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There are a few important take-aways. First, this one didn’t come from the government, it was a private case by a video game maker that sued Google over its terms for getting access to the Google Play app store for Android, decided not by a fancy judge with an Ivy League degree but by a jury of ordinary people in San Francisco. In other words, private litigation, the ‘ambulance-chasing’ lawyers, are vital parts of our justice system.

Second, juries matter, even if they are riskier for everyone involved. It’s kind of like a mini poll, and the culture is ahead of the cautious legal profession. This quick decision is a sharp contrast with the 6-month delay to an opinion in the search case that Judge Mehta sought in the D.C. trial.

Third, tying claims, which is a specific antitrust violation, are good law. Tying means forcing someone to buy an unrelated product in order to access the actual product they want to buy. The specific legal claim here was about how Google forced firms relying on its Google Play app store to also use its Google Play billing service, which charges an inflated price of 30% of the price of an app. Tying is pervasive throughout the economy, so you can expect more suits along these lines.

And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm. I hear a lot from skeptics that the fix is in, that the powerful will always win, that justice in our system is a mirage. But that just isn’t true. A jury of our peers just made that clear.

That may not be true in the future: If market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained. “The impact on innovation can be the most important competitive effect” in an antitrust case

Yet Google’s monopoly means some features and prices that competitors offered never made it in front of customers. Yelp Inc., which in 2004 began aggregating detailed information and user reviews of local services, such as restaurants and stores, claims Google altered its search results to hurt Yelp and help its own competing service. While Yelp survived, it has retreated from Europe, and several similar local search services have faded.

In a 2005 paper, Mr. Scherer found that Standard Oil was indeed a prolific generator of patents in its early years, but that slowed once it achieved dominance.

Standard Oil and AT&T used trusts, regulations and patents to keep out or co-opt competitors. They were respected but unloved.

By contrast, Google and Facebook give away their main product, while Amazon undercuts traditional retailers so aggressively it may be holding down inflation. None enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly; all invest prodigiously in new products.

All are among the public’s most loved brands, according to polls by Morning Consult.

Yet there are also important parallels. The monopolies of old and of today were built on proprietary technology and physical networks that drove down costs while locking in customers, erecting formidable barriers to entry.

. If they’re imposing a cost, it may not be what customers pay but the products they never see.

When the federal government sued to break up Standard Oil, the Supreme Court acknowledged business acumen was important to the company’s early success, but concluded that was eventually supplanted by a single-minded determination to drive others out of the market.

Amazon hasn’t yet reached the same market share as Google or Facebook but its position is arguably even more impregnable because it enjoys both physical and technological barriers to entry. Its roughly 75 fulfillment centers and state-of-the art logistics (including robots) put it closer, in time and space, to customers than any other online retailer.

“Just like people joined Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook, the biggest competitive advantage AT&T had was that it was interconnected,”

Early in the 20th century, AT&T began buying up local competitors and refusing to connect independent exchanges to its long-distance lines, arousing antitrust complaints. By the 1920s, it was allowed to become a monopoly in exchange for universal service in the communities it served. By 1939, the company carried more than 90% of calls.

After AT&T was broken up into separate local and long-distance companies in 1982, telecommunication innovation blossomed, spreading to digital switching, fiber optics, cellphones—and the internet.

“There should be hundreds of Yelps. There’s not. No one is pitching investors to build a service that relies on discovery through Facebook or Google to grow, because venture capitalists think it’s a poor bet.”

At that same hearing Jeffrey Katz, then the chief executive of Nextag, responded, “That is like saying move to Panama if you don’t like the tax rate in America. It’s a fake choice because no one has Google’s scope or capabilities and consumers won’t, don’t, and in fact can’t jump.”

In 2013 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded that even if Google had hurt competitors, it was to serve consumers better, and declined to bring a case. Since then, comparison sites such as Nextag have largely faded.

The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.

Internet platforms have high fixed and minimal operating costs, which favors consolidation into a few deep-pocketed competitors. And the more customers a platform has, the more useful it is to each individual customer—the “network effect.”

But a platform that confers monopoly in one market can be leveraged to dominate another. Facebook’s existing user base enabled it to become the world’s largest photo-sharing site through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the largest instant-messaging provider through its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. It is also muscling into virtual reality through its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014 and anonymous polling with its purchase of TBH last year.

Once a company like Google or Facebook has critical mass, “the venture capital looks elsewhere,” says Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm. “There’s no point taking on someone with a three or four years head start.”

when Google launched its own comparison business, Google Shopping, those sites found themselves dropping deeper into Google’s search results. They accused Google of changing its algorithm to favor its own results. The company responded that its algorithm was designed to give customers the results they want.

As the dominant platform for third-party online sales, Amazon also has access to data it can use to decide what products to sell itself. In 2016 Capitol Forum, a news service that investigates anticompetitive behavior, reported that when a shopper views an Amazon private-label clothing brand, the accompanying list of items labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” is also dominated by Amazon’s private-label brands. This, it says, restricts competing sellers’ access to a prime marketing space

In the face of such accusations, the probability of regulatory action—for now—looks low, largely because U.S. regulators have a relatively high bar to clear: Do consumers suffer?

“We think consumer welfare is the right standard,” Bruce Hoffman, the FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, recently told a panel on antitrust law and innovation. “We have tried other standards. They were dismal failures.”

What would remedies look like? Since Big Tech owes its network effects to data, one often-proposed fix is to give users ownership of their own data: the “social graph” of connections on Facebook, or their search history on Google and Amazon. They could then take it to a competitor.

A more drastic remedy would be to block acquisitions of companies that might one day be a competing platform. British regulators let Facebook buy Instagram in part because Instagram didn’t sell ads, which they argued made them different businesses. In fact, Facebook used Instagram to engage users longer and thus sell more ads

Ben Thompson, wrote in his technology newsletter Stratechery. Building a network is “extremely difficult, but, once built, nearly impregnable. The only possible antidote is another network that draws away the one scarce resource: attention.” Thus, maintaining competition on the internet requires keeping “social networks in separate competitive companies.”

How sound are these premises? Google’s and Facebook’s access to that data and network effects might seem like an impregnable barrier, but the same appeared to be true of America Online’s membership, Yahoo ’s search engine and Apple’s iTunes store, note two economists, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, in a recent paper. All saw their dominance recede in the face of disruptive competition.

It’s possible Microsoft might have become the dominant company in search and mobile without the scrutiny the federal antitrust case brought. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have often needed the government’s help to dislodge a monopolist—and may one day need it again.

As the architect of RealPage once explained, “[i]f you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system.” The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations. The suits have passed important legal hurdles and are going to trial.

Private antitrust lawyers filed multiple lawsuits, which were consolidated in Tennessee by 2023. Their argument “is that RealPage has been working with at least 21 large landlords and institutional investors, encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units nationwide, to systematically push up rents.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued RealPage and corporate landlords, alleging that rent increases of 30% in just two years are a result of the conspiracy. Seven out of ten multifamily apartment units in Phoenix are run by landlords who use the software. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalbe sued as well, noting that “in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria Metropolitan Area, over 90% of units in large buildings are priced using RealPage’s software.”

The FBI conducted a dawn raid of corporate landlord Cortland, a giant that rents out 85,000 units across thirteen states. Today, the Antitrust Division and eight states sued RealPage, alleging not just a price-fixing conspiracy to raise rents, but also monopolization in the market for commercial real estate management software

The gist of the complaint is that large landlords and RealPage work together to (1) share sensitive information and (2) raise rents and hold units off the market. This activity hits at least 4.8 million housing units under the direct control of landlords using RealPage software, and according to the corporation itself, its products cause rents to increase by between 2-7% more than they otherwise would, year over year. "Our tool,” said RealPage, “ensures that [landlords] are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.”

“It’s one thing to say that antitrust enforcement has gotten far too weak,” said Daniel Crane, a University of Michigan scholar who doesn’t agree with Ms. Khan but credits her with opening up a much-needed debate. “It’s a bridge much further to say we should go back to the populist goal of leveling playing fields and checking ‘bigness.’ ”

Her father was a management consultant; her mother an executive in information services. Ms. Khan went to Williams College, where she wrote a thesis on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was the editor of the student paper but worked hard at everything.

Her Yale Law Journal paper argued that monopoly regulators who focus on consumer prices are thinking too short-term. In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition.

“The whole country has been struggling to understand why the economy is not operating in the right way,” Mr. Cicilline said. “Wages have remained stagnant. Workers have less and less power. All we’re trying to do is create a level playing field, and that’s harder when you have megacompanies that make it virtually impossible for small competitors.” He added, “We’re at the very beginning of solutions to this.”

The battle for intellectual supremacy takes place less these days in learned journals and more on social media, where tongues are sharp and branding is all. This is not Ms. Khan’s strong suit. She is always polite, even on Twitter. One consequence is that she didn’t give much thought about what to call the movement to reboot antitrust. Neither did anyone else

Mr. Chopra, with Ms. Khan’s assistance, pushed the argument further on Sept. 6 with a 14-page official comment that suggested the F.T.C. bring back a tool buried in its toolbox: the ability to make rules.Contemporary antitrust regulation, the commissioner wrote, is conducted in the courts, which makes it numbingly slow and dependent on high-paid expert witnesses. He called for the agency to use its authority to issue rules that would “advance clarity and certainty” about what is, and what is not, an unfair method of competition.

From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.

The suit reflects the pushback against the power of the nation’s largest corporations, and especially technology giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have been highly critical of the concentration of power in a handful of tech behemoths.

set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits

A victory for the government could remake one of America’s most recognizable companies and the internet economy that it has helped define since it was founded by two Stanford University graduate students in 1998.

The company says it has strong competition in the search market, with more people finding information on sites like Amazon. It says its services have been a boon for small businesses.

The lawsuit comes two weeks after Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee released a sprawling report on the tech giants that accused Google of controlling a monopoly over online search and the ads that come up when users enter a query.

It controls 90 percent of the market for online searches, according to one estimate.

Google last faced serious scrutiny from an American antitrust regulator nearly a decade ago, when the Federal Trade Commission investigated whether it had abused its power over the search market. The agency’s staff recommended bringing charges against the company, according to a memo reported on by The Wall Street Journal. But the agency’s five commissioners voted in 2013 not to bring a case.

European Union has brought three antitrust cases against Google in recent years, focused on its search engine, advertising business and Android mobile operating system. Regulators in Britain and Australia are examining the digital advertising market, in inquiries that could ultimately implicate the company.

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations

In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.

Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products

Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.

When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.

Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved

The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.

Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.

As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum

In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)

I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur

It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen

a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination

It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.

It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”

Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.

We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.

The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.

The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.

What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.

No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.

Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control

Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.

In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.

I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.

We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.

Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.

First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.

How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.

Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.

others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.

The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.

But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit

The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time

The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.

Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media

We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.

These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation

I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak

Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”

Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.

The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.

This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.

For much of the history of antitrust policy, which dates to the late 19th century, courts remained suspicious of market consolidation and used antitrust to maintain competition. In a landmark case in 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil, which controlled nearly 90 percent of the U.S. oil market, had used predatory pricing, control of oil pipelines and leverage with railroad shippers to unfairly obstruct competitors. It ordered the company be broken up.

And when rivals did emerge, Amazon often bought them. Third-party retailers lacking an alternative sell their wares on Amazon’s marketplace only to say they found their most successful products copied and sold by Amazon itself. Meanwhile, the company routinely changes and obfuscates prices, making it harder for consumers to obtain the supposed benefits of online shopping.

As the internet matured in the early 2000s, there was hope it would spur a new generation of businesses by lowering the cost of reaching national or even global markets. Instead, a handful of enormous companies dominate key technology markets. To this day, and notwithstanding a surge since the pandemic, rates of entrepreneurship languish below the rate set in 2006.

The most successful of the new tech giants found ways to leverage online markets to their advantage. Take Amazon. By offering below-cost prices its rivals couldn’t match, it established itself as the gateway for digital commerce, and over time it has been able to erect further barriers to entry only possible in the internet age, like its rich data on consumer behavior and its huge repository of consumer reviews.

That began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s, when legal scholars, influenced by free-market economists, argued that markets can police themselves, and the focus of antitrust should be on maintaining the quantity and prices of goods rather than on the levels of competition or number of businesses. If a large corporation wanted to undercut a smaller rival on price, that isn’t predatory, but a benefit to consumers.

Now, Amazon controls something like 40 percent of online retail in the United States. Google controls 90 percent of the global search market. Meta owns three of the four largest social media platforms. And already Amazon, Meta and Google, along with Microsoft, are positioned to control the future of artificial intelligence.

In 2017, Lina Khan, then a student, identified the problem in an influential law review article that argued that Big Tech was amassing market power in ways that failed to register in the current legal regime. Appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission four years later, she immediately set about pushing for a return to the more expansive antitrust jurisprudence of earlier eras.

You would think that venture capitalists — who purport to be in the business of displacing incumbents — might support the F.T.C. Instead, many have attacked.

Ms. Khan is “not a rational human being,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who sits on the board of Microsoft, has argued that Ms. Khan is trying to “dismantle companies” and called on a future President Harris to replace her.

I believe the attacks on Ms. Khan and the F.T.C. are an effort to protect the few very large technology companies that dominate markets

Venture capitalists must find ways to cash out on their investments, and in a world where four out of five of those cashouts involve selling startups to bigger firms, Big Tech is now venture capital’s biggest customer. The game might be rigged, but it’s the only game in town.

As markets concentrate, newly entrenched monopolies start exercising their power to foreclose challenges. They lock up talent, hoard patents and engage in predatory pricing. Entrepreneurs face more and more hurdles. Consumers and the economy suffer.

A robust federal antitrust program may be the only force that can liberate technology markets from the hold of Big Tech and restore venture capitalists to their true calling: advancing the cycle of innovation that powers American capitalism.

Theoretically, a company such as Amazon could also be a target

“For some online marketplaces like Amazon, where consumers go online and pay Amazon but a seller is actually a third party, this seems to be [saying] those are direct purchases,” she added. Any case would hinge on whether Amazon actually acted anti-competitively, she said.

Until 2001, deals worth more than $15 million had to be reported to the antitrust authorities. That year, the threshold was raised and indexed to economic growth, and is now $90 million.

For transactions involving few tangible assets such as in technology and pharmaceutical startups, the threshold is $360 million.

after the 2001 changes, the number of merger notifications dropped 70% and the number of mergers that didn’t require notification jumped nearly 50%

Before the change, around a third of merger investigations involved deals worth less than $50 million. After the change, the number of such deals investigated fell to close to zero.

between 1997 and 2017 more than 4,000 acquisitions of kidney dialysis centers were proposed. About half were above the reporting threshold, and in 265 cases, the FTC required divestitures to resolve competition concerns

Among the half below the threshold, the FTC required just three divestitures. Two companies controlled about 31% of facilities in 1997. By 2016, two companies, DaVita Inc. and Fresenius Medical Care , controlled 77% of facilities

his preliminary results suggest the numbers of nurses per technician decline and patients per hemodialysis machine rise at facilities acquired in mergers below the reporting threshold. That, he said, could be evidence of reduced quality of care, though he acknowledged it could also reflect increased efficiency.

22% of markets for physicians are highly concentrated (according to federal guidelines), and they got that way mostly via acquisitions too small to be reported.

pharmaceutical companies often halt development of competing drugs at startups they acquire, especially when the acquisition is just small enough to escape antitrust reporting requirements.

Just look at the word "Google," the lawsuit said — it's become "a verb that means to search the internet." What company can compete with that?

"It's been a relationship of extremes,"

a tectonic shift is happening right now: USA v. Google is the biggest manifestation of what has become known as the "Techlash" — a newfound skepticism of Silicon Valley's giants and growing appetite to rein them in through regulation.

"It's the end of hands-off of the tech sector," said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department. "It's probably the beginning of a decade of a series of lawsuits against companies like Google who dominate in the digital marketplace."

For years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Silicon Valley's tech stars have thrived with little regulatory scrutin

There is similar skepticism in Washington of Facebook, Amazon and Apple — the companies that, with Google, have become known as Big Tech, an echo of the corporate villains of earlier eras such as Big Oil and Big Tobacco.

All four tech giants have been under investigation by regulators, state attorneys general and Congress — a sharp shift from just a few years ago when many politicians cozied up to the cool kids of Silicon Valley.

Tech companies spend millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers, and many high-level government officials have left politics to work in tech,

It will likely be years before this fight is resolved.

She said Washington's laissez-faire attitude toward tech is at least partly responsible for the sector's expansion into nearly every aspect of our lives.

"These companies were allowed to grow large, in part because they had political champions on both sides of the aisle that really supported what they were doing and viewed a lot of what they were doing uncritically. And then ... these companies became so big and so powerful and so good at what they set out to do, it became something of a runaway train," she said.

The Google lawsuit is the most concrete action in the U.S. to date challenging the power of Big Tech. While the government stopped short of explicitly calling for a breakup, U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General Ryan Shores said that "nothing's off the table."

"This case signals that the antitrust winter is over,"

other branches of government are also considering ways to bring these companies to heel. House Democrats released a sweeping report this month calling for new rules to strip Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google of the power that has made each of them dominant in their fields. Their recommendations ranged from forced "structural separations" to reforming American antitrust law. Republicans, meanwhile, have channeled much of their ire into allegations that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are biased against conservatives — a claim for which there is no conclusive evidence.

Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration are using those bias claims to push for an overhaul of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, a longstanding legal shield that protects online platforms from being sued over what people post on them and says they can't be punished for reasonable moderation of those posts.

The CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter are set to appear next week before the Senate Commerce Committee at a hearing about Section 230.

On the same day the Justice Department sued Google, two House Democrats, Anna Eshoo, whose California district includes large parts of Silicon Valley, and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, introduced their own bill taking aim at Section 230. It would hold tech companies liable if their algorithms amplify or recommend "harmful, radicalizing content that leads to offline violence."

That means whichever party wins control of the White House and Congress in November, Big Tech should not expect the temperature in Washington to warm up.

Editor's note: Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are among NPR's financial supporters.

creative destruction has been oversold: Microsoft may be an empire in decline, but it’s still enormously profitable thanks to the monopoly position it established decades ago.

there’s good reason to believe that monopoly is itself a barrier to innovation. Ms. Crawford argues persuasively that the unchecked power of telecom giants has removed incentives for progress: why upgrade your network or provide better services when your customers have nowhere to go?

The association accuses Amazon of abusing its “market dominant” position and argues that because many people use Amazon as a modern card catalog to explore what books are available, if an author is not listed, a reader would assume that the writer has not published any books.

as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies

The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network

Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent

Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything

Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic.

almost all of the profits go to the platforms’ owners, who have all of the bargaining power

The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants

The law gives 20 years of patent protection to inventions that are “new and useful,” as decided by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the winners are big enough to game the system. They make small improvements warranting new patents, effectively making their intellectual property semipermanent.

They also lay claim to whole terrains of potential innovation including ideas barely on drawing boards and flood the system with so many applications that lone inventors have to wait years.

Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.

Economic and political power can’t be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are maintained and enforced, which enlarges their economic power further. One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent this.

We are now in a new gilded age similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. As then, those with great power and resources are making the “free market” function on their behalf. Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture and financial giants — dominates both our economy and our politics.

The real question is how government organizes the market, and who has the most influence over its decisions

Yet as long as we remain obsessed by the debate over the relative merits of the “free market” and “government,” we have little hope of seeing what’s occurring and taking the action that’s needed to make our economy work for the many, not the few.

Last month, President Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, notified the World Trade Organization that the American government no longer supported a proposal it once spearheaded that would have exported the American laissez-faire approach to tech. Had that proposal been adopted, it would have spared tech companies the headache of having to deal with many different domestic laws about how data must be handled, including rules mandating that it be stored or analyzed locally. It also would have largely shielded tech companies from regulations aimed at protecting citizens’ privacy and curbing monopolistic behavior.

The move to drop support for that digital trade agenda has been pilloried as disaster for American companies and a boon to China, which has a host of complicated restrictions on transferring data outside of China. “We have warned for years that either the United States would write the rules for digital trade or China would,” Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, lamented in a press statement. “Now, the Biden administration has decided to give China the pen.”

While some of this agenda is reasonable and good for the world — too much regulation stifles innovation — adopting this agenda wholesale would risk cementing the advantages that big American tech companies already enjoy and permanently distorting the market in their favor.

who used to answer the phone and interact with lobbyists at the U.S. trade representative’s office. The paper includes redacted emails between Trump-era trade negotiators and lobbyists for Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, exchanging suggestions for the proposed text for the policy on digital trade in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “While they were previously ‘allergic to Washington,’ as one trade negotiator described, over the course of a decade, technology companies hired lobbyists and joined trade associations with the goal of proactively influencing international trade policy,” Ms. Li wrote in the Socio-Economic Review.

That paper explains how U.S. trade officials came to champion a digital trade policy agenda that was nearly identical to what Google, Apple and Meta wanted: No restrictions on the flow of data across borders. No forced disclosure of source codes or algorithms in the normal course of business. No laws that would curb monopolies or encourage more competition — a position that is often cloaked in clauses prohibiting discrimination against American companies. (Since so many of the monopolistic big tech players are American, rules targeting such behavior disproportionately fall on American companies, and can be portrayed as unfair barriers to trade.)

This approach essentially takes the power to regulate data out of the hands of governments and gives it to technology companies, according to research by Henry Gao, a Singapore-based expert on international trade.

The truth is that Ms. Tai is taking the pen away from Meta, Google and Amazon, which helped shape the previous policy, according to a research paper published this year by Wendy Li,

Many smaller tech companies complain that big players engage in monopolistic behavior that should be regulated. For instance, Google has been accused of privileging its own products in search results, while Apple has been accused of charging some developers exorbitant fees to be listed in its App Store. A group of smaller tech companies called the Coalition for App Fairness thanked Ms. Tai for dropping support for the so-called tech-friendly agenda at the World Trade Organization.

Still, Ms. Tai’s reversal stunned American allies and foreign business leaders and upended negotiations over digital trade rules in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, one of Mr. Biden’s signature initiatives in Asia.

The about-face was certainly abrupt: Japan, Singapore and Australia — which supported the previous U.S. position — were left on their own. It’s unfortunate that U.S. allies and even some American officials were taken by surprise. But changing stances was the right call.

The previous American position at the World Trade Organization was a minority position. Only 34 percent of countries in the world have open data transfer policies like the United States, according to a 2021 World Bank working paper, while 57 percent have adopted policies like the European Union’s, which allow data to flow freely but leave room for laws that protect privacy and personal data.

Nine percent of countries have restrictive data transfer policies, including Russia and China.

The United States now has an opportunity to hammer out a sensible global consensus that gives tech companies what they need — clarity, more universal rules, and relative freedom to move data across borders — without shielding them from the kinds of regulations that might be required to protect society and competition in the future.

If the Biden administration can shepherd a digital agreement that strikes the right balance, there’s a chance that it will also restore faith in free trade by showing that trade agreements don’t have to be written by the powerful at the expense of the weak.

it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.

Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.

By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely works out

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the voters

Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking to me personally.

The administration’s achievements on antitrust were barely mentioned.

Then, once Ms. Harris’s campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.

clucking liberal pundits would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.

Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage.

It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.

It was a revolutionary power that wanted to end capitalism everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union but all over Asia and Africa, North America, South America. They were gaining a lot of support in the decolonizing societies of Africa and Asia. America was not confident in the ability of its economy to have a permanent recovery from the Great Depression.

When I teach young people today, it’s hard for them to grasp the magnitude and the seriousness of the Cold War and how it shaped every aspect of American life. And the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States.

What coheres to the New Deal is that the Republicans eventually submit to it. And that happens when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower beats Senator Robert A. Taft. So tell me a bit about the counterfactual there that you think almost happened. What led to Taft losing prominence in the Republican Party, and what might have happened if he hadn’t?

he was slow to get on the bandwagon in terms of the threat of China, the threat of Communist expansion, and that opened up an opportunity for another candidate, by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to enter the presidential race in 1952 and to present a very different vision.

He was a Republican in a classical sense — small central government, devolved power to the states, suspicious of foreign entanglements — believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs. And he was opposed to the New Deal.

He thought it was a form of tyranny. It was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style. And he was poised in the 1940s to roll back the New Deal, and he was looking forward to the postwar period after the war emergency had passed. Of course, the war emergency would require a very strong state to mobilize armed forces, to mobilize the economy for the sake of fighting a world war.

They needed foreign markets. America wasn’t sure whether it would have them. And the capitalist class in America was scared to death by the Communist threat, and it had to be met everywhere, and America mobilizes for the Cold War to contain Communism everywhere where it appeared. And that required a standing army in quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before, and Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this.

my counterfactual is that, absent the Cold War, the New Deal, which we now regard as such a juggernaut, would be seen as a momentary blip like so many other progressive moments in American politics. And we would see it as a blip and not for what it became, which was a political order that dominated politics for 30 years.

So there’s been this conventional story of the New Deal era, which is that the fear of Communism, the fear of being painted as soft on Communism or soft on socialism, leads progressives to trim their sails, moderates the sort of left flank of New Dealism. You argue that that story misses what’s happening on the right.

the imperative of fighting the Communists caused Republicans to make even larger concessions than the Democrats did.” What were those concessions?

Well, the biggest concession was agreeing to an extraordinary system of progressive taxation.

The highest marginal tax rate in the 1940s during World War II reached 91 percent, a level that is inconceivable in America of the 21st century. Eisenhower wins the election in 1952. He has both houses of Congress. And quite extraordinarily, Eisenhower maintains the 91 percent taxation rate

I think what mattered to him was the Cold War. The Cold War had to be fought on two fronts: It had to be fought militarily — international containment of Communism — and that required enormous expenditures on national defense, which meant not simply a conventional army but the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower understood that in order to win the ideological struggle of the Cold War — which was not simply an American-Soviet struggle, but it was a global struggle to convince all the peoples of what was then called the Third World to come with the capitalist way, to come with the American way. In order for that to happen, America had to demonstrate that it could give its ordinary citizens a good life.

America had to prove that it had the better system, and that meant you could not return to unrestrained American capitalism — you had to regulate it in the public interest.

And the other aspect of that, which he appreciated, was that in the 1950s, it was not clear whether the Soviet Union or the United States could provide a better life for its average citizen. The Soviet Union was still doing quite well in the 1950s.

And that meant taking money from the rich and redistributing it, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor. It meant supporting powerful labor movement and not trying to roll back the Wagner Act, which the labor movement regarded as its Magna Carta, a very strong piece of federal legislation that gave it unambiguous rights to organize and obligated employers to bargain collectively with them.

He felt that this had to be the way that America went. Maintenance of Social Security — really all the key New Deal reforms — he ended up maintaining because he thought this would be a critically important instrument for convincing not just ordinary Americans but people around the world that this would prove the superiority of the American way.

That is why he acquiesced to the New Deal order.

It’s a pervasive recognition among America’s business class. You say, “The fear of Communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”

And you say it wasn’t just here; this was also true in many of the social democracies in Europe after World War II. Tell me a bit about that class compromise and the role the Cold War played in it.

It is often said that socialism was weaker in America than it was elsewhere. And in many respects, that has been true.

The corollary of that is that the American business class historically has been bigger, more powerful, more unencumbered than the business classes of other nations, especially in Western Europe among America’s industrial rivals. There was no shortage of labor protest in America, but rarely could labor achieve what it wanted to achieve because the resistance was extraordinary, the resistance was legal, it was extralegal.

The national security argument is crucial to getting large segments of the Republican Party on board. For them, the greatest threat, both internationally and domestically, was the Communist threat. And thus, they were willing to extend themselves beyond a point where they otherwise would have gone

I argue that it was the fear of the Soviet Union. And what did the fear of the Soviet Union represent? The expropriation of all corporate capital in the world. That was the Communist dream. And that was deeply felt. And it was felt not simply in a global setting. It was felt within the United States itself,

The history of industrial relations in America was very violent. The business class in America had a reputation of being very powerful and aggressive and unwilling to share its power with its antagonists. So what was it that got them to share that power?

it’s really remarkable to look at how closely the R. and D. state was designed and sold, in terms of its ability to keep America ahead for national defense. It has its roots in World War II, and it continues building much off that rhetoric.

so there’s this interesting way, I think we think of the New Deal in terms of Social Security. We think of it in terms of some of these individual programs. But it is this thoroughgoing expansion of the government into all kinds of areas of American life. And the thing that allows the Republican Party to get on board with a lot of that is this idea that if you don’t do that, well, the Soviets are going to do it

And the business class felt that it was in its interests to compromise with organized labor in a way that it had never done before. That was the grand compromise. It was symbolized in a treaty in Detroit between the three automobile makers, then among the biggest corporations in America, and the United Auto Workers — the Treaty of Detroit — purchasing labor peace by granting unions, good wages, good conditions, good pensions, good health care. Absent the threat of Communism, I think that grand compromise either would not have been arrived at or it would have been scuttled much sooner than it was.

they’re going to have the highways, or they’re going to have the technological or scientific superiority, they’re going to make it to the moon, etc., and then America is going to be left behind.

The vast education bills that are going to propel the tremendous growth of American universities in the 1960s and 1970s — which you mentioned about R. and D. — has a similar propulsion

the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of Republicans on board. And the critical argument for them was national security, and a critical event was Sputnik, when Soviet Union shocks the United States by putting into orbit a satellite before the United States had done it.

that is a shocking moment: Oh, my God, America is falling behind. We must bend every muscle to beating the Soviet Union in every way, and that requires tremendous investments because of satellite technology and R. and D., and also that becomes the foundation of what is going to become the I.T. industry and the I.T. revolution — also a product of the Cold War.

How does that order end?

There are three factors that pull this order apart. The first is race, the second is Vietnam, and the third is the major economic recession of the 1970s.

Every political order has tensions within it in the United States. And the great contradiction in the New Deal Party of Franklin Roosevelt was the treatment of African Americans. In order to have a new political economy of a big state managing private capital in the public interest, Roosevelt had to get the South on board, and the South meant the white South.

And the entire promise of Western Europe prosperity and American university had been premised on the flow of unending supplies of very cheap Middle Eastern oil — most of them controlled by U.S. and British oil companies. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations in the 1970s say: No, these are our resources. We will determine how much is drawn out of the ground and the prices that they will be charged.

That was then complicated by Vietnam, a vastly unpopular war — inaugurated and presided over by Democratic presidents who were perceived by their own constituents to not be telling the truth about this awful quagmire.

It also inaugurated trade-offs between funding a war and funding Johnson’s beloved Great Society. Inflation began to take off.

the third element was profound changes in the international political economy. One of the reasons why America was able to enter its grand compromise between capital and labor and pay labor very high wages was that America had no serious industrial competition in the world from the ’40s to the ’60s.

Most of the industrialized world had been destroyed. The U.S. is actively helping the recovery of Western European economies, Japan, promoting development in Southeast Asia, and in the 1970s, these economies begin to challenge American supremacy economically. The symbol of that is the rise of Japanese car manufacturers

Roosevelt assented to that. But this was also a time, especially in the 1940s, when African Americans were migrating in huge numbers to the North, and they were becoming a constituency in the Democratic Party. This was the first point of crisis, and the Democratic Party found itself unable to contain the racial conflicts that exploded in the 1960s.

The quadrupling of oil prices leads to a profound economic crisis, along with competition from European nations against the United States. And this plunges the United States into a very unexpected and profound — and long — economic crisis known as stagflation. Inflation and unemployment are going up at the same time

None of the textbooks say this should be happening. The tools are no longer working. And it’s in this moment of crisis, the Democratic Party — this is the third strike against it — opens up an opportunity for alternative politics, an alternative party, an alternative plan for American political economy.

that sort of leaves out something that is happening among Democrats at this time. There’s a movement inside of liberalism. There’s the New Deal Democratic order, but you develop this New Left, and there is a movement of liberals against big government — young liberals for reasons of self-expression, for reasons of civil rights, for reasons of this feeling that they’re being fed into a bureaucracy and giant soulless organizations and eventually into the meat grinder of Vietnam

older liberals who are angry about the sort of reckless growth and the poisoning of streams and the building of highways through their communities and the sort of ticky-tacky rise of these suburbs. And this predates Reagan

Yes, the New Left erupts on university campuses in the 1960s, and the two primary issues in the beginning are race and Vietnam. But they also quite quickly develop a critique of the established order.

What was called at the time the system

what was the system? The system was large American corporations who were no longer under control. And one reason they were no longer under control is they were being aided and abetted by a large federal state that was supposed to manage them in the public interest

the system was meant to identify not just the corporations who were doing ill in America, but it was meant to identify a federal state that was birthed in the optimism of the New Deal and had been corrupted. So you have this fissure within the Democratic Party itself.

The other element of this is this profound search for personal freedom and autonomy that was intensely felt by members of the New Left.

The computers were these enormous machines, mainframes, and they were seen as stultifying to human creativity. The personal computer movement was born on — as part of the New Left. Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand imagined a personal computer that would be free of the IBM mainframe, free of big corporations, big corporate power — that it would be the authentic voice of only every individual who would be using that machine.

It was a profound expression of a desire for personal autonomy, individuality, expressiveness — unconstrained by larger structures. This cry, or cri de coeur, came from the left. It was a very powerful part of the New Lef

ne can see how it might suit the purposes of a rising neoliberal order because the rising neoliberal order was also intent on deregulating, freeing individuals from the grip of large institutions and allowing them to go their own way.

Neoliberals believe that the best economic program is one that frees capitalism from its shackles, that allows people to truck, barter and exchange goods, that gets the government out of economic life. And the only role for government is to ensure that markets can function freely and robustly. So it runs opposite to the New Deal. If the core principle of the New Deal was: Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself. The core principle of neoliberalism: Remove the shackles from capitalism. That will bring us the most productive and freest world we can imagine.

I have a shorthand for describing the neoliberal world that was envisioned by neoliberal thinkers and brought by policymakers into existence. It’s what I sometimes call the four freedoms of neoliberalism: freedom of movement, people; freedom of goods to move across national boundaries; the free flow of information; and the free flow of capital across all boundaries.

In a perfect neoliberal world, people, goods, information and capital are moving freely without constraint. If we can imagine a perfect world that The Wall Street Journal wants, this would be pretty close to it.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that the New Left intentionally created neoliberalism. But it turned out that the cries of freedom, personal freedom, personal autonomy that were emanating from them turned out to be very conducive to the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.

Jimmy Carter is an heir to suspicion of excessive federal power. But I also think he’s grasping at this moment a point of transition in the American economy and a sense that government policy as set forth in the New Deal was not working as well as it should have been. I think it mattered that he was an engineer and he was doing a lot of cost-benefit analysis: What kind of yield are we getting for the bucks that we’re investing?

so he’s open to this fertile moment of dissent. He’s channeling new thinkers and imagining a different Democratic Party that you are correct in saying precedes Clinton by 20 years. And the key figure in this movement is a man by the name of Ralph Nader.

I think as I evaluate the Carter presidency, I see a man really caught in the throes of a moment of transition, able to glimpse what is coming but unable to master what is coming

what defines his presidency, for me, is uncertainty, vacillation and, thus, failure. He’s a classical transitional figure, more controlled by than in charge of the moment.

Nader is a man of the left, but he doesn’t fit in the old left or the New Left.

We might call him a man of the consumer left. For him, the key figure in American society was the consumer, and he wanted to champion the consumer. And his contributions — in terms of automobile safety, occupational safety, food safety — were immens

But he also executed a profound shift in ideology, and I’m not even sure how aware he was of the consequences of what he was generating. Because in the process of making the consumer sovereign, he deflected attention, I would say, from what was and what remains the core relationship in a capitalist economy, and that is in the realm of production and the relations between employers and employees

And he was reluctant, in some respects, to challenge corporate power if corporate power was serving the consumer in a good way. He anticipates, in some respects, a profound shift in antitrust policy, and the key figure in this is going to be Robert Bork in the 1980s and 1990s.

It had been an article of faith in American history that no corporation should be allowed to get too large, because they would inevitably exercise power in an undemocratic fashion. So antitrust meant breaking up big corporations. Under Robert Bork, the question changed. Big corporate power was OK as long as it served the consumer with cheap goods.

he and his supporters and his organizations deserve a lot of credit for holding the government accountable and making vast improvements in a whole host of areas — regulating the environment and other matters, regulating food — and compelling government to do the service that it does.

But it also distracts from understanding part of that which powers the rise of large corporations and gives them the ability to control government and capture regulatory agencies. And I think the results of his attacks on government have been ambivalent, in terms of their consequences: in some respects really accelerating the process of delivering goods to the American people and American consumers that they want but, on the other hand, contributing to an atmosphere of thinking the government can’t really do much that’s right.

As you move toward Reagan, certainly part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal is his anti-Communism.So how do you describe the role of the Soviet Union in this period of political time?

The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 is one of the most stunning events, I think, of the 20th century and arguably much longer.

What were its consequences? First, it opened up the whole globe to capitalist penetration, to a degree that had not been available to capitalism since prior to World War I. And this generates a tremendous amount of belief and excitement and expansion and a good deal of arrogance and hubris within the capitalist citadel, which is the United States. So that’s one major consequence.

The second major consequence is: What does it mean for Communism no longer to exist as a threat? And what we begin to see in the 1990s is capital in America regaining the power, assurance, authority, belief in its unilateral power that it had, across the years of the Cold War, if not sacrificed, then moderated.

hat the Soviet Union had promised, what Communism had promised, was that private enterprise could be superseded by rational planning on the part of an enlightened set of rulers who could manage the economy in a way that benefited the masses in extraordinary ways.

That whole project fails, and it fails in a spectacular fashion.

Ronald Reagan had insisted that there was a continuum between Soviet government tyranny and what he regarded as New Deal government tyranny. They were on the same spectrum. One inevitably led to another. He and other Republicans, George H.W. Bush, the party as a whole take this as a great vindication of their core beliefs: that capitalism, which, under the New Deal, was sharply constrained, should be freed from constraint; its animal spirits allowed to soar; venture capitalists encouraged to go everywhere; investments made easy; lower taxation; let capitalists and capital drive America and the world economy, unconstrained by regulation.

these were the core ideas of neoliberals, which have been incubating for decades. And now suddenly these ideas seem to be vindicated. This is the moment of free market triumph.

it intersects in a very powerful way with the ongoing I.T. revolution, which is also bound up with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Because the Soviet Union was very hostile to the personal computer because it required a degree, at that time, of personal freedom that the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow what the I.T. revolution represented in the 1990s. And this is one of the reasons that Democrats get on board with it. What it represented was a belief that market perfection was now within human grasp, that there may have been a need for strong government in the past, because knowledge about markets was imperfect, it was limited, it took time for information about markets to travel, a lot of it was wrong, not enough of it was available instantaneously.

Well, suddenly in the 1990s, you have this dream, this vision of all economic knowledge in the world being available at your fingertips instantaneously and with a degree of depth and a range of statistics and figures that had been unimaginable, and a techno-utopianism takes hold

it’s the intersection of these two vectors — a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates free market thinking and the I.T. revolution — that allows people to think market perfection is within our grasp in ways it never has been before, that pours fuel on the fire of neoliberal free market thinking.

You described Bill Clinton as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of neoliberalism. What do you mean by that, and what are some of the, for you, core examples?

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, no Democratic U.S. president had been elected since 1976. Sixteen years is an eternity in electoral politics in the United States. And the question becomes: Will he roll back the Reagan revolution of the 1980s — massive efforts at deregulation — or will he follow a path that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the early ’50s?

Clinton, in the beginning, is a little uncertain about what he is going to do. And he has some ambitious proposals in his first two years — most notably a vast program of national health insurance, which crashes spectacularly.

And then he gets punished for that venture severely in the 1994 congressional elections, which bring Newt Gingrich and a very right-wing group of Republicans to power — the first time that Republicans control both houses of Congress since 1952. It’s a huge achievement for the Republicans

Clinton reads that moment as signifying that the older Democratic Party of the New Deal, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, really had to be reworked and revamped.

the only way for him to win re-election, and the only way for the Democrats to hold on to national power and to regain it in Congress in 1996, is for him to acquiesce to some core Reaganite beliefs. And at the center of the Reaganite project was deregulation — which is a code word for getting the government out of economic affairs or curtailing government power.

Archived clip of President Bill Clinton: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.

so Clinton signs off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively deregulates the burgeoning I.T. sector of the economy, makes possible an unregulated internet. He signs off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

The Glass-Steagall Act had divided investment from commercial banking and had imposed a kind of regulation on Wall Street that brought an end to the crazy speculation that had brought about the Great Depression in the first place. It was a core principle of the New Deal

He does not seek to revive the Fairness Doctrine, in terms of regulating public media, which had guided successive Democratic administrations: the idea that if a news outlet put out one side of a debate on a policy matter, they were obligated to give the other side equal access.

He becomes an advocate of deregulation and, in some respects, pushes deregulation further than Reagan himself had been able to do. And in that sense, he acquiesces to some of the core principles of the Reagan revolution rather than seeking to roll them back, and it is in that respect that I think it’s appropriate to think of him as a Democratic Eisenhower.

what one remembers most about those battles is how much Clinton and Newt Gingrich hated each other’s guts. And they were seen as being polar opposites.

Clinton, the representative of a New Left America: cosmopolitan, open to the liberation movements, looking for new ways of creating a new and diverse America, embracing sexual liberations — his embrace of gay rights was somewhat limited but still significant. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, representing traditional Victorian America, wanting to reassert the patriarchal, heterosexual family, men at work, women in the home, religious.

one of the surprises, to me, in working on this book, because I remember those days very well, was the degree to which they worked together — on telecommunication, on reform of Wall Street, on welfare.

Clinton would claim, and his defenders would claim, that he was triangulating. He was trying to make the best of a bad deal, that popular opinion was running with free markets, was running with the Republicans. And to some extent, that was true.

the lesson that I draw from that moment is that one must refrain from always getting sucked into the daily battles over cultural issues.

“cosmopolitanism.” Something that was fresh, to me, in your book was this argument that in neoliberalism, you’re looking at more than just what we typically think of it as, which is an economic theory. You argue that there is a moral ethic that came alongside it, that is part of it. You talk about it as, at various times, cosmopolitan, individualistic. Tell me about it.

“Neoliberalism” is often defined, as you say, simply as being about markets and freeing them up

And “neoliberalism” is also defined as something that’s profoundly elitist in orientation, and it’s a device and an ideology used by elites to implant market ideology on a society in ways that deepens economic inequality and has the ability to strangle the democratic rights of the masses.

I also say that in America, it had a profound popular base. Reagan was an enormously successful president, and by “success,” I mean he was able to excite the imagination of majorities of American voters, and his core message was freedom.

half the time he meant freedom in terms of a free enterprise economy, but the other half of the time he meant freedom in terms of giving individuals the autonomy to go their own way.

he was not a fan of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But when Clinton becomes president in the 1990s, he has a profound connection to those liberation movements of the 1960s — to feminism, to sexual liberation, to civil rights.

he detects in a world in which everyone can travel to wherever they want to go. He valorizes immigrants. He valorizes diversity. These are all values that are profoundly compatible with the neoliberal vision. The opportunity to travel anywhere, to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.

This is a world that neoliberalism makes possible, and it’s a thrilling moment for many people who have the opportunity either to mix in the world of American cities, which have filled up with immigrants, or to travel abroad and experience other cultures.

A single global marketplace enables and encourages the kind of cosmopolitanism that people on the left-center side of the political spectrum in America have so deeply valued.

you locate the end of this era in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Why?

The promise of neoliberalism was that it would lift all boats. There was an acknowledgment about those who were freeing the energies of the market economy that it would probably increase inequality, the distance between the rich and the poor, but that the increase in inequality wouldn’t matter because the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody would have more and everybody would have a better life.

And what the 2008-9 financial crisis exposed was first a lot of the market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss — but not by a lot.

on the other hand, it brought into view a sense of how profoundly unequal the access to power was under the neoliberal regime. And here it’s not so much the financial crash itself but the nature of what governments did to promote recovery from the financial crash.

The object in the U.S. and also in Europe became to save the banks first. The culprits of this financial crisis were the ones who were bailed out first. If you were an American in 2009, 2010, 2011, who had assets in the stock market, you had pretty much recovered your position by 2011, 2012. If you were not one of those fortunate Americans and you were living week to week on a paycheck, your recovery did not occur.

You didn’t reach pre-2008 levels until 2016, 2017, 2018, and people understood, profoundly, the inequality of recovery, and it caused them to look with a much more scrutinizing gaze at the inequalities that neoliberalism had generated and how those inequalities have become so embedded in government policy toward the rich and the poor.

one of the identity crises in the Republican Party — one reason the Republican Party is not held together better — is that the Soviet Union was fundamental to what made its various factions stay in place. And it was also, I think, fundamental to what kept the Republican Party, which at its core has a real anti-government streak, committed in any way to real government.

hen I think there’s a sort of casting about for another enemy. I think they end up finding it after 9/11, or think they have, in what they try to turn into global jihadism, and then it falls apart — both as the antagonist and as a project and just feels to me like another part of the sort of wreckage of this period that opens a way for something new.

That new thing, I think, is more Donald Trump than it is anything else.

I think it discredits what had been a core project of the Republican Party, which was to spread market freedom everywhere. When I teach the Iraq war, I tell my 20-year-old students that this is the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, that it’s going to take the U.S. and the world 50 years to recover from. And it’s imbued with a neoliberal hubris that everyone in the world is simply waiting for the wonders of a market economy to unleash, to be unleashed upon them.

OK, if that era ended, what is being born?

there’s also new zones of agreement that have emerged. When I think about the way I covered politics in 2010, the legitimacy of elections could be taken for granted, and the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act could not.

I think it’s useful in this moment of acute polarization to look at some of what lies beneath the polarization.

you’re right: On a series of issues there are intriguing conversations going on between Democrats and Republicans. China and tariffs are one area of agreement.

Ironically, immigration is becoming another area of agreement, regardless of who wins the election. One can imagine that the bill agreed to in the Senate late in 2023 could easily be implemented in some form.

here is an area of convergence on antitrust. Josh Hawley and Lena Khan seem to like each other and are finding some common ground on that. And the national security hawks in the G.O.P., people like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, have converged with what we might call the industrial policy doves in the Democratic Party — people like Bernie Sanders — on the importance of reshoring critical sectors of manufacturing and on improving in dramatic ways the nation’s infrastructure.

we can see here a new political economy taking shape, one that breaks with the central principle of neoliberalism, which is that markets must lead and the only role for a state is to facilitate markets.

another element of that, which has been crucial to the ideological reorientation, is a new understanding of the relationship of free markets to democracy.

for the longest period of time, Americans and Europeans were willing to give China a blank check on their democracy, or on their violations of democracy, because of the belief that if market freedom and capitalist practices set down deep enough roots in China that people with economic freedom would want to add to that political freedom and that democracy would begin to flourish and that the Communist Party that rules China would either have to profoundly reform itself or see itself ushered from the political stage.

It’s hard to convince people now of how deeply rooted that belief was. No one in the Democratic or Republican Parties believes that anymore, and that has intensified the fear along with this “Oh, my God” sense that China is not simply producing ordinary goods. It’s producing very sophisticated goods. It’s cornering markets on electrical vehicles and batteries and solar panels that seemed unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago. And it has had the effect of profoundly shocking both parties.

that has completely transformed and the word “protectionism” is not being used because it’s such a negative term, but the sentiments that lie behind protectionism, which might be described more positively as fair trade, are profoundly with us and shape conversation about U.S. economic relations with China every day of the week.

So the change has been profound in both parties, and one of the surprises of the Biden administration, although in retrospect, it’s not so surprising, given the Biden administration’s commitment to industrial policy, is the continuity we see between Trump tariffs and Biden tariffs.

hey’ve also come, in many cases, to the view that we should have much more industrial policy: the sense that if you leave it to the market, China might, by using the government to foster and supercharge certain kinds of market pursuits in China, just lap us. I think it’s become the dominant view in both parties.

I would agree with that, although I think the Republican Party is probably more deeply split on this than the Democratic Party is. The Democratic Party arranged another kind of grand compromise between the left, represented by Bernie Sanders, and the center, represented by Joe Biden, which led to a profound commitment symbolized by Build Back Better, a $5 trillion project that was going to insert industrial policy into the heart of government economic relations in a way that marks the Biden administration as profoundly different from his Democratic predecessors, both Obama and Clinton.

I think the Republican Party does not have agreement on that to the same degree. And one of the interesting things to watch if Trump wins is how that internal fight in the Republican Party works itself out.

So the sort of ideological strain in the Republican Party that JD Vance is part of, this sort of more populist dimension of it: What they see markets and, particularly, free trade and trade with China and immigration as having violated is the strength of communities and families. They look around, and they see broken communities, hollowed-out communities.They see families where the male breadwinners have lost their jobs and lost their earning power, and so they’re not getting married, and there are divorces, and there are too many single-parent families

on the Democratic side, I think there’s some of the same views. There’s a lot of broken communities.

a huge part participant in this ideologically is climate change: the sense that markets would happily make people rich by cooking the planet. The market doesn’t know if the money is coming from, the profit is coming from, burning oil or laying down solar panels. And so once again, that some goal actually does need to be set. Markets can maybe serve our goals. They can serve our vision, but they can’t be assumed to get what we want right in the world.

And so the sense on both parties that you actually do need to define goals and define vision and that, ultimately, that is going to have to happen through government setting policy and making decisions — the primacy of that kind of dialogue now, the degree to which the first conversation is: What are we trying to achieve? That does feel different.

that speaks to the decisive nature of the election of 2016, which we will see the longer we get from it as a decisive inflection point, as really marking the end of the neoliberal order

It doesn’t mean that suddenly there are no more advocates of strong free markets. I think one of the questions now and one of the key questions for the Republican Party is: Can they get serious about this?

It requires them to have a serious program of political economy in a party that has lacked direction on political economy for quite some time.

You describe the sort of neoliberal era as bringing this much more cosmopolitan view of ethics, of morals and of America’s relationship with the world — a more sort of urbanist view. There’s a lot of connections between what it means to live in New York and to live in London and to live in Tokyo and to live in Hong Kong.

JD Vance is a good example of this — are much more skeptical of the individualistic moral structure that dominated here and that Republicans, for all the influence of the Christian right, largely left untouched.

it’s actually very complicated in both parties because Donald Trump is himself such a poor vehicle for a return of traditionalist virtue. But there is something happening here, a sort of questioning of not just government policy and industrial policy but: Did all this individualism work? Is a world where kids are on their smartphones all the time and families are having this much trouble — and did we get something more fundamental, almost spiritual, wrong?

he concern about the moral fiber of the American people is not new in the Republican Party. That goes back to Jerry Falwell, to some of the ministers who became popular in the 1990s and calling America back to moral virtue and identifying enemies of God.

The new element is a sense that one has to connect that concern for this kind of morality to a serious program of political economy, that it’s not enough simply to call on people to be virtuous.

t serious conservatives have to find a way to rebuild the economic foundation that lies at the root of so much immorality and so much despair in American life.

If that develops enough of a base in the Republican Party, then there becomes an opportunity to talk with Democrats about that, about family welfare, about the welfare of children, about creating institutions, both economic and social, that have the capacity to sustain communities in ways in which they have not been sustained.

There are some issues that run so deeply on questions of morality between Republicans and Democrats, it’s hard to see how they can find common ground. And probably the most important of these is on the question of abortion and reproductive rights. And to the extent to which JD Vance and his associates take their stand on this issue, the possibilities for developing a conversation about morality with liberals and Democrats are going to be very, very slim, indeed.

the things that I think would have once been framed in terms of Christianity are now framed in terms of classical virtue. There’s a sort of rediscovery of the Stoics, not the early Christians.

there’s something here where — obviously, efforts to remoralize America are not new — but this idea that we have gone wrong in modernity by becoming so individualistic seems to be gathering a fair amount of force.

My read of it is that the Christian right is just too weak and not sufficiently appealing to be the vehicle for it. And so these other aesthetic and ancient containers are being searched for, but there is some kind of pushback happening

I think you see a lot of interest among people in both parties around some of these tech regulations. But I think of that as sort of fundamentally moralistic.

he Christian right has become somewhat contaminated by its blind adherence to Trump and by its too great a willingness to plunge into politics with any messenger, no matter what moral qualities they’re exhibiting.

That there is a movement among conservatives to step back from that and to ground their morality in something deeper, more widespread, something that can appeal to a greater cross-section of Americans, regardless of whether they go to church or not