The FTC and DoJ have been hitting it out of the park recently, unfortunately, there are a lot of judges out there that think corps should be able to do anything they want.
Corporate America is certainly not a fan of FTC chair Lina Khan.
She's been subjected to a barrage of attacks from places like the Wall Street journal so she must be doing something right.
Jon Stewart revealed when interviewing her, that Apple executives had asked him not to have her on his podcast.
They’ve been swinging around a bat a while lot, I haven’t seen them hit the ball much less knock out of the park. At most they’re scaring the pitcher with erratic behaviour.
I wouldn't say they're hitting it out of the park; I'd say they've been doing what they were supposed to be doing but haven't in the last 20+ years. Having said that, it's nice to see they've finally woken up after all these years.
I want to see them go after the credit card companies. They can start by passing usury laws that cap interest at 10%.
It's beyond the scope of the agency, but we need comprehensive statutory privacy protection. There's a massive industry around acquiring and selling data that's far bigger than just the credit reporting agencies. It'd be mostly a waste of time trying to approach it piecemeal.
Yeah not allowing 2 crappy, low margin, and low combined market share grocers who have to compete with Walmart and Amazon to not merge was really knocking it out of the park. /s
9 constitutional amendments are only one sentence long, not even a paragraph!
It's all case law.
But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act. Most have limited intellectual interest in the problems it tackles.
And really, who cares about the price of concert tickets, online ads and in-app purchase fees? These guys went to law school not business school.
They. Just. Don't. Care.
Could the DoJ and FTC make them care as much about antitrust as like, at least 2 amendments? Yes.
I have no idea how the DoJ and FTC have failed to drum up excitement about this stuff. Nobody is going to rule against the status quo without passionate feelings about it.
That is by design, no? Sherman act does not address a lot of modern anti-trust, as you mentioned. We need new legislation.
Judges can just as easily find pet causes that don’t align with your interests, I don’t think that’s the mechanism you or I want our country to rely on.
All three of the main US federal antitrust laws (Sherman Act, Clayton Act, and FTC Act) have neen amended since originally adopted, and the FTC act also creates regulatory authority which the FTC has regularly exercised. Even ignoring case law evolution, US antitrust law hasn't been static.
The original Sherman Act has 7 sections (one additional was later added) one of which has two subsections, none of which have multiple paragraphs, for a total of 8 paragraphs.
More to the point, US antitrust law isn't just the Sherman Act and case law, because:
1. There are two other main antitrust-related statutes, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, and
2. The FTC Act as well as its direct mandates also creates regulatory authority for the FTC,
3. In addition to federal antitrust law in the US, there is also state antitrust law.
> But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act.
I'm not sure what the bases for your intuition about how much judges care about those things are; there is certainly a sense in which Constitutional provisions definitionally have priority over statute and administrative law, but its hardly as if antitrust law isn't an area that has gotten extremely detailed judicial attention.
I suggest you look at the supreme courts actual docket.[0] It's a misnomer to think that the Supreme Court only cares about the first and second amendments, that's just what's interesting to Americans. Nobody cares about some random government employee who was furloughed in 2013,[1] for example, but the court reviewed that anyway. Law school is not just about the first amendment. In fact business law is actually a pretty common field to go into.
Because they've had the entire term to take action and the only reason anything is happening now it to attempt to build some momentum going into the election itself. Soon as it's over, everything most likely goes away.
It takes time and work to put together cases like this. I look at it the other way: they've only had three years, and have already done some impressive things.
In this case, because I don't expect Biden to win another term and I expect the prosecution of this case to take longer than a year. The last several administrations have opened their term by tearing down everything that the prior administration had done. To be specific: I'm not confident the prosecutor behind this will have a job at the end of the year.
I genuinely think that if Biden does not win another term there are far larger problems for the American project than Ticketmaster, including democracy existing as we know it today.
Once there is backslash, just blame a junior staffer instead of making the head honcho resign for not controlling what goes into an important PR stream.
Yeah except for Roe v. Wade which you might consider a bellwether event for anti-contraceptive activists. But other than that yeah nothing much happened.
>including democracy existing as we know it today.
Weren't there similar predictions back in 2016? How is it different this time? Or to back up a bit, what exactly does "democracy existing as we know it today" mean? It could mean anything between "US becomes North Korea" and "the whitehouse revoked the press credentials of someone who said something mean about trump".
>It wasn't wrong in 2016 either, what's your point?
Of course "it wasn't wrong" if claims are vague like "democracy as we know it", which means they can be used in a motte-and-bailey manner to initially imply that the US is going to turn into China/North Korea or whatever, but then later be walked back on to whatever the predictions don't really pan out.
>That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.
Was the claim back then that they'll "try" (however poorly planned/executed), or that they'll actually succeed?
The general thought was that a simpleton business monkey who made a virtue out of ordering people around and not accepting "no" for an answer would continue to operate autocratically even as the leader of a democratic bureaucracy.
There was a lot of equivocating that it was all some campaign schtick, the media was misrepresenting him, etc. "4D chess" and all that.
It turned out that the straightforward analysis was the correct one. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.
This round he's playing for double or nothing - having broken a bunch of laws is slowly catching up with him. He continues playing the victim while indignantly expressing a desire for overt revenge. We've already seen the mechanisms by which this will happen (paralysis of federal law enforcement, mobilization of paramilitary goon squads into the power vacuum, and political reality distortion field justifying everything as if President is equivalent to Dictator). So yeah by any reasoned analysis, 2024 really is Trump xor America - you decide.
(Once again, standard disclaimer - unaligned libertarian here. I'd never voted for a major party candidate before 2020. Specifically, I considered a 2016 a toss up between two differently-bad options, and still have no regrets there. But now that we've seen a concrete track record as opposed to mere vacuous campaigning, it would be utterly foolish to ignore it)
I'm pretty sure that if the incumbent conservative President loses to the radical reactionaries, that incoming administration will be tearing down much more than merely the prior administration - more like two hundred years of the painstaking progress we now take for granted.
(Just for context here, lest the postmodern fence-sitters write me off as some rabid partisan - I'm an unaligned libertarian who had never voted for a major candidate in a national election before 2020)
To the contrary, I've been paying very close attention. I'm just not confident that the DoJ can pull this off before the end of the Biden administration.
It's better but it's still a half measure and far away from the blanket pardons that the President (any president) needs to be signing asap.
I get the whole "progress is slow thing" but this is a case of politicians being the only slow ones. A supermajority of the public supports alcohol/marijuana parity.
Rescheduling marijuana is a multistep regulatory process set out in law that Biden initiated with an executive order the month before the 2022 midterm election, so its kind of weird to call it election year pandering.
Biden held significant sway in the country as VP from 2009-2016 and now again from 2021-2024. The fact that he chose to do the bare minimum on the last possible year 12 years into the job with less of a majority than he’s had in the past right as his election polls are starting to tank certainly seems telling.
I think the objection is the timing. If the administration truly cared about such things, they'd do them in non-election years. But they seem to save up these things for election years so people feel listened to.
Yes. I think that is the objection. But it's absurd. It's not like the FTC has been sitting on its hands the past 3 years. Last year, for example, they sued Amazon for illegally maintaining a monopoly. In 2022, they sued Walmart for facilitating money-transfer fraud, Harley Davidson for illegally restricting customers' rights to repair, countless health insurers to block illegal mergers. In 2021 they sued Frontier Communications for advertising false internet speeds, Lockheed Martin from illegally acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Nvidia from acquiring Arm Ltd, etc. There are hundreds of cases this FTC has brought in the past 3 years. Cynically saying "LOL ELECTION YEAR" at this case, because it's the first case you've paid attention to is just... so comically predictable.
Right, right, right. So what we really need is for politicians to be consistent and never do anything at all, including during election years, because they don’t really mean any of it (as we wise folk all know).
I think your perspective might be...tainted. I kid, I kid. But typically it's spelled "perineum" just fyi. I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years. Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.
It's a very old mispelling that I'm sticking with.
> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years.
Over the next 10 years, maybe. But circulating money that didn't exist before (that's what happens when the government increases the debt) devalues existing currency proportionally. It is, by definition, inflation. It's effectively a flat tax which disproportionately affects the poor (as all flat taxes do).
The result is an _immediate_ spike in inflation that _maybe_ cools if the projected revenue is real (it often isn't). That inflation had been staved off for the last... two decades or so by lowering interest rates, encouraging people to spend money they wouldn't otherwise (or borrow it themselves) thereby increasing their buying power and offsetting their devalued currency.
Unfortunately, you can't lower interest rates forever and so, when they reach rock bottom, all your inflation chickens come home to roost.
> Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.
Spending more money you don't have is worse than spending less money you don't have.
> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion.
Back to that though... The reason why the government is spending the way it is recently is because of Modern Monetary Theory[1]. Politicians love it because it says they can spend as much money as they want and debt doesn't matter. They don't really believe it though because they only implement the part where they get to spend all the money you want and the debt doesn't matter. I don't think it's very controversial to consider the "mainstream" (in quotes because the reason they are mainstream is because politicians and political think tanks love them, they aren't actually mainstream among economists) MMT sources to be the cranks.
They know the judges won't let anything bad happen to their friends so they can pretend to act tough every four years (when the billionaire class's preferred candidate/party is in office of course).
I don't understand people like you. A government agency does something material to help the consumer and you just shit talk and resort to base cynicism. Nothing would ever change if everyone was as apathetic as you are.
This defeatist attitude is unhelpful. Are you prepared to lose nearly everything come November? What will you do when the dictatorship looms over you, will you accept your dwindling freedoms? What would cause you to actually stand up for yourself and fight for a better future? I see this attitude espoused a lot and I wonder if any of the people who say so will just roll over and accept a creeping totalitarianism with a shrug. Is there literally anything at all that you'd be proactive about?
If you have causes you are passionate about but you refuse to participate in the (hard won, bloodily won) civic right of voting, then your ability to affect those causes will evaporate. No matter how much you think your government doesn't care now, they will care even less when it is truly, wholly, dictatorially unaccountable to you. And then what? What was your anti-voting stance for?
A substantial chunk of the electorate seems to prefer losing and then whining about outcomes as long as it allows them to pat themselves on the back for 'staying above it all and seeing the futility all along'. I implore you instead to care, hold your officials accountable, and vote. A bad future is not inevitable.
Dictators can actually get something done for you, I'd prefer that to our current anarcho-tyranny.
"Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law."
Can you describe precisely why you think the US meets this definition? Given that these terms are meaningful only in a relative sense, it’d be useful to hear your explanation as a comparison between e.g. Mexico, Somalia, Russia, or whatever other comparisons you find salient.
> Dictators can actually get something done for you, I'd prefer that to our current [x]
the historical track record of that sentiment is both plenty long and plenty awful. Are you ignorant of that history or dispute it or think it’ll be different this time or what?
Given that you chose to quote from a noted white supremacist scholar, it is likely fair to assume that you fall on the same side as the hypothetical impending dictatorship. In that case, sure, the dictatorship will get something done for you. Until of course the leopard comes to eat your face as well. Also in that case, I can see why you promote your narrative of helplessness, since it will hasten the arrival of your glorious new era.
A lot of people (domestic but especially foreign axis of evil countries) want us to feel discouraged this way so we'll stop voting and let MAGA win, because they aren't going to stop anytime soon.
All regulation has a cost. And if based on the track record of the US government, it tends to be high and even potentially introduce weird incentives that solve one problem but create two more.
Lack of regulation has costs too. I’m open to your argument if you can demonstrate somehow what “tends” to be true. I suspect you can’t, and neither can I, which is why we should assess regulations on a case by case basis of their own merits instead of totally unsupportable “regulation good” or “regulation bad” maxims.
Anti-trust has a proven record of making things less shit. It doesn't work if you don't use it, obviously. Courts are unfortunately not built for your instant gratification.
When it comes to holding corporations accountable for their actions, very little actually does ever change. Our entire system treats business/corporations with kid gloves, and it's not a partisan issue that will change with a different party in control.
DOJ has been filing aggressive antitrust cases throughout the Biden administration’s tenure. If you want to be conspiratorial, you can point to their losing record in court and argue they know the cases will fail, but “it’s an election year” doesn’t make sense. I think the realistic take is the people at DOJ are legitimately enacting the strongest antitrust enforcement they can get away with (and then some).
The FTC leadership has made a number of strange (and in my opinion poor) decisions, beginning with insulting and alienating the agency staff, which had experience that the political appointees lacked. They then proceeded to act without regard to previous agency experience. At this point, it seems like they’re just trying to get their political goals back on track, though it seems a bit late, given that administrations are generally most effective at their beginnings.
There is a great deal of documentation and discussion, but this document covers some of it, here are a couple of on-topic quotes:
>"Documents from and testimony by FTC managers show that Chair Khan marginalized the litigators and investigators at the FTC who had the skills necessary to win cases."
>"One manager consulted with his team and reported to
the Chief of Staff that Chair Khan was “[s]capegoating the career staff for the FTC’s ‘underenforcement’ of the antitrust laws”26 and “contributing to an external narrative that denigrates staff.”"
I wouldn't read too much into this document. It's written by one of the most egregious political hacks on the planet: Jim Jordan. Even in this report, he can't resist using the classic "Democrat" epithet at the tippy-top of page 5 [1]. Jordan also subpoenaed Khan after the FTC took action against Elon Musk—Republicans' second-favorite billionaire they'll defend at all costs.
This document reads like political theater because it is political theater.
Apparently career staffers don’t like Khan. You know; the career staffers that, checks notes, have been at a largely ineffectual FTC for decades. Oh well, at least she’s trying.
Going after ticket master makes no sense and would accomplish nothing. Artist set the price of their tickets, ticketmaster is a middleman/scapegoat. Seems it whole scheme worked perfectly if most think they're to blame.
Live Nation owns a significant swathe of venues in America, and requires that artists use Ticketmaster if they want to be able to play those venues. And they continue to buy up more and more venues. Not sure how you can say this integration is just them being 'scapegoated'.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s monopoly and colluding practices are what’s enabling them. Going after them definitely accomplishes a whole lot.
Additionally, if artists were to continue the high prices in a more transparent manner without them, then that’s fine - it’s a free country and a free market.
This is exactly why this board is a waste of time. Half of what you read on here are people talking about things they have no idea about and/or no vested interest in the outcome.
