Could a New Era of Trust-Busting Be Starting?

A surfeit of antitrust news has hit in recent days, as challenges to power players in the worlds of both digital and print threaten to upend the status quos and usher in a new age of trust busting that would make President Theodore Roosevelt smile. On Friday, as Glenn Greenwald reports, a federal court denied Google’s request to dismiss a suit that alleges the search giant is illicitly suppressing competitors of its YouTube service. The suit alleges that Google’s “chokehold on search is impenetrable.”Today, meantime, trial begins in a case that centers on the same statute but in a different realm. The Biden administration has sued to block Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of rival Simon & Schuster. In the suit against Google, the plaintiff is Rumble, which seeks to provide a “free speech alternative” to YouTube. It alleges that its “business model is premised upon helping the ‘little guy/gal’ video content creators monetize their videos.” It prides itself on being “immune to cancel culture” and claims “more than 100 million streams per month.”Its ability to grow, Rumble claims, “has been far less than it could and should have been as a direct result of Google’s unlawful anticompetitive, exclusionary and monopolistic behavior.” The company seeks more than $2 billion in damages from Google. Rumble, which has entered into a “wide-ranging technology and cloud services agreement” with the Trump Media & Technology Group, argues that Google employs two strategies to keep it down: manipulating algorithms to hide Rumble, and pre-installing its app on Android phones to block users from turning to Rumble. Rumble’s legal survival at this early juncture means that Rumble will have access to reams of Google documents via the discovery process. Its task will be to show that Google has run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. That legislation interdicts, “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States.” Bolstering Rumble’s case is a 2020 report from the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, which found that “Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook” have “expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways.”In the book publishing trial beginning today, the Biden administration has sued to block Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of rival Simon & Schuster. According to the Associated Press, the plan would see America’s largest publisher swallow its fourth largest for a little more than $2 billion. Government lawyers contend: “The proposed merger would further increase consolidation in this concentrated industry, make the biggest player even bigger, and likely increase coordination in an industry with a history of coordination among the major publishers.”Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster retort: “More readers are reading books than ever before, and the number grows every year” and say “the merger at issue in this case will encourage even more competition and growth in the U.S. publishing industry.”The novelist Stephen King is expected to be called as a government witness. In correspondence with the New York Times, the author avers that “the more the big publishers consolidate, the harder it is for indie publishers to survive.”This flurry of activity on the antitrust front is but a symptom of the Biden administration’s larger suspicion of big business. Also beginning on Monday is a trial in which the feds will endeavor to block UnitedHealth Group, an insurer, from buying Change Healthcare. The Department of Justice has warned the deal would allow “United to control and distort the course of innovation in this industry for the foreseeable future.”A 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy laments that “competition has weakened in too many markets, denying Americans the benefits of an open economy and widening racial, income, and wealth inequality.”

Could a New Era of Trust-Busting Be Starting?

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