Ownership

In the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever, and the chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers. 

The Department of Justice announced that it has reached a settlement with six broadcast television companies — Sinclair, Raycom Media, Tribune Media Company, Meredith Corporation, Griffin Communications, and Dreamcatcher Broadcasting — to resolve a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the companies engaged in unlawful agreements to share non-public competitively sensitive information with their broadcast television competitors. “The unlawful exchange of competitively sensitive information allowed these television broadcast companies to disrupt the normal competitive process of spot advertising in mark

House Democrats plan to investigate whether President Donald Trump abused White House power by targeting — and trying to punish with "instruments of state power" — the Washington Post and CNN, said incoming-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Rep Schiff said President Trump "was secretly meeting with the postmaster [general] in an effort to browbeat the postmaster [general] into raising postal rates on Amazon." "This appears to be an effort by the president to use the instruments of state power to punish Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post," Rep Schiff said.

The American Cable Association called on the Justice Department to open an antitrust investigation into Comcast-NBCUniversal. It would be a way to keep Justice overseeing the company after the conditions DOJ imposed on the merger expired earlier in 2018.

Google will never be the same. For two years, regulators, lawmakers, academics and the media have pushed Silicon Valley to alter its world-swallowing ways. But outsiders have few points of leverage in tech; there are few laws governing the industry’s practices, and lawmakers have struggled to get up to speed on tech’s implications for society. Protests by workers are an important new avenue for pressure; the very people who make these companies work can change what they do in the world.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has agreed to a settlement with the Justice Department over the sharing of information between television-station owners that raised antitrust concerns. Sinclair said (there's been no announcement from the Department of Justice) the settlement doesn’t represent an admission of wrongdoing and doesn’t subject the company to monetary damages or penalties. Government officials discovered the alleged sharing of sales information during their review of Sinclair’s $3.9 billion proposed acquisition of Tribune Media. 

Many US voters in a recent Morning Consult/Politico poll, including pluralities of both Democrats and Republicans, said they’d like to see the next Congress make it a top priority to pass measures that better protect consumer data, outweighing other more partisan concerns such as efforts to codify network neutrality and addressing allegations of political bias and censorship on social media.

Department of Justice antitrust chief Makan Delrahim put an exclamation point on what might now be called the AT&T/Time Warner Doctrine given the confluence of that case with Delrahim's emphasis on spin-offs versus conditions in vertical mergers: "If a structural remedy isn’t available, then, except in the rarest of circumstances, we will seek to block an illegal merger."

For Louis Brandeis, antitrust would serve both social and economic goals. He saw complete harmony in critiquing the economic justification for corporate power, on terms familiar to modern antitrust analysis, while pressing the larger case for democracy and industrial liberty. Legislatures can, and should, take an expansive view. As a starting point, Brandeis believed that values other than economics would be served by the protection of competition through antitrust, chief among them the preservation of democracy and individual initiative. This was not a subtle view.

The top executives at Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have stayed on the political sidelines during the 2018 midterm elections, opting not to donate to federal candidates who might advance Silicon Valley’s political agenda — or battle back President Donald Trump. Two years ago, these tech leaders emerged as some of President Trump’s biggest critics, challenging his administration publicly on issues including immigration, climate change and gender equality.