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It matters that Fiona Scott Morton has been taking money advising Apple and Amazon at a time when both firms face antitrust investigations.
A large and persistent network of communicators competes in Washington for the attention of the political class: think tanks, advocacy groups, newspaper op-ed writers, cable-news expert guests, academics, lobbyists. They have varying degrees of legitimacy among the public, but all of them contribute to the stream of information that policymakers and their staffs interact with and consume. It’s a constant low hum attempting to influence, shape, and control, and even by osmosis, it tends to work.
Large corporations have long figured out that by laundering their self-interested views through these third parties, they can confer feigned legitimacy upon them. In rare moments when the political class actually seems roused enough to do something, corporations who fear legal or regulatory changes start collecting legitimizers more rapidly. The more independent the communicator appears, the greater the victory for the corporate benefactor. And the biggest win of all is to get someone perceived as a critic into the fold.
Which brings us to the case of Fiona Scott Morton, and me. Scott Morton is a Yale economist who served in the antitrust division of the Justice Department and now directs the Thurman Arnold Project, a collaborative research institution named after the famed antitrust enforcer. A year ago, I wrote a piece for The New Republic about her, noting that her rhetoric on competition policy had sharpened, pushed forward by the incipient anti-monopoly movement. Given that Scott Morton may very well serve as a top antitrust official in a hypothetical Biden administration, her shift toward more aggression on monopoly seemed important enough to elevate.
So it matters that Scott Morton has been taking money advising Apple and Amazon, at a time when both firms face antitrust investigations in Congress and among state and federal law enforcement. Fiona self-disclosed the relationship in a panel discussion last month. The Apple consulting is longstanding; she took on Amazon as a client within the past year.
This is far more the norm than the exception; in fact, there’s even a duopoly among consulting firms that outsource experts and academics to monopolies. Compass Lexecon and Charles River Associates, have 10 prior lead economists at the Justice Department’s antitrust division on their payroll. (Scott Morton, one such economist, works with Charles River.) When Gene Kimmelman worked on a series of reports building an antitrust case against the tech giants, he “had to hire an outside lawyer,” according to Bloomberg, to detail the potential conflicts among those toiling on the project.
The problem goes well beyond one researcher and one set of client relationships.
Scott Morton contributed to two of those reports, making cases against Facebook and Google. The CEOs of those companies will appear before the House Antitrust Subcommittee next week, along with the CEOs of Amazon and Apple, Scott Morton’s clients.
She reconciles this by saying that those papers covered Facebook and Google exclusively, and that “I work for companies that I’m comfortable are not breaking the law.” Personally, I don’t see much daylight between, say, Google steering video search results to its YouTube subsidiary and Amazon steering shopping searches to its house brands. The lawsuit over tech companies using people’s faces to test facial recognition software without their permission implicates Google and Amazon.
Similarly, Facebook’s strategy of buying potential rivals seems identical to Apple buying a company every two to three weeks. Apple’s domination of its App Store seems to go well beyond Google’s Android store for phone apps, requiring developers to seek Apple’s approval to get access to its iPhone users.
Maybe there are nuances here, and there are many ways to resolve these issues short of an antitrust violation. But it’s common sense that, if policymakers are scrutinizing four Big Tech companies, and Fiona Scott Morton works for two of them, and she writes papers about how the other two are stone-cold lawbreakers, then she’s by definition steering policymakers toward the companies she doesn’t work for, to the benefit of those she does.
Lack of disclosure on op-ed pages is ubiquitous; small business owners or experts put their names to arguments constructed by tech platforms, hiding behind the writer’s presumed independence.
In other cases, Scott Morton has written publicly about her clients. In a Washington Post op-ed published last July titled “Why ‘Breaking Up’ Big Tech Probably Won’t Work,” Scott Morton dismisses breakups as “sloganeering,” preferring other restraints that promote competition. The op-ed parrots a common theme of the tech platforms that market share could merely be a function of offering popular products. She didn’t disclose her tech consulting in that piece.
In response to a question from the Prospect, Scott Morton maintained that the op-ed was only about Facebook. “I don’t think a piece on Facebook required a disclosure about work for any other company, pharmaceutical, tech, or otherwise,” she said in an email. She added that she was not working for Amazon at the time, only Apple. But the piece mentions Apple twice and is clearly framed around the tech giants as a whole, not any one company. It even includes a disclaimer about the Post’s owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which would be odd on a piece solely about Facebook.
Scott Morton has also drawn blood on Amazon in the past. A paper she wrote citing Amazon forcing third-party sellers to not offer a lower price elsewhere on the web led to Amazon ending the practice. Amazon had a strategy to prevent that from happening again; hire the expert who pointed it out. This is a win for Amazon even if they get no useful advice about navigating antitrust law out of the consulting relationship.
Zephyr Teachout of Fordham Law, a prominent critic of monopolies, called for Scott Morton to step down from the Thurman Arnold Project after the revelation. “She cannot continue as the Director without undermining its integrity,” Teachout argued.
But the problem goes well beyond one researcher and one set of client relationships. Lack of disclosure on op-ed pages is ubiquitous; small business owners or experts put their names to arguments constructed by tech platforms, hiding behind the writer’s presumed independence. Hal Singer detailed at the Prospect last week the hundreds of congressional and regulatory staffers who have found their way to work for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. The open shilling for Big Tech going on throughout academia and BigLaw and think tanks is so commonplace you can write a detailed article outlining who’s on what side.
This buzz in the ear of decision-makers all day long creates the monopolists’ desired impression. Kamala Harris’s frequent team-ups with tech giants during her state attorney general career offers a window into how this works.
It’s very clear that monopolist purchases of experts who align with their self-serving claims threaten the functioning of democracy in the public interest. In fact, here’s an article making exactly that case with specific examples, co-authored by Austin Frerick, who is now the deputy director of the Thurman Arnold Project, working directly for … Fiona Scott Morton. So if Fiona wants to understand what she has done wrong, she can walk down the hall and talk to someone who has articulated it very clearly. Good people working to fight the influence of monopolies must not be tainted by those who decide to compromise themselves.
