antitrust reform – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Just A Reminder: Authoritarians Don’t ACTUALLY Support ‘Antitrust Reform’

from the fascism-is-not-your-friend dept

A few years ago you might recall there was a three year news cycle about how the modern Trump GOP was somehow “serious about antitrust reform this time.” The party, which has never met a consolidated monopoly it didn’t adore (see: airlines, telecom, pharma, health, energy), was suddenly getting credited in the press for being a serious player in reining in the worst impulses of corporate power.

In reality, the GOP was seeking leverage against a handful of tech companies to bully them away from moderating right wing political propaganda on social media. Most of the disjointed efforts to actually crack down on corporate power or monopolization were badly crafted and went absolutely nowhere, though tech giants did ultimately scale back disinfo moderation efforts ahead of a pivotal election.

Funny, that.

I feel like we’re at risk of entering another, similar cycle with the selection of J.D. Vance as the Republican nomination for Vice President. Stories are already starting to flow discussing Vance’s bonafides as a very serious antitrust reformer, and somebody very serious about reining in corporate power. Here’s how Reuters frames it, for example:

“Vance is one of several Republican lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Florida U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz, called “Khanservatives” for their agreement with the FTC chair that U.S. antitrust law has a broader purpose than keeping prices down for consumers.”

If you recall, Josh Hawley was plastered around the media as the poster child of a new era of right wing interest in antitrust reform, buoyed at times in post-leftist circles by folks like Matt Stoller. But Hawley’s interest in antitrust reform proved entirely hollow, because authoritarians and the oligarchs that coddle them only really care about one thing: power and unchecked wealth accumulation.

Democrats and more traditional Republicans also have this fixation, but authoritarianism is a truly next-level affair that holds zero interest in democracy, the rule of law, or the public interest, and holds even less reservation about the indiscriminate use of violence. Bullying corporations to support bigotry-fueled fascism should never be conflated with good faith efforts to rein in corporate power or police monopoly.

This superficial support for antitrust reform is a pseudo-populist effort to win over low information voters that may not be fully versed with the full brutal impact of real-world authoritarianism.

It’s also intended to obscure the real goal: forcing social media giants to take the knee to the interests of authoritarians, for whom a major cornerstone of power is online propaganda and disinformation. Authoritarians that also very much dream of a future where there are no repercussions for widespread criminality, cruelty, and fraud. It’s hard not to miss the impact of those efforts so far.

The U.S. press is often complicit with this con. See here, for example, where Reuters frames Trump, despite everything we know about his corruption, as somebody actually interested in “antitrust reform” (as opposed to a petty tyrant waging a weird and unproductive grievance campaign against largely amoral self-serving corporate giants he has, falsely, misinterpreted as predominantly left wing because they very briefly tried to stop a few racists from being assholes on the internet):

“Scrutiny of Big Tech would not be a departure for Trump. The FTC and Department of Justice under Trump initiated investigations into Meta, Amazon, Apple, Google over alleged antitrust violations. All four companies were eventually sued, and have denied wrongdoing.”

These weren’t investigations as so much as they were performance art designed to bully. And if you hadn’t noticed, they were very ineffective at actually policing consolidated corporate power, but very effective in chasing big companies away from everything from moderating election lies to embracing bare-bones inclusivity initiatives.

Vance will occasionally veer from party orthodoxy to score brownie points with rural constituents (see recent opposition to successful GOP efforts to kill a low income broadband subsidy program). But he’s not going to, say, suddenly support giving the FCC the funding and authority to take aim at Comcast’s clearly harmful telecom monopoly, or start body checking pharmaceutical empires.

When you scratch below the surface on a lot of this stuff you’ll routinely find it’s simply performance.

The primary interests of the Federalist Society and the tech titan VCs payrolling Vance and friends isn’t truly cracking down on monopoly power, or limiting the power of corporations. The primary goal is the almost total lobotomization of what’s left of regulatory power (see: recent Supreme Court rulings), and the dismantling of government efforts to rein in corporate fraud.

Even if Vance isn’t just a stuffed suit authoritarian opportunist speaking out of both sides of his mouth to earn brownie points with rural voters (and I most assuredly think that, like Hawley, that’s the case,) he’s not going to be operating in any sort of political environment that allows him to pursue those interests.

A Trump Presidency means an immediate and abrupt end to the Lina Khan antitrust reform outlets like The Verge and Reuters insist Vance is a big fan of. And make no mistake: backed by a suite of disastrous and corruption-fueled Supreme Court rulings, a second Trump administration is going to absolutely crush what’s left of U.S. corporate accountability and oversight, wreaking complete havoc across consumer protection, public safety, internet policy, and labor and environmental reform.

If you think any of that actually ends well for actual American employees, consumers, and small businesses without seven-figure lobbying budgets and a trust fund, good luck.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, authoritarianism, chevron, consumer protection, donald trump, fascism, fcc, ftc, jd vance, lina khan, populism, regulatory

NFL Hit With $4.8 billion Verdict In NFL Sunday Ticket Antitrust Case

from the hello-you've-been-ripped-off-for-decades dept

Wed, Jul 10th 2024 03:15pm - Karl Bode

On any given Sunday there’s simply no shortage of U.S. antitrust violations, where some giant predatory corporation leverages its consolidated power to derail price competition and harm consumers.

But because U.S. antitrust enforcement is a feckless and inconsistent mess, in most instances (see: telecom), a company can engage in these kinds of practices for decades and see no meaningful repercussions whatsoever. And most of the time, the government’s rhetoric on antitrust is largely performative (see: the GOP’s recent successful effort to gain political leverage on tech giants).

When companies are occasionally held accountable via regulators and the courts, the targets can sometimes seem scattershot. Take this latest court ruling against the NFL, for example, in which the league has been ordered to pay $4.7 billion in class action penalties over allegations that it artificially drove up the cost of its NFL Sunday ticket out of market streaming service.

The service, historically locked down under one provider (most recently DirecTV/AT&T), has traditionally been prohibitively expensive in comparison to other league streaming services around the world. One reason for that, the class action lawsuit (pdf) alleged, is that the league violated antitrust laws by providing exclusive access to out of market games to a single company (DirecTV).

The NFL had tried to claim that NFL Sunday Ticket was exempted from antitrust protections governing broadcasting, but the class action successfully argued those exemptions only cover over the air broadcasts, not satellite TV or direct to consumer streaming services.

The class action covered 2.4 million residential subscribers and 48,000 businesses in the United States who paid the package between 2011 and 2020. For a while, users who wanted NFL Sunday ticket had to subscribe not just to the package, but to DirecTV as well, resulting in annoyed consumers and lawsuits a decade ago by bars and other businesses complaining they were being ripped off.

The NFL’s deal with DirecTV ended in 2022 after AT&T, imploding and debt-riddled from its pointless and bungled merger with Time Warner, could no longer afford the high price of exclusivity. Google now owns the exclusive, seven-year rights (at a rumored $2 billion every year) to NFL Sunday Ticket starting with the 2023 season.

Damages can technically be tripled under antitrust laws for this lasting ruling, so the NFL could technically be on the hook for as much as $14.39 billion. The league will most certainly file an appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and potentially the corporate-friendly right wing Supreme Court.

If the decision holds (and that’s certainly never certain in a corporate-friendly U.S. legal environment) it could potentially force down the price of NFL game streaming access. NBA League Pass and MLB.TV are significantly lower cost, in part because they’re delivered to consumers across a litany of different services (YouTube, Amazon Prime, league-owned apps). But even those options may be expanded:

“It’s going to require other leagues to take a close look at their model and make sure that the means by which they’re providing consumer choice really does ensure true choice,” said Christine Bartholomew, vice dean and professor in the University of Buffalo’s School of Law. “What happened here, at least according to the jury, was that the NFL had really suppressed consumer choice. Not only did they steer the consumers towards using satellite TV, it meant that they had to buy the whole package.”

Class actions are often viewed as utterly worthless lawyer-enrichment efforts, but occasionally they do nudge things in the right direction absent meaningful competition or regulators with working vertebrae.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, class action, football, nfl sunday ticket, streaming, video
Companies: nfl

Verizon, AT&T Customers Sue To Reverse T-Mobile Merger, Saying It Raised Everybody’s Prices

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Tue, Nov 7th 2023 05:28am - Karl Bode

We just got done noting how pretty much all of the criticism of the Sprint T-Mobile merger by economists and consumer advocates wound up being true. The deal has resulted in more than 10,000+ eliminated jobs, steady price hikes, annoying new fees, a weaker T-Mobile brand, and a lower quality product overall. It also clearly distracted T-Mobile from competent network security.

T-Mobile’s reddit forums are filled with employees saying the disruptive spirit of the company has been dead since the merger. T-Mobile customers are annoyed by endless new restrictions and price hikes.

But Verizon and AT&T customers are also pissed, and are part of a new lawsuit against T-Mobile arguing that the merger raised prices for everybody due to the reduction in overall wireless market competition. A federal judge in Chicago last week ruled that plaintiffs made some decent points and the lawsuit should be allowed to proceed:

“U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin in a 41-page ruling on Thursday said the plaintiffs “plausibly” argued that higher prices “flowed directly” from the $26 billion merger.”

The important time to protect consumers is before these kinds of competition-eroding deals are approved, but that very clearly didn’t happen here. Trump regulators at the FCC didn’t even bother to read about the deal’s impact before approving it. Trump “antitrust enforcers” at the FTC actively helped T-Mobile avoid regulatory scrutiny on their personal time, you know, like antitrust enforcers do.

T-Mobile’s response to the lawsuit was expected: to deny everything and insist the U.S. wireless sector is secretly super competitive:

Attorneys for T-Mobile called the lawsuit “unprecedented,” and said the plaintiffs’ damages were “speculative.”

“If plaintiffs are unhappy with Verizon and AT&T, there is a remedy available in the highly competitive market that wireless consumers enjoy today — they should switch to T-Mobile, not sue it,” attorneys for T-Mobile told the court.

The harms of mindless consolidation are not theoretical. They’re clearly documented. Yet we’re dedicated to ignoring those harms because such consolidation is hugely profitable for a handful of over-compensated executives and a few key investors (sometimes). Rinse, wash, repeat, with nobody responsible for the end result getting within a thousand miles of introspection or accountability.

I’d not expect much from the suit in terms of reform. Any payout will be a tiny fraction of the financial harm caused. The real fix lies in more stringent merger review and well funded and staffed regulators; concepts defenders of a broken but profitable status quo have no real interest in.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, competition, consolidation, high speed internet, mergers, prices, wireless
Companies: t-mobile

Telecom Sector Sees Major Layoffs Despite Historic Stretch Of Tax Breaks, Regulatory Favors

from the government-pampered-monopoly dept

Wed, Nov 1st 2023 05:27am - Karl Bode

The Trump era was very, very good to the country’s giant telecom monopolies. Trump officials doled out billions in tax breaks (AT&T nabbed $42 billion alone) and billions more in poorly tracked subsidies. It also approved anticompetitive mergers without even reading the details, and handed out all manner of regulator favors like the dismantling of net neutrality or the elimination of media consolidation rules.

In absolutely every instance telecoms like AT&T and Comcast claimed these efforts would boost broadband deployment and create untold thousands of jobs.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that none of that ever happened.

Verizon, so far this year, has eliminated 6,000 jobs. AT&T just revealed it laid off another 10,000 jobs (on top of the 50,000 it laid off in the wake of its epic Time Warner and DirecTV merger disasters). All while Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg and AT&T CEO John Stankey hoovered up massive executive compensation. Despite being shockingly terrible at their, you know, jobs:

“Stankey and Vestberg have been such depressing mediocrities in the management job, as reflected in the dwindling share prices of their firms. AT&T’s has dropped from 22.34whenStankeybecameCEOinJuly2020to22.34 when Stankey became CEO in July 2020 to 22.34whenStankeybecameCEOinJuly2020to14.32 today. Verizon’s is down from 57.09inAugust2018,thedateofVestberg’selevation,to57.09 in August 2018, the date of Vestberg’s elevation, to 57.09inAugust2018,thedateofVestberg’selevation,to33.44.”

As it currently stands, Stankey’s $22.9 million in 2022 compensation is 219 times more than the median AT&T employee salary. That’s despite the fact that Stankey oversaw the company’s disastrous attempt to pivot to becoming a streaming video giant via a series of doomed mergers that set giant piles of money on fire.

Vestberg’s $19.8 million in 2022 compensation was 130 times more than the average employee. That’s despite the fact that Verizon’s 5G hype wound up being absolute gibberish, and the company has continued to bleed wireless and TV subscribers as it loses its network performance edge.

These failures occurred even while the government mindlessly coddled both companies to a near-historic degree. As noted recently, thanks to the Trump era and the industry smear campaign against the Gigi Sohn nomination, U.S. telecom giants enjoyed seven straight years where U.S. regulatory oversight at the FCC was the government policy equivalent of a damp fart.

Executives and some shareholders made out like bandits, employees and consumers got higher prices, worse product, layoffs, and chaos. And in policy circles, there’s zero indication anyone learned anything from the experience or has any real interest in pushing for notable reform. In small part because telecom policy–despite the importance of affordable access–is considered passé in the era of “big tech,” but also because there’s simply zero financial, market, or regulatory incentive for anyone in the chain of dysfunction to ever change.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, broadband, high speed internet, layoffs, monopolies, regulatory capture, telecom

T-Mobile Backs Off Price Hike They Pretended Wasn’t A Price Hike

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Mon, Oct 30th 2023 01:37pm - Karl Bode

Earlier this month we noted how everything critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted has come true, whether it’s 10,000 employees who have lost their jobs, the steady implementation of fees and price hikes, a lower overall quality product, or the company’s boring new branding.

Those inevitable outcomes recently culminated in a new suite of price hikes the company pretended weren’t actually price hikes. In short, the company declared it would be automatically “upgrading” many of its users to more expensive tiers, violating its pre-Sprint merger promise not to raise rates.

Initially, T-Mobile denied this was a price hike (it was a price hike). Then the company tried to claim it wasn’t impacting many customers (it impacted a lot of customers). Now the company appears to have backed off the decision after getting significant backlash, but not after first blaming leakers, the press, and a supposed “lack of context.” From the company’s recent conference call:

“Now I don’t know that we still have to do that test cell because, to your point, we did get plenty of feedback thanks to the erroneous context of the leak. And I think we’ve learned that particular test cell isn’t something that our customers are going to love.”

This is precisely the kind of weasel-esque corporate speak that former, pre-merger T-Mobile CEO John Legere would have relentlessly made fun of. But now that there’s overall less serious competition in the U.S. wireless market, that kind of disruptive behavior is simply no longer necessary.

Based on comments by T-Mobile President of Marketing Mike Katz, the company didn’t honestly learn all that much and plans similar “tests” in the future:

“I would expect to see more of those kinds of tests from us because it’s been a consistent practice throughout the entire Un-carrier journey so that we get it right for the experience for our customers.”

In short they’re still trying to pretend a price hike was somehow innovative.

This is precisely why meaningful regulatory review of competition-eroding mergers matter (the Trump FCC didn’t even bother reading details about the plan’s impact before approving it). Once such deals are done, the griping of the press and public generally isn’t enough to counter the reduced competition, or the relentless need of publicly traded companies to exploit it in order to please Wall Street longer term.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, broadband, competition, fcc, high speed internet, mergers, wireless
Companies: t-mobile

FTC Pushes New Rule To Try And Kill Bullshit ‘Junk Fees’

from the *prices-may-be-significantly-higher-than-they-initial-appear dept

Thu, Oct 12th 2023 05:22am - Karl Bode

As a reporter who has covered telecom for the better part of two decades, I’ve spent much of that time watching broadband giants like AT&T and Comcast sock their captive customers with a wide variety of bullshit, sneaky fees designed to help them advertise one price, then charge you with a higher rate. It’s a practice that nets them billions of dollars annually.

At the same time I’ve watched the agency purportedly in charge of telecom and media issues (the FCC) stumble around like a drunken halfwit when it comes to holding anybody accountable for the practice. Most of the FCC’s focus has been on demanding transparency; as in, they think it’s ok for companies to rip you off, companies just have to be clear about the fact they’re ripping you off at the point of sale.

That’s treating the symptom but not the underlying disease, which is usually market failure, a lack of competition, mindless consolidation, and monopoly power. You generally can’t get away with socking your customers with a bunch of nonsensical surcharges if those customers have competitive alternatives.

Of course the practice of bullshit fees isn’t isolated to the telecom industry. The airline, hotel, concert, and real estate rental industries also routinely sock you with such bogus surcharges. Occasionally agencies like the FTC will take a swing at the practice under the “unfair and deceptive” component of the FTC Act, which requires a fairly high burden of proof and is a little vague when it comes to onerous fees.

So the FTC says it’s considering a new rule specifically designed to attack junk fees:

You’ll want to read the proposed Rule for the specifics, but a central focus of the rulemaking is to prohibit hidden or falsely advertised fees by requiring advertised prices to include mandatory charges and by expressly prohibiting misrepresentations about the nature, purpose, or amount of fees.

For example, the rule the FTC is proposing would state, “It is an unfair and deceptive practice and a violation of this part for any Business to offer, display, or advertise an amount a consumer may pay without Clearly and Conspicuously disclosing the Total Price.” (The capitalized words have specific definitions in the FTC’s proposal.) Is that proposed prohibition clear and understandable? Is it ambiguous in any way? What do you think?

It’s a good start. If you want to share your thoughts with the FTC, you can find instructions here.

But just cracking down on junk fees isn’t enough. In telecom and broadband, big ISPs like Comcast can get away with bullshit fees because their captive customers have no competitors to flee to. That means this kind of crackdown needs to be accompanied with the kind of meaningful, cross-sector antitrust reform our corrupt Congress isn’t interested in (despite many recent political performances on this front).

Without it, your airline or broadband provider can just roll these glorified price hikes back into the advertised rate. They’re still ripping you off with inflated prices thanks to industry consolidation, they’re just being slightly more honest about it at the point of sale. So you also need both antitrust reform, and the kind of competent, thoughtful merger review that’s uncharacteristic for U.S. regulators who increasingly see their authority chipped away by a radically rightward lurching Supreme Court.

Still, just the fact that we have regulators actually thinking about how to tackle this problem is a step in the right direction. For decades U.S. regulators have made it abundantly clear that it’s fine if companies rip you off with obnoxious surcharges and nonsensical fees — provided they’re modestly creative about it. Asking them to illustrate up front just how badly you’re going to be screwed is the least we can do.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, consumer protection, fees, ftc, junk fees, surprise fees, unfair and deceptive

from the more-money-for-a-shittier-product dept

Mon, Aug 14th 2023 05:27am - Karl Bode

If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, offshored labor, whatever it takes.

While high level executives and some shareholders benefit from this enshittification, there’s just an endless list of casualties from this process, whether it’s product value, quality, customer satisfaction, customer support, employee pay, jobs, or even the long-term health of the company itself.

As the streaming market saturates and competition grows, enshittification has come to the streaming video sector in a big way. Products once heralded for low cost convenience now see relentless price hikes at the same time there’s been an erosion in quality and convenience. All to a backdrop of striking workers, many of whom say they were never paid a living wage during the sector’s heyday.

Netflix, as we’ve well documented, seems intent on charging more and more money for a lower quality product, while it demonizes the kind of password sharing it once praised for contributing to its success. Disney now seems intent on following suit on password crackdowns, as Hulu, Disney, and all the other streaming giants race each other to impose sometimes biannual price hikes.

On many fronts, streaming was a notable improvement to the traditional cable TV model, which mandated that consumers purchase massive bundles of largely unwatched channels. Or pay their cable company a ridiculous monthly fee to purchase a dusty old cable box. The problem: a lot of streaming’s novelty and innovation obfuscated many other long-percolating problems in the sector, including unchecked media consolidation and attacks on labor.

Alena Smith, showrunner of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, wrote about how new streaming Hollywood in many was is worse that what it disrupted, especially when it comes to creative pay and the transparency creatives have into the success and impact of their work:

…to this day I have no earthly clue how many people have seen it [Dickinson], nor what value my near-decade of creative labor generated for the company. Not only do I have no metrics for my own success, I don’t even know how Apple would determine those metrics in the first place.) In their mad rush off the digital cliff, these companies transformed Hollywood from a high-wage, high-profit, hits-driven industry into a low-wage, low-profit, subscription-driven one. They also broke the basic bargain at the heart of show business, which is that creative artists and independent producers will share in the financial success their work creates.

Like most of America’s problems, the one two punch of mindless consolidation with feckless regulatory antitrust oversight has had some fairly unsurprising results, especially for workers. Executives like Discovery CEO David Zaslav fail endlessly upward, receiving outsized compensation for blistering incompetence. All while their products, customers, and workers take the hit for pointless merger mania (see: the broad dipshittery that has been the AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of mergers).

Smith is correct to affix the blame on greed, mindless consolidation, and feckless regulatory oversight as opposed to blaming the underlying tech:

You might say if you were a viewer of my limited series about the streaming wars, we’ve seen this movie before. Unregulated platform capitalism has already chewed up and spat out most of the 20th century’s once-profitable culture industry, from music to journalism to books. People often blame “the internet” for this rampant destruction of livelihoods, as if the technology itself were some kind of demon, hellbent on erasing the value of creative work.

We can control and structure the marketplace of the internet through our laws and the enforcement of those laws. We can eliminate glaring corporate conflicts of interest and make the web — our now-de facto gathering space as a society — a better place to be an artist and an audience member. We’ve done it before: through laws like the Paramount Consent Decree, which legally separated the production and distribution of films, thereby ending the autocratic “Studio System” of that era; or the “fin-syn” rules of 1970, which blocked TV networks from distributing their own content during prime-time hours, ushering in a golden age of independent TV production.

None of these problems are new or unique to Hollywood. You see the same grotesque dysfunction in journalism, health care, education, telecom, traditional cable TV, transportation, energy, and countless other heavily consolidated sectors and industries. In large part because we’ve utterly normalized corruption and greed and let it run amok; often under the pretense of unbridled, patriotic free market American innovation.

There are counterbalances to Wall Street greed and the brunchlord hubris of the executive set. Antitrust reform (not the GOP performative type, but real antitrust reform), properly and competently staffed regulatory agencies, functional merger review, unionization of exploited work forces, functional consumer and labor abuse protection, checks and balances for monopoly and monopsony power, campaign financing and lobbying reform, and more.

You can feel the seed of real change growing thanks to unprecedented anger at the now comically tilted playing field by savvier, younger generations, but it remains an open question of how stupid and unbalanced we’re willing to let things get before meaningful, consensus-driven reform actually arrives. Judging from our trajectory from the 80s, 90s, and early aughts, we could be waiting a while.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, competition, enshittification, media consolidation, mergers, streaming, video

One More Time With Feeling: The GOP Never Seriously Supported ‘Antitrust Reform’ Or Monopoly Busting

from the past-is-prologue dept

Wed, Apr 26th 2023 05:23am - Karl Bode

For the last few years, press and policy circles were absolutely dominated by talk about how there was an amazing “new, bipartisan coalition” of folks interested in “reining in ‘Big Tech’,” meaningfully checking corporate power, and finally embracing competent “antitrust reform.”

The problem: it was largely all bullshit.

The GOP in particular, which has, for forty years, embraced and encouraged monopolization and consolidation at nearly every turn (see: telecom, banking, insurance, media, healthcare, air travel, energy, etc.), was repeatedly portrayed by some pundits and journalists as “very serious about antitrust reform this time.”

At least as it applied to “Big Tech.” There are countless U.S. business sectors where monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are rampant that Congress simply couldn’t give any less of a shit about because crowing wildly about them generally doesn’t get you a prime-time spot on corporation-controlled cable news. Legitimate anger at “Big Tech” did provide an opening for dialogue.

For years, many of these same experts quite correctly pointed out that U.S. antitrust reform had grown toothless and frail, our competition laws desperately needed updating in the Amazon era, and “are consumers happy?” (the traditional consumer welfare standard) no longer meaningfully measured all aspects of potential harm in complex internet-connected markets.

The problem: the GOP’s interest in antitrust reform was never really genuine. Politicians like Senators Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz glommed onto a legitimate reform movement primarily to gain leverage over Silicon Valley tech giants, hoping (pretty successfully, as it turns out) to scare them away from moderating the kind of race-baiting hate speech and political propaganda increasingly employed by America’s growing conspiracy theory addled authoritarians.

Some folks, like popular monopoly buster Matt Stoller — the subject of a somewhat glowing profile piece in Politico last week — meaningfully bought into Hawley’s claim he actually cared about the public interest on this subject. The most generous interpretation is that Stoller saw it as an opportunity to develop a meaningful new bipartisan coalition on antitrust reform.

It didn’t go particularly well, something that anybody with even a fleeting grasp of fifty years of GOP policy history probably could have predicted:

For some of Stoller’s critics, the episode put in sharp relief the folly of his attempt to celebrate Hawley’s antitrust work. About ten days after the Capitol riot, a software engineer with his own interest in antitrust built a website — “Why Did Matt Stoller Shut Up About Josh Hawley Dot Com” — complete with a countdown clock noting that Stoller had tweeted about Hawley just before midnight on the 5th but not since.

Politico’s interpretation is that legitimizing and validating the GOP’s hollow performance on antitrust reform was somehow a helpful means to an end, and that, as a result, Stoller has been “winning over Conservatives” despite some strange looks cast his direction by other trustbusters:

The Hawley gambit is part of a broader effort to build a bipartisan consensus around the idea that government should use its might to challenge the power of big business. And amid what some on the right are calling the “Realignment,” which has some conservatives and Republicans reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power, he has a fresh opportunity to do just that.

The problem, again, is that the GOP was never actually interested in “reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power,” and claiming otherwise gave the party unearned policy credibility in the media and policy circles it never had to actually earn.

There’s fleeting evidence the GOP was every actually interested in any of the policy reforms Stoller and friends claimed they were shifting toward.

GOP party leaders are still out there, week after week, defending monopolization across countless sectors, dismantling the regulatory state, undermining the nominations of hugely popular reformers, stacking the courts to the benefit of large corporations, and coddling the most radical whims of unchecked corporate power across nearly every industry.

So unsurprisingly, not much ever actually came from the GOP’s sudden and completely uncharacteristic support of antitrust reform, despite two straight years of sound and fury by Stoller, Glenn Greenwald, and some major news outlets like Politico.

The results were some, sloppy bills, several specifically tailored to only apply to the biggest tech companies, which failed to gain necessary traction in Congress despite endless press rhetoric about a bold new “bipartisan” coalition that was destined to change everything. All while the GOP saw relatively little coverage of efforts like its propaganda-laden assault on FCC nominee Gigi Sohn.

To be clear, despite the press narrative to the contrary, I don’t think either party is particularly serious about antitrust reform. Congress is simply too grotesquely corrupt, and the combined cross-industry lobbying opposition to meaningful reform (see: consumer privacy) is too gargantuan to be overcome without a massive policy and cultural sea change, serious and unified lobbying and campaign finance reform, and an historic, voter-driven upheaval of the affluent, captured, congressional gerontocracy.

By absolutely every indication, we’ll all be waiting a while.

Some key Democrats, like Katie Porter and Lina Khan, do at least actually care about the issue. Some key Republicans, like Ken Buck, kind of care, but are so mired in bigoted partisan fever dreams (see his threat to use antitrust to punish “woke Apple” or his tendency to shoot his own legislation in the ass via strange missteps) he’s effectively useless as any kind of serious reformer.

The peril of taking the GOP seriously on this subject came with a nasty side effect: it normalized and legitimized insurrectionist pseudo-populists like Hawley, who were able to hide their real agendas — namely their assault on content moderation of increasingly unhinged authoritarian propaganda — under the banner of legitimate interest in anti-monopolization and antitrust reform.

That’s not to say there’s no value in bipartisan coalition building, or that even the most corrupt policy makers can never change their stripes. But that’s a far cry from what happened here: the legitimization and normalization of increasingly unhinged authoritarian bullshit artists with a generation-long history of supporting unchecked corporate power on nearly every level.

You needed only look at the last 50 years of GOP policy history to see how this gambit was going to turn out, something ignored by folks like Stoller (whose not so “progressive” China hawkery is ignored by Politico), keen on creating an illusory bipartisan coalition that never actually was.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, big tech, josh hawley, matt stoller, monopolies, monopoly busting, ted cruz, telecom

T-Mobile Simply Lies When Pressed About 9,000 Lost Jobs In Wake Of Sprint Merger

from the zero-accountability dept

Wed, Apr 19th 2023 05:27am - Karl Bode

Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal who predicted job losses, the former potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be “job positive from day one” and every day thereafter.

Yeah, about that.

Geekwire did a proper retrospective on the deal’s impact last week (something the press usually can’t be bothered to do), and found that T-Mobile now employs 9,000 fewer employees than it did before the deal. And while that’s not quite as bad as the 15,000-30,000 jobs union leaders predicted (although layoffs will likely continue), it’s still… not great.

Especially given the lengths T-Mobile went to to insist layoffs would never happen, and the hostility the company expressed against deal critics who predicted otherwise.

When Geekwire’s Todd Bishop pressed the company on its failed promise to create jobs… T-Mobile officials simply lied, falsely claiming they’d accomplished their goal:

“We’ve upheld our jobs commitment. Before we merged with Sprint we said we’d have more employees as a combined company than the two standalone companies would have had on their own without the merger — and we have done just that.”

This is patently false and disproven by the company’s own publicly-available earnings data and employee numbers, which indicate it’s clearly about 9k employees lighter.

As Geekwire notes, they gave the company another shot to answer the question, and T-Mobile simply doubled down, again falsely claiming they’d fulfilled their promises of job creation. T-Mobile can lie here because it knows federal U.S. telecom regulators are gridlocked by telecom industry lobbying, and generally too feckless to do anything about it even when they aren’t.

This is, of course, par for the course for U.S. megamergers, especially in the highly consolidated telecom space. Companies make all manner of empty promises to regulators pre-merger, knowing full well they have zero intention of following through. Thanks to federal regulatory capture and corruption, the penalty for these kinds of empty promises is usually nonexistent.

Recall, the Trump FCC approved the T-Mobile Sprint merger without even reading data on the deal’s impact. Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” Makan Delrahim used his personal email and phone to work closely with T-Mobile to ensure regulatory approval, resulting in a plan to try and make a new competitor out of Dish Network that’s looking increasingly doomed.

This is all extremely typical for a country that talks a lot about “job creation” and “antitrust reform,” yet routinely rubber stamps mergers and consolidation without the slightest fuck given about the employee and consumer-facing repercussions. None of the think tankers, hired economists, Senators or regulators responsible for the impact of consolidation in telecom are ever held even remotely accountable, and the band plays on to obvious effect.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, consolidation, doj, fcc, jobs, layoffs, mergers, telecom
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Congress Urges DOJ To Review The Time Warner Discovery Merger Mess Amidst Chaos And Ongoing Layoffs

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Wed, Apr 12th 2023 05:33am - Karl Bode

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.

But that was just the start.

After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.

This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to creators, shuttered numerous popular programs they didn’t want to pay for, and engaged in round after round of additional layoffs to achieve promised “synergies.” Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the end result is a shittier product and, well, chaos.

It’s been a wonderful example of the blistering stupidity of the “growth for growth’s sake” mindset, the perils of mindless consolidation, and our obsession with completely pointless megadeals that genuinely only benefit investors and higher level executives. Everybody else, from artists and employees to consumers, gets screwed in the form of layoffs, higher rates, or lower quality product.

Enter Congress, where a teeny, tiny number of lawmakers think maybe somebody at the DOJ might want to at least review the approval process that helped create the deal. They’re not calling for the merged companies to be broken up, though they are asking that the process that resulted in this dumb mess maybe inform future reviews:

“We also hope that the competitive consequences resulting from the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger inform updates to the merger guidelines to ensure that the guidelines reflect the needs of workers, consumers and content creators in the media and entertainment industry,” the letter said.

The letter was signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust; Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas).

Of course it won’t. Nobody will learn anything from this process. Outside of baseball, massive pointless mergers are the top American pastime. There are just countless examples of how consolidation and monopolization through megadeals harms all of the things American policymakers claim to be dedicated to (free markets, free choice, competition, innovation, creating jobs).

This complete apathy to the harm of mindless consolidation occurs as countless folks in Congress make TV appearances claiming to support things like “antitrust reform.” In part because it’s happening in the less sexy media policy space, where regulators have effectively been defanged and issues often get overlooked given the current myopic DC fixation on “Big Tech.”

When it comes to taking media consolidation seriously, a small handful of Senators saying “maybe somebody should do something about this” is about as close to competency as it gets.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, artists, creators, layoffs, megadeals, mergers
Companies: warner brothers discovery