Washington Monthly - As Election Day Approaches, Don’t Forget About the K Street Wolves

Open Markets’ editorial director Anita Jain wrote a review of the book The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, a nonfiction account of the excesses of the lobbying industry

It’s been almost three months since The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, a novelistic nonfiction account of the rapacious lobbying industry’s excesses, appeared with considerable fanfare. The title’s homage to Jordan Belfort’s financial memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Martin Scorsese film, plus the book’s two esteemed journalist authors being brothers, gave it extra panache. But even with our focus diverted by an octogenarian president abandoning his reelection bid to allow his Gen X heir to go toe-to-toe with a democracy-threatening former president and his gaffe-prone Millennial running mate, this remarkable book deserves our continuing attention.

For instance, after years of abusing its market power to squelch competition and spy on users, Google is finally facing two federal antitrust lawsuits, one for its search monopoly and the other for its dominance over the digital advertising market. To defenders of the Mountain View, California, behemoth, the suits are misguided. Still, to the federal prosecutors, state attorneys general, and private parties pursuing them, they are a noble, albeit late, attempt to contain a tech giant that spent the first two decades of the 21st century snapping up rivals, dominating new markets, and building an illegal monopoly over all corners of the Internet.

Yet, the feds had tried to halt Google well over a decade ago. The Federal Trade Commission considered suing Google for pushing its products over those of competitors as far back as 2011. However, after quietly wrapping up a two-year-long antitrust probe, Barack Obama’s FTC offered the corporation a toothless settlement. What happened to the lawsuit that would have certainly curtailed the power Big Tech enjoys today? Lobbyists did.

The Brothers Mullins show how Google’s luxe lobbyists outwitted the FTC through a secretive campaign dubbed Project Eagle, targeting the panel’s five commissioners—three Democrats and two Republicans. With 50 policy ninjas—former FTC officials, academics, and antitrust lawyers—the lobbyists cranked out white papers, media interviews, and ultimately 75 op-eds, including ones written by former FTC chairman James Miller and none other than the late Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court nominee and intellectual godfather of the anti-antitrust movement. (Both were Google consultants at the time.)

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