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3 days ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
Lots of important stuff happened last week. Administration officials claimed progress with China in ending the trade war, Trump previewed an executive order on drug pricing, there’s a mess of corruption at the Federal Reserve, and problems at Newark airport illustrated the terrifying costs of DOGE on the air traffic control system. All of that is after the paywall.
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1 week ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
Today’s piece is brief, but notable. This morning, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue, testified in the Google remedy antitrust case. And he made two observations about the consequences of the case, which led Google’s stock to crater 7.5%, or $150 billion in value. Here’s the Google stock chart.
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1 week ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
The following BIG piece is authored by an anonymous writer in the music industry. Last December, Universal Music, the biggest music label in the world, proposed buying Downtown Music for $775 million. It’s not a massive merger in absolute dollar terms, and Downtown Music doesn’t own copyrights directly, it’s a services company that focuses on technology and distribution, running a variety of subsidiaries (Fuga, CD Baby, Songtrust, Curve, and AdRev).
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1 week ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
Lots of important monopoly-related things happened last week. Now that Apple’s app store monopoly is broken, developers are cutting prices and building cool stuff. The tariff shock is about to hit in force, but the stock market has recovered all of its losses since April 2nd. Plus a lot more.
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2 weeks ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
Ok, two quick pieces of good news. The first is that a judge in Northern California, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, issued a very harsh rebuke to Apple over its control of the iPhone app store. The order is part of a long-standing antitrust case brought by Epic Games against Apple in 2020.
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2 weeks ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
News just broke that House Republican Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, who has always disliked antitrust law, is proposing to use the budget process to roll back a key law in this area. The specific provision at issue is Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair methods of competition.” On Wednesday, he’s holding a committee hearing to roll back this authority through a strange legislative maneuver.
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2 weeks ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
This week had lots of monopoly-related news, both good and bad. The most important story is that on Monday, in a D.C. district court, Judge Amit Mehta started hearings on how to restructure Google to thwart its unlawful monopoly. Two floors down, Judge James Boasberg continued the antitrust trial between the government and Meta. Never before have two trillion dollar plus companies been put on trial at the same time, in the same court house.
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2 weeks ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
This piece has a very simple point. While there are a lot of things we can only source from China right now, America can build. And we can get a lot, though not all, production up and running much faster than most of us assume. I am writing this piece because we’re going to hit some rocky shoals in the next few months, when the ships from China stop coming and the inventories of key materials draw down. It’s not clear how bad the damage will be.
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3 weeks ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
A few days ago, Federal Reserve economist economist Ricardo Marto published an important paper on what happened to the economy in the period after Covid struck. What he found, after crunching numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is that there was massive redistribution of wealth upward, from working people to big business. According to Marto, domestic non-financial corporate profits doubled, to $4 trillion a year.
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3 weeks ago | 
thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller
Today’s news of the week has a lot of good and bad stuff in it, as usual. This week’s round-up is a bit unusual, in that I’m going to start by offering some historical perspective on the relationship between fascism and monopoly power. But first, some house-keeping. I try to only send out a few emails a week to keep your inbox clean, but there’s a lot of great stuff that BIG is putting out you can access. I’ve been enjoying Big Tech on Trial, which is giving daily recaps of the Meta antitrust case.