against them arrive near the same time as well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
There is also smaller stuff, the behind-the-scenes institutional changes, like funding levels for antitrust enforcers and newly populist conservative nominees for regulatory agencies that could make a more assertive competition agenda part of a new bipartisan consensus.
The trial has generally gone well for the government, with good evidence that Google thwarted competition from small firms (Branch Technologies) and big ones (Microsoft and Apple), using payoffs.
September 14: The Federal Trade Commission pledged criminal referrals and civil litigation for pharmaceutical executives that use a certain technique - known as ‘Orange Book fraud’ to lie about their patents and in turn block lower priced drugs.
September 21: The Federal Trade Commission, with votes from Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya, Becca Kelly Slaughter, and Lina Khan, sued a New York private equity firm and its subsidiary, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, for rolling up and monopolizing the anesthesiology market in Texas.
September 28: The Antitrust Division sues over meat price-fixing in the chicken, turkey, and poultry industry, alleging that 90% of the market is unlawfully inflated through a conspiracy run by a company called Agri Stats.
This one didn’t get a lot of notice, but it’s about a way that CVS Caremark, one of the largest pharmaceutical middlemen, ends up harming independent pharmacies by charging them excess and unpredictable fees involving Medicare prescription dispensing.
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