thebignewsletter.com

5 days ago | thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller

Today’s monopoly round-up is a bit shorter than usual, as I’ve been on vacation for the past week. The biggest piece of news is that the Trump administration’s trade policy took a big hit. But in addition, there are updates on how the key judge overseeing Google’s antitrust loss sees the possibility of a break-up, the FTC waived through a a major chip software merger, and noncompete bans continue to advance in states. Ok, let’s start with Trump trade policy, which got rolled back in two ways.

1 week ago | thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller

This week’s focus is the Trump Federal Trade Commission abruptly ending a lawsuit against Pepsi (and de facto Walmart) for discriminating against smaller stores. After that I’ll have the round-up, which is full of monopoly-related news, including a major change to the Apple app store, a big Supreme Court ruling calling the Federal Reserve the fourth branch of government, and the GOP tax bill passing the house. A note, I’m going on vacation next week, so I won’t have much for next Sunday.

2 weeks ago | thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller

Late last month, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a stinging order against Apple as part of the longstanding antitrust battle between Epic Games and the phone giant. The case was started in 2020 when Epic Games changed its popular Fortnite game app on the iPhone to allow “players to bypass Apple’s payment system for in-game purchases, and use a proprietary Epic payment option instead.” Apple in turn kicked Fortnite out of the app store, citing the breach of its app store rules.

2 weeks ago | thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller

Lots of stuff in the monopoly round-up. The merger boom is back with Charter buying Cox, Apple again refused to comply with a court order, and there’s a new antitrust lawsuit against the dialysis duopoly. Plus a lot more. I’ll start with two events at the biggest health care company in America, UnitedHealth Group, a corporation so reviled that large numbers of Americans cheered when one of the firm’s executives was assassinated in December.

3 weeks ago | thebignewsletter.com | Matt Stoller

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on how Mark Zuckerberg is giving public interviews on Meta’s AI strategy, often dropping that chatbots could address the epidemic of loneliness by serving as friends or, more surprisingly, as therapists. I found his open discussion of chatbot therapists surprising, because therapists have ethical obligations. They aren’t supposed to encourage suicide or harmful behavior, spy on their patients to target them for ads, or violate privacy.