Antitrust

We must take on Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tech, and all the other corporate monopolists whose greed is denying progress for working people.

After Fubo filed an antitrust lawsuit against the trio for its upcoming Venu streaming service, Puck’s Eriq Gardner sat in on an evidentiary hearing overseen by NY District Judge Margaret Garnett:

From the several days of testimony I witnessed — packed with executives, consultants, and economists — it feels like a preliminary injunction might just be on the table... Garnett seems genuinely concerned by the extraordinary influence that could be wielded by an alliance of the sector’s behemoths. 

The most likely targets to be spun out are Google’s Android mobile operating system or its Chrome browser, Bloomberg reports. DOJ’s antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter has long signaled he prefers structural remedies (legal speak for breakups) in many cases. Either way, Bloomberg says DOJ is likely to ask for a ban on exclusive contracts the judge found helped reinforce Google’s monopoly. A DOJ spokesperson said it’s evaluating the ruling and “No decisions have been made at this time.”

The FTC called Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass price hike “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it had predicted ahead of the company’s Activision-Blizzard buy.

Microsoft’s response (PDF) claims that with included multiplayer and the upcoming day-and-date release of Call of Duty, the offering isn’t degraded at all.

The agency wants more information about Amazon’s maneuver to hire most of the Adept team and license its technology. Adept said its plans to build “useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product” would have required “significant attention on fundraising.” The informal inquiry might not lead to an investigation or enforcement, but enforcers are keeping close watch of tech giants and AI.

In a new interview with The Financial Times, Jonathan Kanter says regulators may need to act urgently to keep AI from being controlled by already-dominant tech companies. Kanter has been leading the antitrust charge against tech intermediaries that are “more powerful than the products and services or the entities they intermediate.”

“It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement announcing the DOJ antitrust lawsuit.

The feds have filed an antitrust lawsuit seeking to break up Live Nation, the parent company of event ticketing giant Ticketmaster, and we’re about to hear more details from the government’s side in this press conference.

Update, May 27th: Replaced live stream link with archive copy from YouTube.

The announcement could come as soon as Thursday. Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, calls itself “the largest producer of live music concerts in the world.” It’s one of many agents of consolidation that drastically reshaped music.

Karl Bode, writing for The Verge in 2019 about the propect of higher prices and inevitable post-merger layoffs:

But if you’ve seen telecom mergers go through this process before, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical. Consolidation tends to make prices higher, connectivity worse, and customer service even more terrible. Pre-merger promises to do better are usually hollow, as consumer advocates, unions, and many antitrust experts all agree.