Harper's - The Antitrust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech

In Harper’s October 2024 cover story, Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn takes a hard and honest look at the state of our movement and players and institutions still standing in the way of the preservation of liberal democracy -- some of whom might surprise you. 

“It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to “make and unmake” who they will. It is these corporations that—even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state—have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world.”

Lynn’s incisive new piece includes commentary on a number of top issues of the day, from Elon Musk’s role on social media and in the presidential election, to the future of U.S. antitrust enforcement in different election scenarios, to the two incredibly consequential trials between the U.S. government and Google that could transform the internet, to the need for a radical change in thinking among the Supreme Court’s liberal justices. 

“The single most dangerous effect of neoliberalism,” Lynn writes, “(was to) blind most of our leading economic and legal scholars to the power structures of the production and communications systems on which we all depend… liberalism is not an attitude but the art of structuring power.”

Over the last two decades, Lynn pioneered understanding of how the monopolies of the 21st century threaten our democracy, individual liberties, security, and prosperity. Lynn’s efforts to update antimonopoly law and thinking for the digital era have been fully embraced by the Biden Administration and have shaped the thinking of policymakers and thinkers around the world.  

His warnings on structural flaws in international systems predicted today’s supply chain crises, and his proposed remedies have been widely studied by the U.S. government, Europe, Asia, the IMF, and the OECD. Lynn developed his thinking in three books - End of the Line (2005), Cornered (2010), and Liberty from All Masters (2020), as well as numerous articles, speeches, and Congressional testimony.