New Economic Patriots Take Aim at Big Tech, ⚖️ FTC v. Meta: Monopoly Edition
Welcome back to The Dispatch from The Tech Oversight Project, your weekly updates on all things tech accountability. Follow us on Twitter at @Tech_Oversight and @techoversight.bsky.social on Bluesky.
📺 HEARING WATCH: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee is holding a hearing entitled “Big Fixes for Big Tech.” We expect to see a bipartisan panel of economists, tech watchdogs, and private sector leaders making the case for aggressive antitrust enforcement that breaks Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon’s iron grip on the digital economy.
TUNE IN at 2:30 PM. Watch the hearing here.
🦅 NEW ECONOMIC PATRIOTS TAKE FLIGHT: A new crew of populist-minded House Democrats launched a new economic working group with a powerful credo: the way forward for the party is economic populism and taking on corporate monopolies. Reps. Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and a half dozen others say that to bring the party roaring back, Democrats need to channel a “fighting spirit” – and Big Tech is squarely in their sights.
🔥 Deluzio: “It’s not just putting the economy first; it’s being clear about why you’re being ripped off. We’re very clear who those villains are.” We are, too.
- Google has lost its online search antitrust case, and a ruling is coming soon in the ad tech case
- Amazon faces a monopoly lawsuit over its domination of online retail
- Apple is ensnarled in one over its anticompetitive actions in the smartphone market
- Meta’s monopoly trial starts in a matter of days. And the company has never stopped profiting from lies, online rage, child endangerment, and Chinese government censorship
- And consumers? They get worse service, higher prices, and fewer choices.
We look forward to seeing what these folks do!
“The anti-monopoly spirit is as old as America. It’s rooted in a simple idea that power has got to be checked — just like political power, economic power has got to be checked, too. That’s the spirit of economic patriotism I am fighting for in Congress.”
🤑 OPERATION: Personal Enrichment: As President Trump and co-President Elon Musk continue to make life easier for financial criminals and Big Tech fraudsters, a cadre of Senate leaders (spearheaded by Senate Banking Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren and Senate Finance Ranking Member Ron Wyden) sent a letter Friday to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. They demanded that the agencies explain how they’ll protect our financial system from the conflicts of interest posed by the president’s planned for-personal-profit stablecoin, “USD1.”
The GENIUS Act is a taxpayer-funded handout to Big Tech that will enrich Big Tech CEOs, like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, while destabilizing our economy and raising prices. The bill would establish a scheme to regulate stablecoin and would not prevent Trump from overruling federal agencies for his own personal gain – even if that meant taking the U.S. dollar down with it. The senators raised the alarm that stablecoins are not covered by federal deposit insurance, and in the event of a loss of value, taxpayers could end up bailing out crypto holders.
New York Mag: Trump Knows A Good Grift When He Sees One
“You may remember that Donald Trump launched a novelty cryptocurrency in January — followed by one for the First Lady — making over $100 million off trading fees. But just this month, Trump’s business interests also announced the launch of a third cryptocurrency, a murky crypto SPAC plan from Trump Media executives, and a crypto investment fund with a major exchange two days after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced the end of a formal probe into the company. With Trump’s crypto ventures speeding up, I spoke with Corey Frayer — a senior adviser to former SEC chair Gary Gensler — about crypto’s new attitude under a lax regulatory environment and the “unthinkable” conflicts of interest that could still be on their way."
The FTC’s monopoly case against Meta goes to trial in a matter of weeks, with major implications that could break up the Big Tech giant – with Instagram and WhatsApp potentially being spun out. If past is prologue, we should expect explosive testimony outlining how Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s conduct BROKE THE LAW.
The story is already pretty clear: Facebook’s “buy, bury, or copy” strategy gobbled up competitors or squashed them while they were still small, clearing the way for it to co-opt their mobile features to shore up its own dominance – and to hone its surveillance-based advertising model and raise its revenue by billions. Mark Zuckerberg even called it his “land grab” strategy.
Don’t be fooled by their rhetoric. Even with the emergence of TikTok, Meta still monopolizes multiple social media markets. If you care about antitrust, data privacy, protecting kids online, then you care about the outcome of this trial.
Watch this space. More to come.