In a federal court in Washington, a judge soon decide Google’s fate. Will the marriage be dissolved? And, more importantly, what impact would such a step have on your life?
Antitrust and competition policy is an area that can seem foreign to some people. Taxes? We understand that. Gas prices? We understand that. But antitrust law?
But listen to us. Antitrust Law Is very much over your life. And the feeling that this is not the case allows big corporations to rule over you.
So we return to that conversation with America’s top competition watchdog, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. No one has done more to revitalize antitrust enforcement in recent memory. But, more importantly, no one has tried harder to explain to the public what antitrust is and how monopolies – and breaking them up – affect our lives.
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Balzac wrote: “Behind every fortune there lies a great crime.” Leaving aside the word “every,” which may be an exaggeration, what do you think are the key crimes behind today’s greatest fortunes?
I started out as a reporter and researcher, and my job was to study how different markets had evolved. I talked to chicken farmers, book authors, and people from different markets. I realized that we have seen major waves of consolidation in the United States over the last 40 years.
There are millions of consumers and thousands of producers controlled by a handful of companies. These gatekeepers, these dominant middlemen and intermediaries, play an important role, but the power they have consolidated allows them to pick winners and losers and enrich themselves by squeezing more and more out of the producers who actually make something and the consumers who buy it. They create markets that simply don’t seem fair to many people.
We are witnessing an increasing consolidation and concentration of power and an exercise of power that is making other people poorer and more arbitrary and making them feel more pressured and less free.
So many people say we’re in a crisis of democracy, and of course it’s a big crisis of democracy, but it’s happening in a lot of little places too. I think a lot of people maybe don’t understand how this particular work you’re doing fits into a larger question of democracy versus authoritarianism, power for the people versus power for the few.
How people experience their freedom in their day-to-day lives is often determined by their economic relationships and their involvement in our commercial sphere. Some of the chicken farmers I spoke to, for example, were so afraid of the processors they depended on that they didn’t even want to talk to the government. Fear of retaliation undermined their right to free speech – fundamental freedoms.
We also see how the Extension of non-competition clauses ties employees to existing jobs and makes it very difficult for them to freely change employers. These are also fundamental freedoms.
One of the original insights of the antimonopoly tradition in the run-up to the Adoption of antitrust lawswas that just as we have checks and balances in our political sphere to protect us from concentration of political power, we also need antitrust laws to protect us from concentration of economic power. It was recognized that to create real freedom and real democracy, you need safeguards on both sides.
I’m wondering how broad you see your mandate to regulate technology companies when it comes to not just practices that we think of as traditionally deceptive, but also the actual undermining of democratic participation, belief in reality, and things like that that may seem a little more ethereal to people.
