Better Offline - Matt Stoller Explains Monopolies

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

In this episode, Ed Zitron sits down with Matt Stoller, author of the BIG Newsletter and Research Director of the American Economic Liberties Project to explain what a monopoly is, why they're so pervasive, how America entered a "monopoly crisis," and what all of this means for Google, Apple, Meta, and the rest of big tech. Want to read the transcript of this episode? Go to wheresyoured.at/stoller BIG by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/ Matt Stoller on Twitter https://x.com/matthewstoller  Newsletter: wheresyoured.at  Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at  Ed's Socials: http://www.twitter.com/edzitron  instagram.com/edzitron  https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Podmeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. QuaZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host at Zittron. Today we're talking monopolies, and I'm joined by Matt Stola, who covers market power and antitrust for the big newsletter and is the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. Matt, thank you for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me. So this is a very dumb place to start, but I think it's necessary. What exactly is a monopoly?

Not a dumb place to start at all. there are different definitions, but generally speaking, it is the control of a recognized branch of trade or service, a unified control of recognized trade or service. And that's a definition I'm giving you from Lewis Brandeis, who was a Supreme Court justice. But it's the same, I think Milton Friedman had a kind of a similar definition. The essence of a monopoly is control of a market. or a recognized trade. And what do most people not actually understand about them? What I think most people characterize monopoly as kind of an economic thing or, you know, just a commercial thing. But really a monopoly is a political institution. So when we're talking about monopolies, we're talking about what is effectively a private

government over a market, over an industry. If you're in that trade, right, or that service, if you apply your trade there, If you're operating in a market which is monopolized, then you have a political boss who sets the prices, the terms of trade, who can buy, who can sell, and you're under their thumb. And yeah, it's your trade, right? So it looks like the quote, unquote, economy. But in fact, it's really a, that person has, or that firm has political power over you. And if you have enough monopolies in an economy, then at least in the commercial sector,

which is a big part of our lives, we're not living. in a democratic society, we're living in a society of a bunch of private governments, authoritarian governments overmarkets. So Sundarpa Shai of Google would be like the president of his private monopoly, his little private government. I think that's right. If you, if you think about how people, you know, there was a, there's a good quote that from a plumber actually in the, in the Wall Street Journal who said that, you know, the government can find me, but Google can put me out of business. Because Google could take his business off Google Maps. They could change his ranking in Google search. And so he was way more afraid of Google than the government.

And that's because Google has governing power over the internet. And you can see this like every publisher can tell you that the change in Google's algorithm can be catastrophic or can be, you know, hugely important and impactful in some ways. So, so yeah, very, very much. So Google is the private government of the internet, or at least the gatekeeper of the internet. And it is exactly, it's exactly what you're talking about. They also have political power because they're a big company and they lobby and whatnot. But just as infrastructure, they are governing that infrastructure. Almost feels like Yelp is like a borough of the larger Google country than Yelp controlling the reviews. And Yelp has a weird little mob-like thing they do where you have to pay.

them to get rid of bad reviews now. It's never really thought about the governmental comparison. Right. I mean, so what you have with something like Yelp is because Yelp is under the control of Google, right? And Google is doing all sorts of things to sort of try to kill Yelp. Yelp and Google has monopolized advertising, right? A company like Yelp, it kind of has no choice but to move towards a kind of sleazyer business model where they're extractive. because all of the other areas where they could make legitimate money have been monopolized by Google or been taken by Google. So in one sense, what happens when you have monopolies is you have higher prices and all the rest of it. But another thing that happens is that businesses that are operating often have a choice of continuing in existence or not.

And the choice of whether to continue in existence is often to go down through a business model that can look sleazy or can be problematic or can be coercive. And so it's like that's that's the choice. Do you go out of business or do you do this do this thing that, you know, you don't like. There's a law. There's a rule of thumb called Gresham's law about counterfeit money, which is, you know, when somebody starts using counterfeit money, then nobody wants to use real money. because even if you want to use real money, you're like, I'm not going to put real money out there if it's all counterfeit.

Yeah, and the guy with the counterfeit has the advantage. Right. You have to play by their rules. Good money drives out the bad. And so this is one of the things you see, for example, when you go to like an Expedia or something like that and your hotels.com, you're looking for, you know, to book something.

They don't show the, you know, resort fees, the junk fees until, you know, you get to the last page where you're going to check out or something. sometimes even when you get to the hotel. And it's not that every hotel wants to rip you off, but they all know that you're going to be looking at the price and comparing the sticker price that you see on the results page. And if their rival is not showing you that junk fee, then they're at a competitive disadvantage if they don't lie. So what's happening... Honesty sucks. Yeah. Well, it's just that a market,

where you have rules that enable, that allow fraud, is just a different market than one where we don't allow fraud. It's just there, you know, there's discussions about capitalism or free markets or whatever. But the fact that you use the term market doesn't mean anything because markets are politically structured, like a farmer's market, a derivatives market, a slave market, they all use the term market. They're very different institutions,

very different moral elements underpinning them, very different arrangements of power. So you've said something you wrote, and it's also on your main page, is America's in a monopoly crisis. Right. What do you mean? So what you have in a lot of areas and in most, I think monopoly or oligopoly, which is just a small number of companies controlling a market is now a systemic feature of the American economy.

And it didn't used to be. So there are different ways to measure it. But, you know, about 75% of industries in the last 20% of. 20, 25 years have gotten more consolidated. And so you see, you know, and this is largely through mergers. So another statistic would be, you know, there's something called the Wilshire, Wilshire 5,000, which is an index of public companies. And we don't have enough public companies for the Wilshire 5,000. They're only about 3,400 public companies now. There used to be around 9,000 in the 90s. Now we have around 3,500. It's largely because of mergers, even the country per capita is,

you know, the decline is even more significant. So just the number of big companies is smaller because companies have gotten, you know, they've merged and gotten much, much bigger. And this has a lot of consequences. What you see is wages are much lower than they otherwise would be. So the amount spent on employees with either increased wages or health care or training is probably between $14,000 and $20,000 per American in the non, in the non-financial. corporate sector is about 80 million Americans. You see things like the cost of health care, which is largely driven by market power, consolidation in hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurers. The price of an insured family of four has gone from about 10,15,000 a year in

2008 to about $30,000 a year today. So that's, you know, a lot of the, you know, lack of increase of compensation and wages, if you just take those two facts of just how much, you know, lack of ability to move to a new job because of consolidation, that $15,000 to $20,000 plus the increase that we're paying in healthcare, that's a lot of money. And that's, you know, every single year. It's basically almost a new car every single year that's just extracted from every family by this increased amount of concentration. And do you have less? ability to move because there are just less places to work. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's right. There's just, like, if you, it used to be that you had, say, you were in a town, you had 10 stores,

the, you know, a couple of dry goods stores, some grocery stores, butcher, you know, like, you're, you know, your standard Main Street. And then that all got put under one roof, Walmart. And so you have one place to work. And all the stuff is sold there. And now you don't have any place to bargain as if you're a worker or if you want to set up a store, you can't do that either because for other reasons because that Walmart has more bargaining power with suppliers. And so you can't compete. Even if you could do it more efficiently, you still couldn't compete because you couldn't get the supplies that you needed or you couldn't get them at the same price.

And that sounds like another manifestation of the political nature of these companies because they just set the terms that customers will expect and the business has to operate with. Yeah, I mean, Walmart in the 1990s and 2000s as it was growing. And there were political reasons it grew. There were just changes in pricing law and antitrust laws. But Walmart would literally just go to their suppliers and they would say, okay, you, Levi Strauss, you're not making your genes in China. We want you to move production to China. That's, and if you want to get into Walmart and you need to get into Walmart because we are 8, 9% of the retail dollar and you need it, you're going to do this.

And they just did this across the board. And they literally restructured how American production happens. And was that to lower prices? Was that to why did they want them to move to China? Lower prices, usually, but also, you know, they had specific ways that they wanted to see their business operate. So they just want control. I mean, there are other things that they did that are actually really interesting to restructure how, how retail works. But yeah, it was largely a price. It was a price element.

And is the crisis that there are just so many of these little moving powers within America? You mean that there's so many monopoly crisis? Yeah, I mean, the crisis is that we have, you know, as people get used to being bossed around, they lose their respect for democracy itself, right? I mean, that's the, ultimately, like, you see a ton of cynicism. And I think the reason that there's all of the cynicism about the rule of law about the idea of living in a society is because most people experience living in an authoritarian part of their lives. I don't want to overstate it. We're not living in a dictatorship or anything. This is still a democracy. But you know, you get bossed around and you get told you can't.

I mean, the amount of fear in commerce is overwhelming at this point. When you talk to people in lots of different areas, they're afraid to talk about what's going on in their industry because the monopolist can retaliate against them. And so if you're living in fear, then you're not living, you're not, you're not free, right? You may not be living in a dictatorship, but you're not free. That's interesting as well, because so much of what I've talked about with the Valley is this without really framing it like you are, which is people fear Sam Altman of Open AI. He's grown big because people fear his existence. what he may say about them. Reed Hoffman. Right. Same deal. And just the political nature of these

institutions I never really considered. Is this how it got so bad that the corporations kind of got this level of power? So it's interesting. The story of why this happened is actually not a story of big corporations seizing power. Because we didn't actually have this problem in the 1970s and before that. I mean, you know, there's always like some big companies. And there's always been some problems. here and there, but largely this is a story of bad ideas taking over. So what happened in the, we had this populist tradition in America, right, which you can, you can find this, you know, really the original populace was a political party in the 1880s and 1890s. They were farmers from the South and the Midwest. They were upset about a number of different

changes in the economy, the dominance of railroads, dominance of large banks. Basically, they were mad about Eastern capital controlling their business and making it hard to make a living, selling farm products and controlled by processors, controlled by railroads. This is very similar stuff that we're seeing today. So standard oil, they didn't like that. But you could go back, you could find this, you know, you go back in the 1600s and find antecedents in England and so on and so forth. There has always been this tradition of let's not have too much. have too much power in America, right? That's the checks and balances thing, the Federalist papers and whatnot. Also, no one should have, we should try to avoid conflicts of interest.

I mean, that's in the Bible. No man may serve two masters, right? So you have these two sort of basic themes, checks and balances, no conflicts of interest. And we've always kind of understood that that's the way that we should arrange our society. Very bitter fights in the 19th century over corporate chartering. We regulated our corporate. This idea that we used to be less a fair, and that's always nonsense. What is just corporate chartering? What do you mean there?

So just the idea of being able to charter a corporation, create a corporation. Oh, okay. Like who can form one? Yeah, being able to form one, limited liability corporation, where if my corporation does something, it's liable, but me as a human being that runs it is not, right? An eternal entity that, like, you, you, doesn't die. is not a natural person but can conduct business as if it is a natural person. That was an innovation in the 19th century.

It's not something that anybody could get. There were all sorts of fights over who could charter it for what reason. Originally it was academic institutions, municipalities. They didn't allow anyone to just charter a corporation because they were like, this can be really dangerous. Corporations were originally chartered to allow the pooling. Eventually they started to charter them in business. And they said, you can pool capital and men to build things of public works and make a little

profit. And we're going to put very restrictive confidence in there. And it was very restrictive until the 1880s and 1890s. And that's when you started to see federal antitrust laws because the state chartering didn't work as well. And so we needed a new regulatory regime. And that was the, that's when we got into the, into the federalization of it. But that, that's the story. The story is we've always kept a tight rain on commercial. concentrations of power. In the 1970s, there were sort of two different political and intellectual movements that came, that won the debate, each one within the Republican Party, one within the Democratic Party. The Republican debate, the one on the right was the Chicago School, these were

the libertarians, and their argument was power doesn't matter. Concentrations of power doesn't matter. Concentrations of power doesn't matter. Conflicts of interest don't matter. Traditional things like usury caps, all that stuff is very silly. The only thing that matters is efficiency. We need to just think about what is most efficient. And to understand efficiency, let's think, let's ask economists. They're the scientists, right? We're going to move this political question out of the realm of the public and the citizen and move it to the expert, the scientist, the economist.

That's why these political things become the economy. That's why we start using terms like human capital instead of people or infrastructure instead of bridges. Like it's just a very, you know, the language gets weird. and sort of flabby. And distant as well. Yeah. Distant, alien, right?

I noticed this in some of the documents that I was looking at, the government talked in the 78, 79, that like the language started getting weird and very technocratic, wonky. So that was on the right. On the left, it was sort of like some quasi-socialists who made a similar argument, and they, you know, they were not, they didn't like small business, right? Because they thought that, like, small business people were, like, racist. and rubby and and they they preferred working with, you know, the big, the big banks and the,

and the big chain stores. And they thought, oh, they're cosmopolitan and smooth. Yeah, regardless. Who knows how big corporations feel about race. Jesus. I mean, I'm not, I'm just telling you what. No, no, no. I'm not saying you're the one. It's just like, oh, God. Right. I mean, so, so they didn't like car dealers, right? That was like, they were like, car dealers are sleazy. We don't like them. They were kind of more socialist. They said, you know what? We should, we should have big planning. right work with IBM, work with like the big fancy companies to sort of plan things. And they were like, we need experts to kind of be planners in the economy.

And that's actually not very different than saying, let's just allow the economists to run things. Right. It's actually very similar. Both the right and the left, they kind of hated each other. But they agreed that populism was bad, that small business was sort of foolish and silly. and that what we really should do is have big institutions running things. And those big institutions, you know, maybe the right thought, well, they should just generate cash because that's more efficient. And the left maybe thought, let's have them be more socialist and look out for the public interest.

But that was the sort of the gist of what both. And they won. And then they changed antitrust laws in the 1970s and a whole bunch of regulatory laws in the 1980s. Like, for example, deregulation of airlines, which happened in 1980, the most aggressive proponent of deregulation of airlines was Ralph Nader. Okay? Oh. It wasn't a right-wing thing. The airlines themselves didn't want it.

It was Ralph Nader pushing it very aggressively. He was also very aggressive about pushing for deregulation in banking. You know, I mean, it's a weird history here. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite on humor. me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.

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Yeah. So Nader realized he made a mistake. But what the basic idea there was, oh, this is, it's bad for consumers that we have this regulatory schema for banks or for or for truckers or for airlines, it increases prices. It's not as efficient as it could be. If we consolidate power, that's more efficient, right? All these grubby, you know, because at scale, you'll be able to. Right, right, right. And so the Chicago schoolers, the right, the right, the right, were like, absolutely, this is completely right.

I mean, they're hippies and communists and we hate them. But they're not wrong about the need to bring the experts in to run things and move away from these, you know, grubby, dumb, small business people. And, you know, there's a lot of it's the consumer rights movement was the people on the left who got this to happen. And, you know, even if today, if you read like the biographies, autobiographies of people who worked in the Carter administration, though, like, invexed. the anger they have towards the teamsters is really weird.

Like I've read like multiple people from, what was his name? Alfred Khan was kind of the big one. He was like the big derogal. But he used to talk about like how the goal of a lot of the policies was to just destroy the teamsters and reduce wages like for workers. And did they, why did, why was there such bipartisan descent for small business? It just doesn't. Maybe it makes sense just looking back like hindsight is 2020, but it just feels so

illogical almost on the left. There's an elitism to it, right? So you had the first generation, like in this, it's the 60s and 70s, and now you have finally like tens of millions of people who are college educated, right? It's right after the GI Bill and this World War II. And they're trying to understand the economy. And the New Deal exists, right? The New Deal framework is there.

Things are basically prosperous. and they stop caring about questions of political economy and concentrations of power and inequality because there just isn't that much of it. I mean, yeah, there's like, there's some like rich people. There are rich people, but they're seen as kind of like boorish and tacky. They're not like considered powerful. Wall Street doesn't really matter. You know, in the 70s, it's just like a place with coupon clippings of like bonds.

It doesn't, it's not, you know, it's not a big deal. And that's kind of the vibe that that. that most people have. You know, it's in 1979, you could like, you could leave high school and you could just get a, get a job making 50 bucks an hour in a factory, right? Right. It was just a very different society. So there just wasn't the concern over being able to make it in.

And that $50 an hour job was not, I'm going to guess, from a mega corporation. Or it was. I mean, but it could be, it could be, but it, like, it could be for Ford or it could be for a supplier of Ford or whatever. But, like, it wasn't, you know, there was a lot of light manufacturing by smaller companies. But the point is, is that you had a lot, there were a lot of options. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't considered weird or a bad thing. And inequality was fairly low. And you could also start your own business.

It wasn't that hard to do that, right? But the political infrastructure for that had kind of fallen apart. And when inflation hit in the 1970s, and inflation hit for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with changes. in banking, some oil shocks, those two movements, spent a lot of time convincing people that the American economy was misshapen because there wasn't enough expertise running things. And so in the 1970s, when there was inflation, when there were these, when there were financial shocks,

the argument was, we got to get rid of these New Deal rules. Now, there were legitimate reasons to update those rules. Like the train system was a mess. And because you couldn't close down unprofitable routes, you know, there was a lot of like real problems with our transportation system, you know, that was hard to update trucking rules. There were things that needed to be updated. But they just said, you know what? All of this stuff, just throw it out and give freedom to capital to unionize, to do whatever

capital wants because that's how to bring down cost. You've got to make things more efficient, and that will address pricing. So was there a succession of legislation, or was it one big moment? It was a bunch of different. It was some legislation. A lot of it was through the courts. So it wasn't, you know, it's not like we ever repealed any of these antitrust laws. It's just that interpretations by enforcers and the courts changed.

Oh. Yeah. And that's actually the Reagan administration, you know, there's this document that a colleague uncovered in 1980, the transition, a transition document from two important economists who said, we're not going to be able to convince Congress to get rid of antitrust laws. So we're just going to have to change it administratively by not enforcing the laws that we don't like. So that's what Reagan did with murders. He said, we're no longer going to enforce merger anti-merger law. And so that's why, you know, you saw a huge consolidation wave in the 1980s. You know the movie Wall Street, the 1987 Oliver Stone. Yeah. So that's about a merger,

right? That is the moment, like, that's what happens, is that that change. You also saw, in terms of legislation, yes, there was a tremendous amount of deregulation of, particularly of finance, but also of trade, also of shipping, also of, you know, railroads and trucking. And there were a lot of legislative changes that fostered the consolidation of economic power in the name of efficiency. So, you know, one of the first laws that changed was one that was called the Consumer Pricing Goods Act of 1975. They said, we are going to allow discounters to basically charge much less than an item costs in order to kill their rivals. So, you know, the idea, it used to be that if I sold, if I was a producer and I sold, say, Ingersoll watches or something, I could tell. the retailer what price, minimum price they could set. And that way, that retailer couldn't

price below cost to draw people in and kill their rivals. Let's say, like, you know, they don't do that with Ingersoll watches, but they do that with milk, right? You know, price below cost to kill your rivals. If you, if you can price below cost, this is what Amazon does, right? Like, the reason Amazon was able to kill its rivals is because it could borrow from Wall Street for as long as it took, whereas its rivals couldn't. And that's called predatory price. Uber did something similar. That used to be illegal. And one of the laws that made it possible was the Consumer Pricing Goods Act of 1975 that was put in place by the Democrats who had just gotten elected reacting in a reaction to Nixon. And they didn't know what to do about inflation.

So this is something that the Naderites told them to do. They did it. And Walmart exploded as a result. In 1970, Walmart was about, had about, I don't know, $20, $30 million in sales by 1980. It had a billion dollars in sales by 1985. Sam, Walton, richest guy in the country. So a bunch of stuff, like a bunch of legal changes happened, deregulation of finance, deregulation of all of these different areas, and also the relaxation, dramatic relaxation of antitrust laws. And so when you make, when you legalize monopoly, which is effectively what happened,

then you get a bunch of monopolies. And this is to our earlier point, if you don't monopolize, then you get eaten. Right. And you get destroyed. Right. So you could say Mark Zuckerberg did what he did, and that's bad by rolling up, you know, the social media space. But if it hadn't been him, it would have been somebody else, right?

And same thing with Google, same thing with all of these guys. Like it was going to, when you create a legal environment like that, that's what happens. So these big companies, now they're big, now they're powerful, and they use lobbying, they use infrastructure and they're governing. But it didn't start out that way. Now we have a political economy problem. But the ideas have changed. So the intellectual framework they were operating on of we're Google, we don't do evil,

right, which is fundamentally a statement about governing. I think there's like a general view that whatever you think about Google's business model, it's inappropriate for a private entity to be wielding sovereign power. That's not, it shouldn't be up to them. Right. So what does it actually mean that the government said they had a monopoly over search? What actually the ramifications? So this is getting to the search trial.

We can talk a little bit about that. But a monopoly means, you know, what the, what, so they were just deemed a monopolist by a judge, Judge Ahmed Meta in the, in D.C. district court. It's actually their second loss. They were also dubbed a monopolist in the Android App Store control over the app store. Yes, with the case with Epic. Yeah. So this is their second.

And there's a third case that's starting where it's about their control. of software that underpins online advertising markets. That starts in a couple of weeks. Anyway, what META said is that Google is a monopolist because they control search, right? General search services, and then they control

search advertising. And what they were doing that was illegal is they were preventing rivals from getting into the search market using contracts. And so it's not just that they, were monopolizing, it's that they were thwarting rivals from challenging them. And then they were raising ad prices as a result of their control of this market. So that's the, that's like the, in antitrust law, it didn't always used to be this way, but, but we interpret it to, to,

really since the 60s to the 80s, depending on what case you look at. If you are, if you are a monopoly and then you do something to maintain that monopoly or to extend your monopoly, that's what makes it illegal. If I just create a new product category, some widget that no one's ever heard of before, and I start making it and it's popular, I'm by definition going to have 100% of the market.

That's not illegal, right? What would be illegal is if I had 100% of the market and then I said to my distributors, hey, if you want my thing that everybody wants, you can't distribute my rivals thing. That's what makes it, that's what turns it into an illegal conspiracy. That's effective with the argument about what Google was doing with search. So how do you feel it's going to go? Well, I don't know.

I mean, they're starting, so the case started in 2020. It was originally brought by the Trump administration. The Biden administration has brought it forward. And it took until 2024 when it went to trial. And finally, the judge ruled that Google's a monopolist. Now is the second part of the trial, which is called the remedy phase, where the government comes and says, here's what we want to cure the monopoly. And Google will say, no, I don't think that's right.

This is what you need to cure the monopoly. And there will be another effectively a trial. And then the judge will rule and make a decision. And then it will go on appeal, probably. to the Supreme Court, or depending on who wins in this election, they could settle it as the Bush administration did with the Microsoft suit in 2001. So all of that being said, we don't even know what the Justice Department is going to ask for. So the Justice Department could ask for something very small, in which case that's the most you're going to get. Or they could ask. And that's the end of him.

Right. Well, I mean, it's not the end. There's going to be, you know, yeah, that's the most you're going to get. Or they could ask for, you know, breaking up the company and, you know, opening up the data vaults to let anybody use the data that Google collected or, you know, opening up their IP volts and saying anybody gets to use that or, you know, there's a ton that the DOJ could ask for. We're going to sort of find out more about that in the next month or two. that remedy phase conference they're just going to talk about the scheduling of the remedy phase in I think September

6th or 9th or something like that so we're going to be covering my organization is going to be covering that you're going to hear about that if you want to see it but it's I don't know it's very exciting I mean this is the first big tech company that's been deemed to be a monopolist

and the antitrust law you know a lot of antitrust law is just not so much what the law says, but whether you use the law. The Department of Justice didn't bring a monopolization case pretty much for 20 years since Microsoft. Like the Google case was the first one, certainly first big one.

FTC brought a few. There have been some private cases, but this is really the first big one since Microsoft. And what's going to happen, and what is already happening is, you know, every big company, is we're you know, every CEO in a company that has market power has to ask their general counsel. Are we doing something that could get us into hot water?

They didn't have to ask that a few years ago because you could just the general counsel or their antitrust counsel could say, eh, don't worry about it. Who gives a shit? It won't do anything. No one will ever bring a case, right? But now not only did the government bring a case, but they won the case. So it's like, oh, okay, now we got to be careful. And just so when you say they won the case, so it was the government versus Google with a, no, this is very simple, with the judge, Judge Meta saying, I agree with the government, right?

Yeah, it was the government and then there were a bunch of states as well. And the meta didn't, he didn't agree with everything the government said. So there were certain things with like Google's advertising platform that he said, ah, that's not a monopoly. But on the big stuff, the search stuff, yeah, he agreed with the government. How do you break up a company like Google, though? Wall Street does it all the time. I mean, you just saw, I think DuPont just broke itself up into multiple divisions. You know, Google is not just one, it's not like one jumbled together thing.

You know, Google has different divisions. And so, you know, and they buy companies and they sell companies. And you just put an investment banker in there to sell the company, you know, sell parts of the company. It would be selling off bits of the company, though. Yeah. You could just, I mean, depending on what they, you know, you could do it in lots of different ways, but this is something that Wall Street knows how to do. So you could just, it's not rocket science.

You know, Google, you just go to, Google has a bunch of people who work in the YouTube, you know, at YouTube. And they have someone who's a CEO of YouTube. You just say, okay, if you have a share of Google, you now have a share of Google and you have a share of YouTube. Of a separate institution. Yeah, separate companies, right? I mean, there are difficult things to break up. Like, let's say you wanted to have a different, a separate search engine, right?

Right. Okay, there, do you clone it? Who gets the Google domain? Like, who gets the brand? You know, there are also questions, all right, like, let's say you open up the data vault and you say other entities can come in and use the data. Those are technical questions. And you could basically the way you would deal with that is you would have Google pay for a,

like a special master who would. would kind of like run, who would run a, like a technical committee that would make a lot of decisions. That's what Microsoft had to do after they lost. There was a technical committee that came in and basically was a regulator for Microsoft's couple hundred people, a hundred to 200 people who were just making sure that Microsoft's software was compatible with other entities' software. And they had certain legal authority over Microsoft. You do that for parts of Google. where you can't actually do a breakup. And there, you know, there you go. This is a remedy is not that hard, um, depending on what you want to do. But it almost feels like they kind of want us to

think it's harder than it is because that benefits them. It makes, oh, it's impossible to do this. We couldn't possibly. But I imagine that that's the argument in the remedies phase. Well, I mean, I think that, yes, they, they, in the, in the epic, we've seen the remedy argument in the epic, the apple. And what Google has been saying is, oh, all of this stuff is so hard. It's so expensive. How can we do this? And also, it's not fair. And the judge is basically like, come on, you're Google. You've been saying how awesome you are for a long time. You can do this. This is not that hard. And it's not going to take you 10 years and $8 gazillion. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and

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you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard. The yard. The yard. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection.

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Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-Ehart. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them

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Hey, I'm Jared Adano. You might know me as that loud guy who yells out, Help on the internet. Help! Somebody, please! But there's so much more to me than that. I'm an actor. I'm a comedian, and recently I've become quite the helper myself.

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Oh, cream of chicken suit. Hey, cream, cream a chicken suit. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from a Hypocrite as part of the Mike Coutura Podcast Network available on the I-Fart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself about love or relationships, can they? shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown and explore the journey of healing, self-discovery, and returning to yourself. We explore

higher consciousness, emotional well-being, and the practices that help you find clarity, peace, and self-mastery in a world that can feel overwhelming. The world is becoming lonelier. We're not becoming more social and connected. We're becoming more individualized, but we actually meet people in connection. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So do you see any other monopolies within the tech industry? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of market power in, in all over the economy.

And you see it in, you know, I mean, probably the most obvious monopoly is Veracines control of the dot com domain. Like, I know it's like a small. Yeah, it's just so obvious. If you want to register a domain name and you want a dot com or you own a dot com and you need to re-register, you know, you need to renew it, you're going to pay a, you know, You're going to pay registration company, and they're going to have to remit whatever they charge. I think they charge like $9.50. And it's like 70% operating margins because they manage the dot-com domain name because the government charters them, told them you can, you get to manage this. They have a contract government that lets them do it.

Just a very clear, 100% of the market for renewing.com domain names and just everybody that owns a dot-com domain. gives them $9.50 a year. They should give them probably 90 cents a year. Right. But are you suggesting there'd be other charters or charterers? Well, what they should do is either just put a price cap on it and say you get to charge two bucks and that's it, like a utility. Or say every three years, just bid it out and say, okay, whoever gives, you know, the best price gets to manage the, you know, the dot com domains. They've done that for other, you know, for other domains, and it tends to drop the price pretty dramatically.

So this is a personal one I'm going to ask. How do you feel about the Madden franchise with Electronic Arts? So the reason I ask this is because it sucks. It's something that I, you know, people have been telling me about for a long time. So monopolies is not, it's not like always obvious. The moral arguments aren't always obvious. Madden's a really good example where, and I don't know that much about this, but you used to have a lot of different NFL sort of football games. You had at least two. Yeah, and they were, and they were innovative. So,

you like, they had to innovate around, like, different features. I don't play video games. I don't believe in fun. I don't like, you know, I don't think there should be any joy. But I lost that. So, but as long as you're not going outside, that's my main concern. Not a problem. Okay, good. So, you know, these long-term monopoly arrangements are, I think there's something really problematic about it. But I don't exactly know what to do about it. But Madden has gotten, it's not that it's gotten worse. It just hasn't improved, right?

And there's also some of the other sports games. They're like extracting more and more money. But you see this with fanatics too. Yes, oh, God. They've made the experience in sports worse. So I think what we need to look at is these kind of long-term exclusive contracts. And there are some questions.

Like, should the NFL be able to leverage its brands to create, you know, obviously they have, obviously they have a right to profit from their brand, right? And obviously the players and they all have right to profit from their brand. Just as movie company, you know, they get a copyright. movies they make. But the question is, should you be allowed to take that brand that is a government-granted monopoly, which is fair because you are generating, you know, you're making the product, right? But should you be able to turn that into another monopoly?

Should you able to leverage that, you know, or should you have to say, okay, well, we will, I'm going to profit from it. anybody that uses the NFL in a game has to pay me, but I can't restrict who gets to use that in a game. Right. That was a little bit like, there have been antitrust cases on that. There was one in the 40s that restructured Hollywood. So there were a bunch of movie studios, and they owned or they controlled theater chains,

and they wouldn't let rival movies into the theaters. So it'd be like, if you want to get, you know, like. Gone with the Wind, which everyone wants to see, then you have to take our other movies and you have to keep rivals out of your theater. And it was just a way of controlling the comms. It was a way of turning their monopoly over, legitimate copyright monopoly over Gone with the Wind,

which they had made into a monopoly over distribution of movies in general. And this feels, the Madden thing feels a little bit like it's turning their brand into control over, over just like football-related video games. And that doesn't feel, it's had the consequences that we don't like higher prices, worse quality.

And you're right about Matt Madden, I think it's a great example of how, of a problem of this kind of long-term licensing agreement. Yeah. Because it's, it is, I would argue with people about whether it's good or bad. I think it's a certain kind of mediocre,

but you're right. It keeps things kind of trapped in amber. It only gets as good as the monopoly. decides. Yeah, that's right. And EA Sports will overpay, right? Like, they will pay more just to just to be the monopolist, right? They're not paying for the license. They're paying for the license and to exclude someone else from getting into the space. Kind of like Apple with Google. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's the thing is you don't want, so the original, the Sherman Antitrust Act bars monopolization and restraints of trade. So if you think about

the term restraints of trade, it is about saying someone shouldn't be able to restrain trade to, it's not a critique of big business. It's a critique of not allowing business to get big, right? And this is a case where they are preventing more business from being done by paying explicitly so others won't get that NFL licensing brand. It almost feels like monopolies are just distinctly un-American? Well, you know, they, you know, let me get this quote from Woodrow Wilson, because it's a really good quote. I know he's, you know, was virulently racist and everything, but, you know, take the good

with the bad. So America was created to break every kind of monopoly and to set men free upon a footing of equality, upon a footing of opportunity to match their brains and their energies. So he actually appointed Lewis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. And, you know, there is a, you know, Thomas Jefferson wanted to put an anti-monopoly plank in the Constitution. That was one of his critiques. You know, you see, like, historically, the anti-monopoly lens is kind of a critical way to understand American history. And you can see this, like over and over and over, there is this fear of monopoly power.

and it comes from the recognition that we do not want to be run by a king. So John Sherman, Sherman Antitrust Act said that, you know, if we wouldn't be, we'll not be ruled by a monarch, we should not be ruled by an autocrat of trade, right? Very explicit about the link between monarchy and authoritarianism and monopoly. and they were using the term monarchy because fascism hadn't happened yet. Right. So, but monarchy did exist, right? Then in the 19th century, Americans were looking across the ocean and they were seeing a bunch of kingdoms.

There was a little bit of democracy, but that's what they were really looking at. And they were like, we don't want that. And today we would just say fascism, right? But like you, you know, that, and we did analogize monopoly to fascism in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. But it has always been foundational in America. that concentrations of power are what we escaped, and they are not what we want here. And there's always been this tension because you do need to consolidate capital and effort to do great public works and to do great works in general.

Like you often do need to do that. But how do you control the power of that? How do you control the power of industry? If you're going to put a billion dollars together to build a railroad across the country, You know, that's awesome. Now you have a transcontinental railroad. But who runs that railroad and the prices they charge, the ability for them to charge different prices to different classes of people based on who they want to see succeed, now all of a sudden you're talking about a political problem. Well, of course, you don't want to say you can't have a railroad, but you do have to

deal with the political power that's concentrated. And it's true with telegraphs. It's true, the internet going, all of these. So this has always been a problem, a political problem that we've tried to address. And I think what happened in the 70s and 80s and this has happened for the last 40 years is we just kind of forgot about it. And then all this consolidation happened. And now we're trying to get a handle on it again. And is this what you were referring to? You mentioned previous, previous quote of yours, authoritarianism is coming from the private sector. Is this what you mean? That's right. It's, it's fascinating. fascinating as well, because I've been running business for 15 years and felt pretty well learned

about this stuff, but never really thought about these companies as political entities, which leads me to a cloud compute question. So do oligopolis basically have the same problem? Because right now in tech, you have basically three or four, maybe five companies that control all cloud compute. Is that something we should let stand? Do we need to see signs of price fixing? what are the bad signs? So really good question. Every market is its own special snowflake, right? You can't make, you know, some markets, right?

You can, you could structure a market to have a lot of different entrance, like farming, right? You could have a lot of people growing corn depending on how you split up the land. You can have a lot of banks, right? not totally clear to me that you could have a lot of, say, auto producers. Right. Not going to have a family, you know, artisanal auto producer that makes a lot of cars, right? So same with chemicals, same with lots of different. I mean, you can, like, there's just, there are some industries where you're going to have

a small number of producers, semiconductors. There's, you know, they're not going to have, like, so. Cloud computing, when I look at it, to me, it's just a capital story. Right. Who has the capital to build out the data centers to get the power that you need, to design the compute that you need. And it might be the case that you really can only have three or four of them, maybe have some specialty cloud computing.

I don't know. This isn't an area I've studied extensively. Sure. But typically when you do have an entity where entities where you have like a huge capital investment and you can't have, there are natural limits on the number of competitors, you have some form of public utility regulation, which usually takes the form of saying you can't engage in price discrimination. Like you can raise your prices, but you can't charge more to that entity for the same service than you charge to this other entity. And you can't, you know, and you can't say engage in like surveillance of your clients to gain, give yourself an

advantage. That would be, or, you know, there's certain, like, you can't pick winners and losers. You have to, you have to be a public utility. It's a little bit like, you know, it's a little bit like a railroad or a granary or something which is clothed with public interest, but is owned by a private entity. It gets a little tricky with things, you know, with companies that make open source tools on top of, you know, for cloud computing entities. Do those cloud computing entities just like absorb those tools, make their own version of it? Like there are, you know, I don't have an answer to all of the questions about how to run a

cloud computing infrastructure. But generally, what you want to do is you want to say, all right, we're going to try to pull the power out of, we want the economies of scale, but we're going to try to pull the ability to be arbitrary and coercive out of the business model through antitrust law or regulations or whatever we can do or just transparency of pricing. I know there's egress pricing. I mean, that's, you know, being able, allowing people to get out of the cloud computing, pull their data out if they want. So there are different techniques, but the basic idea is to recognize that there is a public interest in this private, in these, in this private infrastructure. And so the public has some right, not total right, but some right to control.

how these entities are operating. And that they must be free trade in the sense that someone can easily leave and go to a competitor. Right. Within reason. Within reason. Yeah, that's right. Another question.

I think we can wrap up with this one. Is Meta a monopoly? Because Meta is the only provider of advertising on Meta's products. And they have, there is no way that someone realistically compete with Facebook. It is too big at this point. And same with Instagram, kind of. Is it a monopoly? I'm trying to understand these concepts in real time. Yeah, I mean, I think you, you know, there are different markets, right?

So I think an easier way to conceptualize this would be to look at Apple, Apple and Google. And you would say, well, Apple's not a monopoly. I mean, I can buy an Android phone, right? Right. I don't need to buy an iPhone, right? And that's true if you're looking at it from a perspective of somebody who's buying a phone. It's a duopoly. There's a lot of market power there, but it's not a monopoly. However, what if you've bought the phone? Now all of a sudden, you know, you can't, it's not easy to switch, right? So you're kind of locked in.

Is Apple a monopoly? Kind of, kind of. Okay, you can look at it from a different point of view, which is, what if you're an app developer, right? Now you have to get on the iPhone because some of your customers are there. And you can't not be on the iPhone. So getting into the app store for Apple, that's a monopoly question. And the same thing is true for getting.

So it's a little bit like you're, you know, sure, maybe you can, there's a lot of railroad options, but there's only one railroad that goes from one town to another. So there might be a bunch of different railroads. But for what you need, there's only one option. So it's access to the customer. Well, right. Just there's lots of different markets. There's lots of ways to understand, you know, what, what,

market power means. So if you take that back to Facebook, which is really like a conglomerate of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, do they have market power and what do they have market power over? I think you'd look at the ability to buy certain kinds of advertising, right? If you do you need, if you're running advertising campaigns, do you need to buy on Facebook? Or can you just avoid Facebook entirely? This is one of the questions. in the Google case. And this is the question in actually multiple Google cases. And it's been a question in a different case involving medical advertising,

which had involved a company called Icuvia. And the court found that, in fact, yes, if you are doing specifically pharmaceutical marketing, IQIA is there is market power involved in these very narrow places where you have to buy. It's kind of like that smaller railroad that one place you put at the, one, the only one that goes to the place that you need to go, jack up prices and control who gets to use it. So the question I think, the question I would ask is,

if you're an advertiser, do you have to buy on Facebook's products? If you are, you know, a company, do you have to communicate through Facebook's tools, right? I know WhatsApp is really embedded in a lot of different business arrangements at this point. So that's where, that's kind of how I would, I would look at it. And I think you could make a pretty good argument that Facebook has immense market power in social networking in general. You know, the definition, there's different ways to test for monopoly. You could just say, well, can they raise prices without really losing very much? Which they have been.

Which they have been. And I think it's pretty clear that they can. And if there were another option, right? You could, you probably would, they would, they would see a loss of customers bleeding going to somewhere else and they don't see that. Another way to understand it is after some of the scandals that they've had, do they lose customers because of it? Do they lose users because of it? And the answer is no, right? So there doesn't really seem to be an effect of the quality of the product. It doesn't seem to affect whether people use it or not. actually I might push back at that a little bit. And perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but Facebook's advertising product is decaying to the point that it's actually unreliable,

how much comes out of it. And also they approve, there's a big thing where they approve fake ads for other companies. So it's interesting as well, because it almost feels as if we need a full consumer awakening just to the concept of monopolies writ large so that people can start looking at these companies and acting and even just discussing them differently. Right. So to Facebook, the product quality is decaying. The advertising quality is decaying. Are they losing business because of it?

As in they being meta or they be, right. Because if they're not, then that's proof of monopoly power. Because what it's going is the quality is declining, but they're not getting, like if it were, if there were a competitive market and the quality of a product went down, down, people would say, I'm not going to buy that product anymore. The shirts fall apart. I'll go buy somewhere else. But because, but it's like if that's the only place where you can get the product, you can't, you have no choice. You have to keep buying from them. Right. Right. That makes sense. So Matt, yeah. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for

joining me today. Where can people find you? So I write a newsletter called the, the big newsletter.com, which is about monopoly power and finance. And I also, I'm the research director of a nonprofit called the American Economic Liberties Project. And then I rant on Twitter way too often. That's my, you know, that's my Madden. Posters Mindset, it's the greatest. You've all been listening to Better Offline.

Thank you for listening so much. And, of course, the regular places to find me and the show follow after this. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I-com.

You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-L-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, Zone Media.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcast. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the

challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my Gen X squad from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS. Unfiltered conversations from night sweats to futas to scheduling sex.

Wait, what sex? Is it just me? Or does every woman my? age. Want to look at Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes. They say we can't polish a turn, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Heart Can It Be with the Anna Maria Riva on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter

Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car. and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfridell from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge.

That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. Again, we are experts. Listen to Podmeads twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.