Unshocking Report: Trump Admin Is Historically Terrible At Reining In Destructive Monopolies

Failures

from the dysfunction-junction dept

You need only look at its treatment of the telecom industry to understand that the Trump administration doesn’t give a flying damn about U.S. monopolies (or the impact those monopolies have on consumers, prices, innovation, or the market). Despite being one of the least competitive (and least popular) industries in America, the administration has taken a hatchet to telecom consumer protections, often using bogus data and fraud to do it. Massive, competition and job-eroding mergers are rubber stamped before the administration even sees the data. Any pretense at meaningful oversight is theater.

A new report by the American Antitrust Institute suggests that despite the administration’s rhetoric around “big tech,” its apathy to monopolies is fairly uniform. Experts have noted for a decade than US antitrust enforcement has grown toothless and frail, and our definitions of monopoly power need updating in the Amazon era. Antitrust enforcement had already waned under the Obama administration, getting severely worse once Trump came to power:

“Despite its anti-corporate concentration rhetoric on the campaign trail, key metrics of cartel and merger enforcement have declined since the Trump administration took over. And in 2017 and 2018, the DOJ did not open one monopolization investigation, the longest span of inattention to dominant firms in the last 50 years.”

That’s not particularly surprising for those who watched the head of the Trump DOJ antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, not only ignore the input of his staff and approve T-Mobile’s competition eroding $26 billion merger with Sprint, but personally helped usher the deal through the process via his personal phone and email accounts.

The report notes that cartel investigations, fines, and the amount of fines levied are down overall as well, with the number of corporations fined by the Trump agencies in 2017 and 2018 falling by about 45% compared to the Obama administration. This sort of corruption isn’t new, and it’s certainly bipartisan. Trump’s just exponentially worse at disguising feckless obedience to profit and corporate power as a more elaborate ethos. For years, America routinely embraced mindless “deregulation” of broken markets like telecom under the belief that antitrust enforcement would come in and maintain some semblance of proper balance. That is, again unsurprisingly, proving to be total fantasy in practice:

“As markets have changed over time, deregulation garnered broad support through bipartisan efforts intended to remove regulatory barriers that were thought to impede competition more than their benefits could justify. This was based, however, on the assumption that lost government oversight would become unnecessary due to active antitrust enforcement. Conservative administrations have often deregulated without concern for whether antitrust enforcement or competition policy would effectively fill the gap.”

When the administration does act, it often acts for the wrong reasons, as seen with the short-lived “antitrust investigation” into the auto industry for adhering to pollution standards. Or the administration’s lawsuit to stop the AT&T Time Warner deal, which had less to do with protecting markets and consumers, and more to do with making Rupert Murdoch happy and getting revenge on CNN for critical coverage of his bumbling and corrupt administration.

Throughout all of this, somehow, many policy folks and tech reporters still somehow take Trump’s rhetoric about reining in “big tech” monopolies seriously. The DOJ’s announcement of “investigations” into everyone from Google to Apple are treated with deadpan seriousness by a press and policy ecosystem that doesn’t seem to learn from experience. Some Economists advise we perhaps should stop doing that, since there’s zero indication the administration takes Section 2 of the Sherman Act seriously, and there’s very little indication any of these investigations will result in substantive action:

More often than not, such investigations are being used more for leverage on other issues (see: Barr’s war on encryption, or more positive coverage and ranking). Because in reality, Trump cares about three things: attention, power, and personal enrichment. It’s not clear how much more idiotic theater we need to witness before policy experts and tech reporters understand that, and stop treating egomania, grift, and corruption as “very serious policy.”

Filed Under: antitrust, big tech, doj, monopolies, telcos