Welcome to our final installment of The Corner for 2023. Over the course of the year, our team continued to drive the reinvigoration of antimonopoly law around the world, as well as policies reining in Big Tech. See some of the ways we did so below.

CONFERENCES

Competition achievements

Critical Hearings

• Caroline Fredrickson, strategic councilor on democracy and power, wrote an article for The Atlantic, “What I Most Regret About My Decades of Legal Activism,” recounting her long career as a judicial advocate for social issues at the expense of economic ones like antimonopoly.

• Executive director Barry Lynn wrote a cover story for the Washington Monthly that called for the elimination of dangerous chokepoints in international supply chains, grounding his argument in the history of U.S. industrial policy starting with the American Revolution.
   

• Senior reporter Karina Montoya wrote a story for the Washington Monthly explaining how retailers are selling consumer data and earning juicy profit margins in the process with implications ultimately threatening the future of privacy and journalism.
   

• Chief economist Brian Callaci published a think piece in The Atlantic on how Bidenomics is reversing four decades of economic orthodoxy led by the Chicago school that helped unleash dangerous concentrations of power and control in America.
   

• Writing in Washington Monthly, policy director Phillip Longman called for reviving the dormant Robinson-Patman Act to address today’s wealth inequality and inflation.
   

• Reporter Austin Ahlman published an article in The Intercept on the FTC’s about-face on the acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, which the agency blocked when Lockheed Martin tried to buy it last year, in a decision that put the agency at odds with the Defense Department.
   

• Europe director Max von Thun coauthored an article in The Guardian warning that the UK, as well as regulators around the world, needed to more effectively legislate the emerging AI space, rather than let Big Tech firms take the lead.
   

• Senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley published an op-ed in the Democracy Journal on the unprecedented Supreme Court-led assault on administrative agencies, which is tantamount to a direct attack on responsive and democratic government.
   

• Center for Journalism & Liberty director Dr. Courtney Radsch published an article in The Guardian arguing that the recent drama at the AI developer OpenAI — where CEO Sam Altman was fired and then rehired over the course of a long weekend — distracts from the real issue at stake, which is Big Tech’s tight grip over the emerging AI space.
   

• Food systems program director Claire Kelloway coauthored an article for The American Prospect that dismissed the idea that antitrust law enforcers should approve a merger between Kroger and Albertson’s based on corporate promises to divest stores in a few markets, saying divestitures actually drive up prices.
   

• Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan published an op-ed in The New Republic urging federal agencies to address the control Amazon exerts over workers and businesses that ostensibly lay beyond its corporate boundaries.
   

• Audrey Stienon, who manages our industrial policy program, wrote a lead story for The Corner exploring how private equity titans have been quietly deploying classic rollup strategies that limit competition and raise prices across the care economy, including day care centers.

Pivotal Papers

COALITION WORK

• Open Markets worked with Food & Water Watch in January on comments to the US Department of Agriculture over new pro-competition rules the department proposed under the Packers and Stockyards Act. Open Markets also submitted an additional set of comments.
   

• In April, Open Markets led a coalition of 50 labor and public interest groups in April on a joint comment urging the Federal Trade Commission to ban non-compete clauses and training repayment agreement provisions (TRAPs).
   

• Open Markets worked with European civil society groups again in May when it led a joint submission to the European Commission on the role third parties must play in implementing and enforcing the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act.
   

• Open Markets and its affiliate Center for Journalism & Liberty in May joined media experts and civil society groups from around the globe in signing onto Principles for Fair Compensation in Journalism & Big Tech. Center for Journalism & Liberty director Dr. Courtney Radsch helped craft the principles at a conference at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg, South Africa.
   

• In August, in coalition with the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association, Open Markets sent a letter to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission urging greater enforcement efforts to combat Amazon’s book monopoly.
   

• Open Markets partnered with labor unions and a host of other civil society organizations on a comment to the Federal Trade Commission’s proposal to alter merger guidelines in September. The comment commended the draft guidelines’ positive changes, but it also presented the commission with several ways to strengthen and clarify the proposed guidelines.
   

• And in December, Open Markets continued its work on the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill by working with European working with Foxglove and Balanced Economy Project on a submission calling for targeted improvements to the revised bill that would prevent Big Tech corporations from circumventing its requirements.

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