Political scientists will tell you that policies that billionaires hate will not *ever* be enacted by politicians, no matter how popular they are among the public:

cambridge.org/core/journals/pe…

And yet, all around the world - the US (under Trump I, Biden and Trump II), Canada, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even China - governments have done more on antitrust over the past couple years than over the past four *decades*. Where is this coming from?

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Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens - Volume 12 Issue 3

^{Cambridge Core}

My working theory boiled down to "enough is enough" - AKA Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." As in: people are just *so pissed off* with corporate power that politicians are *finally* acting to curb it.

But I was never very satisfied with this. There's *lots* of stuff that the public is furious about, which politicians aren't acting on, from climate change to taxing billionaires. Why antitrust and not all *that* stuff?

pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the…

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I've been mulling this over, and I got to thinking about a low-key disagreement I used to have with comrades in the digital human rights world, just before all the antitrust stuff really kicked off:

memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04…

Back then, people on the same side as the barricades as me were deeply suspicious of antitrust.

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They thought that the bubbling policy revival for antitrust was a way for phone and cable companies to enlist the government to go after their adversaries in the tech world, against whom they were (badly) losing the Net Neutrality fight:

techdirt.com/2019/06/04/if-big…

Back then, my thesis was, *Sure, maybe Big Telco is pushing for antitrust to target Big Tech, but once antitrust arises from its long slumber, it will turn on telcos - and every other concentrated industry.*

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If 'Big Tech' Is a Huge Antitrust Problem, Why Are We Ignoring Telecom?

Over the last week or so, Google, Amazon, and Apple have all taken a significant beating on Wall Street amidst rumblings of looming antitrust investigations by the DOJ and FTC. Google, we’re …

^Techdirt

Tldr: I'm pretty sure that's what's happening.

You see, one part of the antitrust battle boils down to a fight between rentiers and capitalists. The largest tech (and other) companies are primarily rentiers - entities that make money by *owning* things, rather than *doing* things. They make *rents*, at the expense of other companies' *profits*:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/clo…

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Companies like Epic (makers of Fortnite) want to sell your kids skins and mods for their in-game avatars without giving Apple and Google 30% of every dollar that brings in, and they've got a *lot* of money to make that desire real:

cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore…

This is millionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's gigantic corporations going to war against galactic-scale corporations.

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These pro-antitrust companies are the inheritors of the telcos' mantle, powerful belligerents in a Extremely Large Tech war on Big Tech. There are a *lot* of these large companies and they're sick of being subjected to a 30% economy-wide App Tax on all the payments they receive in-app:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its…

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Let me be clear: I'm *not* saying that the only reason we're getting muscular, global anti-monopoly action is that slightly smaller corporations (who universally aspire to acquiring monopolies of their own) are fighting for their own self-interest.

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What I'm saying is that the *coalition* of everyday people who've had their lives ruined by monopolists *and* corporations that are stuck paying the app tax (and the 51% tax that Google/Meta take out of every ad-tech dollar, the 45-51% Amazon takes out of every e-commerce dollar, and the sums that Tiktok, Twitter and Meta extort from business customers to "boost" in order to reach their own followers) is, in combination, sufficient to awaken the antitrust giant.

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Members of the public are critical to this fight - we're the ones who tip the scales from one side to the other. That's why rentiers go to such great lengths to convince policymakers that they have the public on their side, whether that's Amazon trotting out "small businesses" that depend on (and get viciously fucked by) Amazon's ecommerce platform:

thehill.com/opinion/finance/47…

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Or leaders of groups like the NAACP who've been bribed to front for the phone companies and cable operators in the fight against Net Neutrality:

techdirt.com/2017/12/19/naacp-…

All other things being equal, policymakers will simply side the deepest-pocketed, most unified corporate lobby in any fight (which is how the media companies won the Napster Wars).

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NAACP Fought Net Neutrality Until Last Week, Now Suddenly Supports The Idea

For years now we’ve pointed out how one of the telecom industry’s sleazier lobbying tricks involves paying minority groups to parrot awful tech policy positions. That’s why you…

^Techdirt

But when the public *and* one side of the corporate world is one side of an issue, policymakers understand that siding with them will get them votes *and* money, which is *much* better than just getting money (which is how we won the SOPA/PIPA fight):

eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/ever…

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“Everyone Made Themselves the Hero.” Remembering Aaron Swartz

On January 18, 2012, the Internet went dark. Hundreds of websites went black in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

We can *really* see this in the EU, where the new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are going after Big Tech with both barrels, with the enthusiastic support of the EU's tech industry. That's because the EU's tech industry barely registers when placed alongside of US Big Tech, which has sucked up nearly 100% of the market oxygen by cheating (on privacy, taxes, wages, etc).

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Despite the farcical efforts of US tech shills like Nick Clegg (former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned Meta shill, who insisted that Facebook was "defending European cyberspace from Chinese communism"), everyone knew that US tech companies were extracting (billions of euros and the personal information of 500m Europeans) from the bloc and siphoning it off to America, after first cleansing it of any tax obligations by laundering it through Ireland and the Netherlands.

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If Europe still had thriving tech "national champions" - Olivetti, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, etc - these companies might plausibly mount an opposition to muscular tech regulation in the EU. But these companies were crippled by predatory capital and then mostly absorbed into US Big Tech (or ground into dust).

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Back when I was having a friendly blog-argument with my comrades about whether tech antitrust was a Big Telco plot, I averred that it didn't really matter, because Big Tech really *was* terrible, *and* because once we'd roused antitrust enforcement from its 40-year slumber, we could wrest control of it from the telecoms monopolists who'd helped us dig it up and reanimate it.

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