Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we describe the UK’s efforts to block the United Arab Emirates from pushing into the country’s media market, and ask whether this offers a model for how the U.S. can handle foreign investment of U.S. media assets.

UK’s Rebuff of UAE-Funded News Takeover Marks Big Change in Media Policy

Austin Ahlman

In recent weeks, policymakers in the United Kingdom have moved aggressively to thwart an attempt by investment firm Redbird IMI, an American investment venture with deep ties to the government and royal family of the United Arab Emirates, to acquire influential conservative newspaper The Telegraph. The House of Lords voted overwhelmingly to back a sweeping ban on all investments by state-aligned investors in British newspapers, and the provision appears likely to become law.

If enacted, the move would be a stinging rebuke of Redbird IMI, which has laid out ambitious plans to rapidly expand its media holdings in democratic nations around the world. It could also mark a turning point in the hands-off approach these nations have generally taken to investments and acquisitions by entities affiliated with the UAE government and other authoritarian regional powers with abysmal press and speech records like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These regimes are increasingly looking to western tech and media companies to diversify and insulate their oil-dependent economies and expand their global influence.

The potential deal has also faced scrutiny from Ofcom, the UK’s chief media and communications regulator, and the Competition and Markets Authority, which also appears poised to block the deal should legislative action stall.

The push to halt Redbird IMI’s bid for The Telegraph is also a sea change from the relaxed approach western governments have taken to foreign ownership regulations for tech and media companies. The European Parliament recently bolstered investment disclosure requirements with the European Media Freedom Act. And Poland’s Law and Justice party passed a controversial measure in 2021 aimed at limiting all foreign investment, regardless of investors ties to other governments. The UK’s effort to contain firms like Redbird IMI is unique in its targeting of state-aligned investors.

Redbird IMI was formed in December 2022 as a joint venture between U.S. asset management firm Redbird Capital Partners and nominally private UAE investment firm International Media Investments, or IMI. In reality, IMI is controlled by the Emirati regime via Vice President and royal family member Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and other government officials like Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and current COP28 president.

The partnership, helmed by former CNN executive Jeff Zucker, has already spent billions of dollars to acquire or invest in a broad smattering of American and European media companies. That list includes the recent acquisition of the British multinational video giant All3Media, the purchase of a minority stake in Euronews, and deals with news powerhouses CNN and Sky News to help expand their operations in Arab nations. The deal with CNN is particularly eye-catching, given Zucker’s controversial exit from the network following the disclosure of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate less than a year prior to the establishment of Redbird IMI.

Redbird IMI’s aggressive investments are not the only recent sign that Gulf monarchies are moving to take full advantage of the generally lax approach within liberal democracies to state-aligned investments. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly courted UAE investment for his multitrillion-dollar plans to shape the global AI economy. And last month, the New York Times reported that Saudi Arabia is in talks with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to form a staggering $40 billion investment fund for global artificial intelligence ventures. Andreessen Horowitz is the same firm that facilitated the Saudi backing of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter in particular has sparked renewed scrutiny of the leverage these regimes may attempt to wield once they get their teeth into democratic nations’ corporations. Ofcom warned as much in a recent report on the acquisition of The Telegraph where they indicated that the deal would create incentives for the UAE to “intervene editorially in a way which could negatively affect the accurate presentation of news and free expression of opinion.”

U.S. policymakers have an opportunity follow the UK’s lead in pushing back on that trend. In recent years, the United States has generally moved in the opposite direction by weakening already-flimsy foreign investment rules, which have primarily applied only to broadcast media and largely failed to distinguish state-aligned and independent investors, several times in the last decade.

Going forward, however, the Federal Communications Commission could use its existing authorities to reestablish oversight of foreign investments in areas authorized by Congress. And the current debate over data security and foreign influence presents an opportunity for lawmakers to empower regulators to go further. While a recent effort to sever TikTok’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party is a move in this direction, it is much less ambitious than the UK’s approach. If the world’s democracies are serious about containing the influence of authoritarian regimes, we can send an unequivocal message that our public spheres are not for sale.

Open Markets and Partners Publish Manifesto on How Europe Should Tackle Monopoly Power

The Open Markets Institute, joined by civil society partner organizations in Europe, published a manifesto, entitled “Rebalancing Europe: A New Economic Agenda for Tackling Monopoly Power,” that sets out how the European Commission should more effectively address monopoly power and control in the EU. Open Markets and our partners will host a conference on April 15 in Brussels at which policymakers, advocates, and experts will discuss the manifesto’s recommendations. Speakers include German state secretary Sven Giegold; chairman of the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets Martijn Snoep; members of the European Parliament René Repasi and Axel Voss; and Antoine Babinet from the European Commission. Register for the conference here.

Max von Thun, Open Markets Europe director and coauthor of the manifesto, said, “We can trace numerous crises facing Europe back to extreme concentrations of economic power: the undermining of democracy, public debate and innovation by a handful of tech giants; the threat to security and resilience from highly concentrated industries and supply chains; and the central role of monopolistic corporations in pushing up prices, driving down wages and working conditions, and undermining the fight against climate change.” 

Policy priorities in the manifesto include updating the EU’s approach to competition policy with a more flexible paradigm that incorporates a greater variety of non-economic objectives; introducing a cross-Commission mandate to tackle concentration of economic power; granting the Commission new powers to investigate monopolistic control across entire industries and not just specific companies, and; deploying more bright-line rules and structural remedies in competition investigations.

The manifesto’s core signatories include SOMO, Balanced Economy Project, Foxglove, Lobby Control, Rebalance Now, The Good Lobby, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. 

Open Markets Cosponsors Premiere of Food Inc. 2, Sequel to Groundbreaking 2009 DocumentarY

This week Open Markets Institute cosponsored the Washington, D.C., premiere of the documentary film Food, Inc. 2, which explores how monopoly power by a handful of large food corporations has harmed farmers, workers, animals, and consumers. The event was attended by Senators Jon Tester, Cory Booker, John Hickenlooper, and Raphael Warnock as well as authors Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, financier Mark Cuban, actor Morgan Freeman, and restaurateur and food activist Kendall Musk. Other sponsors include Participant Media and Magnolia Pictures.

Food, Inc. 2 drew from reporting by Claire Kelloway, who directs Open Markets Institute’s food and agriculture program. “Addressing their monopoly power is a critical piece of the puzzle to improve public health, empower workers, and lessen our food system's environmental impact," Kelloway said. Over the years, OMI has worked closely with Food Inc.’s filmmakers, as well as Pollan and Schlosser, on a campaign to raise awareness of the many dangers posed by monopolization of America’s food systems. The documentary comes 15 years after the original Food, Inc, which was nominated for an Oscar and which ignited a cultural conversation about the multinational corporations that control our food system at enormous cost to our planet, workforce, and health.  

📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:

• Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, and representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Porter, along with other members of Congress, cited two Open Market Institute papers on the Robinson-Patman Act in a letter urging the FTC to revive enforcement of the lapsed 100-year-old law designed to protect small business owners from large retailers. The two papers, “Controlling Buyer and Seller Power: Reviving Enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act,” by OMI senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley, and “The Robinson-Patman Act as a Fair Competition Measure,” by OMI’s legal director Sandeep Vaheesan, chief economist Brian Callaci, and Hanley, were published late last year. “By enforcing the RPA, the FTC can prevent dominant market players from further eroding the economic and social benefits that independent stores provide to their communities,” the letter reads.
   

• Caroline Fredrickson, Open Markets’ strategic councilor on democracy and power, published an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that the greatest risk to a second Trump presidency lies in the potential for rife corruption and graft at the highest levels. “What we should fear most is Mr. Trump transforming our government into a modern-day Tammany Hall, installing a kleptocratic leadership that will be difficult if not impossible to dislodge,” Fredrickson writes. 
   

• Open Markets’ industrial policy fellow Garphil Julien wrote an article for Washington Monthly contrasting President Biden’s approach to trade policy with former President Trump’s. Julien concluded that Biden’s approach is both far more strategic and effective. President Biden “views trade policy as part of a much larger suite of tools that governments should use to structure markets so they serve a broad range of public proposes, ranging from national security needs to the rights of labor and environmental protection,” Julien writes.
   

• Open Markets’ senior reporter Karina Montoya published a review in the Washington Monthly of Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli’s The Everything War, which delves into Amazon’s origins and the e-commerce giant’s destructive legacy of stealing ideas, predatory pricing, and squelching competition. “Born as a scrappy online shop, Amazon created the perception that it was a David facing the Goliaths of its time,” Montoya writes. “But Bezos, trained on Wall Street, had foreseen that its business model could exploit the laissez-faire environment that had left corporate America to its own devices since the 1980s.”
   

• OMI’s Caroline Fredrickson published an article in the Washington Monthly comparing the legislative achievements of Presidents Biden and Trump. “Overall, Trump was able to fill 234 judgeships on the federal bench; Biden, less than a year from the end of his term, will need close to 60 to match that number,” writes Fredrickson. Her compilation of case lawyers who formally appear in cases on behalf of Trump or who apparently have worked independently on behalf of his false assertion that he won the 2020 election was also cited in Vanity Fair. 
   

• OMI senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley published a co-authored article, “Toward a Merger Enforcement Policy That Enforces the Law: The Original Meaning and Purpose of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.”
   

• OMI’s executive director Barry Lynn and Europe director Max von Thun were both quoted in an article in the The American Prospect on Europe’s weak antitrust enforcement. Lynn was quoted as saying, “Part of neoliberalism was silo-fication, rather than competition policy being the coding that underlies everything in the political economy. Von Thun said, “Big Tech companies drive what compliance looks like, rather than saying to tech companies this is what we expect from you.”
   

•  Center for Journalism & Liberty director Dr. Courtney Radsch spoke on a panel last week before approximately 30 staff members from the Senate and House of Representatives on Big Tech's dominance over the building blocks of AI and the many harms of this control. She presented a number of solutions that would help address the growing problem, including existing legislation such as the American Innovation and Choice Act (AICOA) and Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act.
   

• Barry Lynn delivered a keynote at the conference How to Fix Everything, hosted by the Patriotic Millionaires. “Today we have an enormous opportunity,” he said, “To build an entirely new political economy, that supports the true liberty of every individual, and builds our democracy.”
   

• Open Markets Institute’s legal director Sandeep Vaheesan led a breakout session on competition policy at Democracy Journal’s conference this week on “middle-out” economics, “Redefining the Center: How to Make Middle-Out Economics the New Mainstream.” Conference participants focused on the three pillars of middle-out economics: public investment, worker empowerment, and competition policy.
   

• Daniel Hanley was quoted in both Politico and Bloomberg Law commenting on the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple. “By seeking to end Apple’s coercive practices, the government aims to ensure that consumers have access to non-Apple alternatives and to spur Apple to compete through fair and honest means,” he told Politico. In reference to the coming hearing in a U.S. District Court in New Jersey, which falls within the purview of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Hanley told Bloomberg Law, “Historically, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has been a decent venue, especially when it comes to monopolization cases and monopolistic conduct.”
   

• NewsPub refers to CJL director Dr. Courtney Radsch’s testimony before the Canadian parliament in an article on the Journal Preservation Act introduced in Illinois. The article cites Dr. Radsch as saying Google and Meta blocked access to news on their platforms during the legislative processes in Australia and Canada, claiming technical issues that were later found to be negotiation tactics. 

  🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING: 

• Ramped-up enforcement by the Department of Justice of prohibitions against directors serving on the boards of two competing companies at the same time led to the resignation of two executives from the board of Warner Bros. Discovery who also served on the board for Charter Communications. Under President Biden, the DOJ has introduced more aggressive enforcement of Clayton Act prohibitions on interlocking boards. (New York Times)
   

• The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opened an intensive Phase 2 probe of the proposed merger of Vodafone and Hutchison’s mobile network operations in the country. The move follows a refusal by the corporations to offer substantive responses to concerns the body raised about the impact of reducing the number of major competitors in the market from four to three. (CNBC)
   

• The Department of Justice won a bid to revive its investigation of price-fixing by the National Association of Realtors in a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. The investigation had been closed in the previous administration, and its revival follows the high-profile settlement of private lawsuits against the organization last month. (Politico)
   

• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced sweeping plans to adopt mandatory disclosure requirements for mergers and acquisitions and expanded authority for blocking problematic accumulations of market power. (Reuters)

  📈 VITAL STAT:

10%

The portion of Microsoft’s global annual turnover the software giant risks paying in EU antitrust fines if found guilty of antitrust breaches, a penalty driving the corporation’s move to unbundle its Office software suite from its Teams workplace application globally after European antitrust authorities ordered the services to be separated within the continent last year. Microsoft has already racked up 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in EU antitrust fines in the past decade for bundling two or more products together. (CNBC)

📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:

Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry: Corporate agriculture and antitrust expert Austin Frerick profiles several food tycoons to pull back the curtain on the way consolidation, corporate greed, and the whims of a handful of powerful and well-connected families like the Kochs have distorted and corrupted America’s food markets. Along the way, Frerick highlights the policy decisions that enabled those stories and outlines a path to a better future for our agricultural economy.

🔎 TIPS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS?

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