Attorney General Pam Bondi’s meager attempt at insult comedy in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week is the kind of thing that many political observers call “dramatic,” when in reality it was boring deflection and obfuscation punctuated by lazy scandalmongering. But there was something interesting going on in that hearing on the other side of the panel.
Four different senators asked Bondi about the antitrust division and its slide into pay-to-play corruption. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) posed questions about how Bondi’s team overruled her antitrust enforcers to approve the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks merger after pressure from MAGA lobbyists, how Live Nation has hired the same lobbyists to try to get a monopolization case thrown out, and how top antitrust deputies were fired for resisting lobbyist-infused deals.
Bondi refused to answer anything about this, instead simply asserting that Gail Slater (the head of the antitrust division) was doing a great job. Bondi wouldn’t even agree to appear before the antitrust subcommittee, and unleashed the usual parade of insults. She got particularly mad when Blumenthal brought up dismissing the challenge to the merger between American Express GBT and CWT at the behest of lobbyist Brian Ballard, who Bondi worked for.
The big story here, as Matt Stoller notes, is that senators felt the need to press Bondi on antitrust, where the swirl of scandal and corruption is growing. Nobody mentioned that Chad Mizelle, Bondi’s chief of staff, resigned rather than face a judicial proceeding in the HPE-Juniper case, but that was lurking beneath the surface. The administration’s antitrust policies aren’t defensible, and Bondi can therefore only lash out. But it’s a sore spot that the opposition is poking at.
The swarm isn’t just coming from partisan Democrats. Some business and right-wing groups are also demanding stronger competition policy than one dictated by the wealthy and well-connected. An insider-y article from The Free Press had some MAGA types grumbling about the status quo, while revealing that Trump’s National Economic Council has been pushing for corporate deals.
As a result, we’re starting to see the enforcement agencies recognize this vulnerability and deliver better outcomes. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sued Zillow for making a secret $100 million “partnership” with Redfin to stop competing in online housing rental and advertising markets and simply funnel Zillow’s listings under its name. The FTC also sued Live Nation over misrepresenting ticket prices by adding junk fees later in the sale, and allowing scalpers to buy up tickets and sell them at inflated prices on their own secondary market platforms. State attorneys general joined in on both lawsuits.
The new cases build on work done by the previous administration, as is customary in antitrust cases that take a long time to complete. But both cover areas where antitrust enforcement has already been active. The Zillow-Redfin case is separate from an antitrust suit against RealPage for using algorithms to boost prices, and it comes amid continued consolidation in real estate brokerages, including Rocket Mortgage purchasing Redfin in July.
Meanwhile, the ticketing lawsuit is separate from the ongoing antitrust lawsuit that the Department of Justice is pursuing against Live Nation. In a statement, the Break Up Ticketmaster Coalition expressed the fear that the new suit would replace the old one. “Getting to the root of consolidation in this industry is the only way to build a fair ticketing and live events marketplace for fans, independent venue owners, and performers alike,” the statement said.
Concerns about corporate power are not going to recede.
We will know soon enough whether this mild burst of enforcement actions is a sign of re-righting the path after the Trump administration’s lobbyist infiltration or its few token responses to throw people off the scent of corruption. With $1 trillion in global M&A in the last quarter alone, there are a host of major acquisitions and big-money trends coming to the agencies that will make it impossible to dodge picking a side.
This week, two major regional banks—Fifth Third and Comerica—announced a proposed merger, furthering an unceasing bank consolidation that will likely grow if allowed to go unchecked. Gaming giant Electronic Arts is being taken private in a $55 billion deal from a private equity consortium led by Silver Lake, apparently with the help of Jared Kushner bringing in Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Silver Lake is also in on the TikTok deal, along with Oracle, one of the companies riding the AI bet that is really the main thing now holding up the otherwise shaky U.S. economy. AI infrastructure spending is now responsible for close to half of all economic growth in the country, and far more than half of stock market gains this year. We’ve pushed all our chips into the center on AI, and inside that there are a host of partnerships and deals between enormous companies trying to guarantee the benefits of the AI boom for themselves.
That includes a $100 billion Nvidia investment in OpenAI, which amounts to giving OpenAI the money to buy Nvidia chips, as well as separate OpenAI deals with Broadcom and AMD that will allow the ChatGPT maker to produce its own chips and diversify away from Nvidia in some data centers. And separately from that, Nvidia is propping up Intel with some of its spare cash.
There are serious concerns about Nvidia using its free cash flow to backstop an unhealthy market on the verge of collapse. But in competition terms, the Biden administration was taking a hard look at AI markets in a bid to make the entire tech stack open and available. OpenAI and Nvidia are clearly making moves to lock that down, either to discourage competition or increase their market power and ability to charge monopoly prices. While some outside allies of the administration have expressed concerns about these emerging monopolists, there hasn’t been much concern yet from the antitrust agencies.
Consumers have good reason to be concerned about consolidation under Trump as well. The consequences of a bad ruling allowing Microsoft to gobble up Activision, as prices for its Game Pass subscription service and the Xbox rise, has led to belated recognition that Lina Khan’s warnings about the imposition of market power was 100 percent correct. EA has a similar history of nickel and diming gamers, and going private is likely to increase the urge to raise prices ever further.
That this issue has emerged to become a cudgel for Democratic attacks and a rallying cry for gamers, small businesses, farmers, consumers, workers, and more speaks to its resilience, even amid the corruption shocks of this administration. Concerns about corporate power are not going to recede. In the near term, maybe only left-leaning states will be engaged. (California recently passing a ban on algorithmic price fixing is a good example.) But in the long term, America is rediscovering its roots as a country that rejects arbitrary coercion by would-be domineers.
