Why should the government crack down on a free browser like Chrome when the real pain is felt in food, fuel, housing, and healthcare? It feels like a huge waste of government time and resources to go after free stuff that barely impacts consumers (significantly less than GDPR I might add...), when instead they could be bringing down costs of life-saving care by breaking up the healthcare cartels and conglomerates propped up by private equity.
Unfortunately the answer is: Because law professors hang out with, and went to college with, the people who make Chrome, while they haven't even met the people who own the businesses that provide us with food, fuel, and housing.
Yes, that plus a belief that their chosen occupational path was more moral than going into technology or business. They believe that they are more moral, so of course, they should make more money.
But they knew their choice of occupations led to less money, so they cannot complain.
This is much like the resentment of the nobility and clergy against the merchants in the pre-modern era. It is really about status competition, not morality or money.
I just mean that I went into a tech field while a number of good friends from college went into law. But none of us went into construction or farming or oil drilling.
I worked for these companies and I gotta be real with you: I firmly disagree with this sentiment. I’m not full bore Warren over here, but a broken clock is right twice a day. The tech companies have been way over their skis for at least a decade. They are functional monopolies.
We broke Microsoft’s hold before, we can do this again.
All of these products are “free” through consumption of YOUR data. Your personal information is bought and sold for billions of dollars. It’s not just ad targeting, there’s an entire data broker ecosystem. IMHO give people a tiny piece of that and more control over what’s shared. You hate cookie based ad tracking? Fine gut it. The advertising agencies will pivot to media mix modeling.
There’s also a freaky political aspect to this for ANY politician: the platforms allow a remarkable amount of direct advertising above and beyond just your registered voters. They also box people into groupings via algorithmic content. I’m a man in his late 30s - every time I look up a YT video on rebuilding my pc for fun, I get bombarded with bonkers red pilled content. Why? Because there’s an association and it leads to more watch time and ad revenue. The whole system is poison…
I am yet to see how I am harmed by all this targeted advertising or an algorithm that predicts.what videos I might want to watch. I don't like the existence of the data collections that make it possible, but that's only because I fear what the government will do with it. Companies just want to try to sell me things with it and I really don't have a problem with that.
I agree, Apple and Google should not be allowed to ban alternative app stores. The solution to this though is to... not let Apple and Google ban alternative app stores. Progressives instead just want to break up the big tech companies, because as Noah said they care about perceived political power, not consumer welfare.
Like I said - the political side is what worries me. You wanna sell ads? Fine. The problem I see are the incentive structures around algorithmic content, programmatic advertising and engagement/eyeballs growth to hit revenue targets that tech companies are held to. It’s fascinating to watch things change post ZIRP and post COVID, big clash of expectations and reality.
It will be more important when you are queried on re-entry to the US why you are consuming this or seeing that … and we will detain you awhile pending further investigation/evaluation.
That depends on who we elect into power, how they exercise that power and, if necessary, how we check their power. We aren’t doing great on any of the three fronts at the moment.
The "benefits" of tracking and surveillance, "like relevant ads and videos"? I'd be fine without any ads at all, and with seeking out the videos I want to watch. The internet was at its best without all the enshittification -- when it was like a giant library.
“YT video on rebuilding my pc for fun, I get bombarded with bonkers red pilled content.”
A lot of people make these claims. They are all liars. That’s not how recommendations work. Even if you’re not watching that content on YouTube, you’ve interacted with that content on another platform that has some cross app data sharing enabled.
It’s the modern version of I have no idea how these dirty mags appeared under my mattress.
IDK, about a year ago I started getting pushed redpill content extremely hard on YouTube. Just short after short with Tristan and Andrew Tate.
To my knowledge, I didn't engage in redpill stuff, but perhaps it's because I do martial arts? Some video game? I've tried to think about what did it and maybe it was after a Jimmy Carr special. Is there a big stand-up/redpill overlap? Some combination of the above? IDK. Recommendation algorithms are sometimes black boxes even to the developers.
As far as I could tell, regular video recommendations were fine. This was just happening on shorts.
All I know is once it showed up it was extremely difficult to get rid of. It took about 2 months of extremely dedicated blocking and down voting for the algorithm to chill out a little.
I’ve literally worked on these platforms I’m not BSing you. It’s based on a combination of personalized user content, trending topics and relevancy.
Relevancy is a really broad term. If I click on a gaming channel to watch a video reviewing a game, and don’t know that creator has a ton of politically tinged videos but I don’t watch those, am I interested in gaming content or political content? How do you square that circle. Things can get mixed in and content can change over time. There’s lots of examples of this out there where content creators went fully for the easy “anti woke” content mill and their channels get reclassified as time goes on.
I’ve heard these cock and bull stories for a long time and I’m not buying it. If it happens on TikTok or Reels there are ways to explain it - like recommendations are based partly on how viral they are. YouTube gives heavy weightage to your viewing history and subscriptions.
It’s not really clear that you’re making an argument here at all, other than to say that you think OP is a bad person (?). Obviously you get personalised ads and recommendations and obviously that will inevitably have some political valence in many cases, and it’s not at all absurd to worry about the long run aggregate effects of this on society.
“We broke Microsoft’s hold before, we can do this again. “
The government closed the barn door way after the horse left. Google and the cloud disrupted WinTel. Same thing here, we’re going to break up Google as they’re about to be disrupted by AI.
> We broke Microsoft’s hold before, we can do this again.
Microsoft's won on appeal in 2001. The case was about Internet Explorer and IE is still bundled with Windows to this day. Whatever happened to Microsoft it wasn't because of antitrust legal proceedings.
"Accordingly, we affirm in part and reverse in part the District Court's judgment that Microsoft violated 2 of the Sherman Act by employing anticompetitive means to maintain a monopoly in the operating system market; we reverse the District Court's determination that Microsoft violated 2 of the Sherman Act by illegally attempting to monopolize the internet browser market; and we remand the District Court's finding that Microsoft violated 1 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully tying its browser to its operating system. Our judgment extends to the District Court's findings with respect to the state law counterparts of the plaintiffs' Sherman Act claims.
"We also find merit in Microsoft's challenge to the Final Judgment embracing the District Court's remedial order. There are several reasons supporting this conclusion. First, the District Court's Final Judgment rests on a number of liability determinations that do not survive appellate review; therefore, the remedial order as currently fashioned cannot stand. Furthermore, we would vacate and remand the remedial order even were we to uphold the District Court's liability determinations in their entirety, because the District Court failed to hold an evidentiary hearing to address remedies-specific factual disputes.
"Finally, we vacate the Final Judgment on remedies"
It didn’t help that IE was crap and Chrome became a better more hip browser. The real issue at hand was always about OS + software restrictions. Microsoft had a true monopoly - you automatically got IE with Windows as a “feature” and that ensured high adoption.
Gotta remember that you had to buy/install browsers. The accusation was that Microsoft had manipulated its API to favor its own browser for its OS.
It’s not too dissimilar to Apple forcing all browsers on iOS to run on WebKit and then enforcing their own data management rules through it. I’m shocked that wasn’t a bigger case vs. the App Store stuff with Epic.
"It didn’t help that IE was crap and Chrome became a better more hip browser. The real issue at hand was always about OS + software restrictions. Microsoft had a true monopoly - you automatically got IE with Windows as a “feature” and that ensured high adoption."
Meanwhile the government almost completely missed the first part of bundling in the 1980s when Microsoft devastated Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3. And the IE stuff was still way late in the day after Netscape got hammered.
Fellow tech worker and agree with almost all of your sentiment. But ultimately I can just put my phone down. Or we can legislate these platforms to open up their algorithms to user configuration or some other thing I don't know about. I am worried about our priorities. I agree social media algorithms are holding us back from thriving as people, but we have to pay attention to our survival needs first. It wasn't until I got smacked with my own health issues that I started to be disappointed with the government's priorities. I know for a fact that the "harm" I've felt from big tech companies of all types is nothing compared to what I've experienced trying to fix this dumb body of mine.
I also want to chime in here; Chrome influences huge swaths of business; it isn't a problem in itself, but Google is. Google's search index controls the internet and they have used this to leverage out every competitor in businesses connected to that. And they continue to destroy competition by promoting their properties over others.
Yep, every business whose Google rankings have been destroyed by an in house Google product, Google Travel, Google Reviews, Google maps. Just do a search, tons written about this in every country Google uses their search index to abuse. That isn't even touching the advertising market which is a tax on every business that needs to gain customers.
Hospitals have a monopoly on healthcare. That was one of the intentions of Obamacare, and it succeeded. Now what used to be regular old doctor’s offices and urgent care places can charge “facility fees” and receive higher Medicare reimbursement than doctor-run clinics. Criminal.
Sorry, I had in my head "healthcare cartels" (players coordinating to keep prices high, competition low, etc.) and "conglomerates propped up by private equity" as two separate things when writing, but you're right that PE does play a huge role in healthcare too. Veterinarian consolidation comes to mind. Those anti-competitive effects would be regional or local I bet. I was actually thinking of food, where production and distribution consolidation has created these monopsony situations. Farmers lose all their margin and get locked into restrictive contracts. Grocery store chains lose their margin on the other end. Something like a Walmart effect and its generalized form.
At this point, I think it’s hard not to psychologize people. When I was younger, I feel like the pseudo-religious, quasi-scientific people who yelled their pet theories from the rooftops that it really was all the bourgeoise, corporate power, the government, or the aliens that controlled everything were rare.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it feels like they’re everywhere now.
If I were to use unnecessarily harsh wording here, I feel like these Warrenite types are essentially sore losers resentment project.
By that, I mean, just like you wrote in multiple articles, they are the ppl who got (overwhelmingly non stem) degree at prestigious undergrads or grad schools who had a really high expectation for their future and got super disappointed as they couldn’t get what they felt deserving. And I imagine they end up resenting ppl who had success - and post 2008, that’s tech ppl by and large. I feel like their obsession w Google and Meta are the epitome of it. And by extension, I think they also resent math or anything related - after all that’s the subject they struggled while giving money to ppl they resent in their view. I think that’s why their (voodoo) economics are highly ideological but lacking in the mathematical basis. At the same time, if you think of them as bunch of super highly educated ppl who struggle with math, their insane obsession with “languages” and “messaging” is a bit more understandable.
They're not even sore losers. They're sore winners. I can understand a sore loser, but a multi millionaire senator eaten by envy of billionaires is beyond my capacity for empathy.
It's resentment of one group of elites against another. This type of intra-elite friction and petty resentment is totally normal, and we can't stop it. Humans just work like this. Businesspeople resent the law professors just as much.
We just can't reorient our politics around that resentment, especially now.
yeah, I think the problem is one group of elites happened to dominate the institutes that has the political power(non profits org, congress staffer class etc)
And I also suspect this faction is better at coining catchy (but galaxy brain) phrases and spreading it as they have more non stem academia and journalists... and part of their extreme obsession to procedurism and "community input" can be explained by the composition of them (aforementioned ones and bunch of lawyers).
I wish they just saw the big picture and join forces with normie and pro growth liberals recognizing the banal fact "Orange man (and ketamine addict wannabe entertainer) bad (or as of right now horrible)"...
I think your overall essay is strong - its counter-productive to lean on anti corporate populism as an electoral strategy, many of the issues seized upon are wrong on the merits, and there likely is an intra-elite resentment component to it all (as you say, welcome to the story of basically all of history).
But I also think the tone of your essay downplays the true potential threat to prosperity from concentrations of power (market or otherwise) and the effects of the “free at point of use” model on politics and news media more broadly, given that suddenly *attention* and engagement becomes the new commodity.
Do you have anything to say on those issues, abstracting from your specific complaints from the essay? Or do you reject that they are worth monitoring?
Or is what you're really saying is, "We can't orient our politics around that resentment *for the wrong reason(s)*"??
To my ears, Warren is totally on top of the bad economics of extreme market concentration; just that her primary emphasis is on how it hurts *consumers*, not macroeconomic health. Or, if you feel it's her CFPB which is a waste of space, you should state your case. And/Or, if you feel that Monopoly/Oligopoly does not both result in macroeconomic negatives, and accretion of excessive political power, then also say so.
With all due respect I don't think it's envy that drives Warren. I think it's politics pure and simple. Warren has convinced herself that the best way to appeal to the progressive crowd is using these tactics. She may be wrong on the merits of the case but I don't think Envy is the actual issue.
Noah, you put forth the proposition that the Warrenite crowd went to school with the tech Bros and they're envious that they didn't make the kind of money the tech Bros make. Do you think Elizabeth Warren ran into the tech Bros at the University of Houston? Or at Rutgers law school? I don't think so. No more than you, I don't want to psychologize people but least in Warren's case I don't think Envy is the problem
I hit enter too soon. I had meant to preface what I wrote with the fact that I agree with you and the abundance movement on what needs to be done and think Warren is wrong and her opposition to it. I just wanted to make that clear.
The irony at the same time is, after seeing a comment on CHH article, it is young male tech worker who’s engaging in resentment project in the form of manosphere online… (i.e. in their view, CS degree should’ve promised success including romantic one but post Covid isolation plus tech job slashing made it very hard for them according to the commenter)
Because coding and intimate relationships are two different skill sets. With little if any overlap.
Which brings us full circle back to being a mid-30's male and getting deluged with with red pill ads. I mean what guy couldn't benefit from certain sexual lifehacks, yes?
Yeah exactly! I personally have been frustrated by this lack of introspection in American society from bottom to up.
And when it comes to the phenomenon in American elite, my galaxy brain take is both American way of upbringing (what Noah called out as over praising and no instilling of humility) and straight up Tiger Mom way of upbringing (oftentimes, they tell kids to study saying if you go to good school and programs, you’ll succeed) are to blame… at the same time, i def understand it really is hard to come up with a good message to convince kids to study and pursue good degree - like “you have a high likelihood of success if you’re comfortable constantly updating yourself, and that takes the form of studying” is prob the most accurate take but will convince 0 kids to study…
I think there's something to that. In Seattle, we've had years of blaming the rising housing costs on tech bros who make too much. We've had taxes on high salaries enacted and in many cases the advocates clearly state that increases in housing costs and visible homelessness are a result of tech bros making too much money not housing supply lagging behind demand, moving from a shelter to housing model by closing down shelters before you construct the housing, more tolerance of public camping and the spread of fentanyl.
Some of that is not wanting your city to change, but there's also plenty of "I went to school with people who became tech bros and they weren't that smart so it's wrong to pay them so much money". And maybe, but there's a reason that people with those skills are paid so well, namely that those skills are valuable. I've taught many people to code. All were smart and motivated enough to make a career of it but less than half stuck with it because it was boring , there was too much drudgery, or they just didn't like all the debugging, which is fine but it's also why its such a valuable skill. What's interesting is that I don't see the same arguments about orthopedic surgeons or even doctors and nurse practitioners. And definitely not about nonprofit executives making six figure salaries.
And I guess this hyping up of college education (and as Noah wrote here, the increased presense of knowledge economy) kinda created the worship of intelligence, which could be described as "IQ = the value of person" (here IQ does not necessarily mean the conventional IQ measured by the test, it is subjective scalar value of how smart one person is). And this resulted in weird source of cope and resentment, which I think is really really counterproductive. (Like, I believe that intelligence and skills are more of high demensional vector and if ppl started to think that way, we get more chill and have more productive conversation but I digress lol)
And as for nonprofit, I feel like it is so ironic that they started to behave way less strategic after the academic credential of members gets superb.
I suspect, as a result of education polarization and post 2008 job market, they sucked up a lot of disgrunted highly educated population, which made the non profit really prestigeous but very emotionally driven and puritanical. And I feel like non profit orgs get away exploiting employees with this prestige and am not a huge fan of it...
Google and Meta between them have wrecked traditional journalism by taking away the advertising revenue that traditional media relied upon. I suppose that could be one reason why non-STEM grads were particularly resentful (as journalism was a common career path for such grads) but it also has the greater harm of making it easier for disinformation to thrive.
Yeah, and plus internet overall made the journalism really competitive which destroyed the payment scale of journalism too
And for misinformation, I have a mixed feeling - overall, I think accusing of and requiring Meta and Google to monitor misinformation is a futile effort - that said, I think trying to regulate ever improving recommendation algo would’ve been more productive way - not only it has one of the reason misinformation spread but also it seems to radicalize ppl. And tbh that algo is almost like a very addictive drug and is kinda wild that there’s no regulation around it
I certainly don't advocate "requiring Meta and Google to monitor misinformation", especially as that this would create a huge additional barrier to entry that would only entrench the dominance of those firms in the first place.
What could be done is to require social media platforms to allow users to downvote posts (as is already possible on Slashdot or Reddit) with heavily-downvoted posts being hidden from view: this would prevent far-right activists (or anyone else) from shoving their stuff in the faces of unwilling readers.
Robert Nozick made a rather insightful argument about why intellectuals and scientists are generally opposed to capitalism: the issue of resentment is especially apparent among grad students, adjunct professors, and basically anyone in academia who was fed the BS line of "go to college or become a fry cook," partly because education has been really hyped up over the past for decades as a surefire path to upward mobility. Successful intellectuals, on the other hand, are probably jealous of how powerful and influential capitalists are without having to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops of academia.
<And by extension, I think they also resent math or anything related - after all that’s the subject they struggled while giving money to ppl they resent in their view. I think that’s why their (voodoo) economics are highly ideological but lacking in the mathematical basis.>
To be fair, there is a case to be made that the prolific use of mathematics in economics comes with certain tradeoffs. Yes, mathematical equations allow for immaculate levels of precision in theoretical work, but with higher precision comes a higher level of complexity and greater difficulty in conveying such information to the broader public. Economists are a notoriously defensive bunch (not entirely without reason), and their obsession with mathematical models at the expense is probably one reason (among many) that the public seems to distrust them.
I disagree (source: am academic). I don’t think it’s envy, I think it’s taste: people who invest in the prestige economy that fuels academia think that business people are often ignorant philistines.
They find them distasteful, in my experience. Most people who’ve made careers in academia (actually pretty hard to do) knew they were pursuing something other than money (though whether they’d admit how much of their ambition was still tied to status and prestige, I’m less confident).
Yeah, I think that tradeoff argument is makes a lot of sense - one of my pet peeves in American politics is lack of understanding of econ 101 stuff like price theory (on the left side) and how GDP is calculated (on the right side) (i increasingly feel lack of understanding of basic game theory by top figures in politics is also harming but i think it is besides the point) but part of it is econ is thought to be too theoretical for a lot of ppl like you said.
That said, the level of math to conceptually understand Econ 101 (or intro to game theory too tbh) is not that hard imo (prob the hardest math is Lagrange multiplier to solve for maximizing utilization function, which I don’t think is that hard imo but I can digress). I know this is super biased take as someone growing up in East Asia but I wish more ppl are a tiny bit more comfortable with math overall here…
It's important to remember that mathematics can be very intimidating to someone unused to dealing with it, and even more so for someone who is used to being seen as exceptionally brilliant (this happened to me in middle school when I had trouble learning about negative numbers).
Also, Econ 101 can be very misleading, so when people do their research and realize that (for example) price controls aren't always destructive or that free trade creates winners and losers, they feel betrayed by the people who initially taught them. It's one of the reasons why I think economists would do themselves a big favor if they did work with other social science disciplines and avoid the temptation to assume that mathematical prowess is the same as scholarly rigor. There's a culture war in academia between mathematically inclined economists and the more literary and verbal crowd, which I find fascinating.
yeah, I think math resembles a little bit to Peter's principle in a sense that "you feel comfortable with level of abstraction until you don't" and I def have to confess I tend to be oblivious to the fact that the level of abstraction ppl feel comfortable is vastly different (but somewhat trainable at the same time i think - linear algebra required a little bit of time for me to get used to but eventually got pretty comfortable). I remember watching a youtube video "teaching trigs to middle schooler" and I vividly remember when he reiterated "now we have to remember that we expand the definition of cosine and sines to use unit circles so that it takes angles outside of 0~pi/2 as we used to using right triangles" - this expansion came very natural to me back when I was a kid, so I never imagined that some ppl would struggle.
And yeah, while part of me feels there's a reason econ 101 is econ 101 - there's a lot of exceptions, this is def not well communciated or understood. Also, I think the challenge with econ 101 is oftentimes, at what level are you analyzing it is very confusing - sometimes, it is at a market level, and othertimes, it is at individual level but it is often not communicated well either I think. And tbh, I think the issue comes down to "the (econ) researcher is not necessarily good at teaching". I feel like this is prob really a missed opportunity as having more ppl with econ degree who's actually good at teaching would benefit a lot of ppl.
As for the culture war, one thing I find fascinating is econ is not the only social studies field having "math faction" and "verbal faction" - I think sociology and poli-sci could also be math (or in case of sociology, stats?) heavy but idk if they are the center of that debate lol
Antitrust lawyer here. I partially agree. The view from inside the government is that focusing exclusively on consumer welfare leads some anticompetitive companies to be able to degrade services without consequences. It would be silly to pretend that just because something doesn’t have a cost to the consumer that it doesn’t have a cost at all.
And yet. The problem is that the antitrust laws have no way of dealing with a lot of how our economy functions today. Google and Meta are sort of low hanging fruit. Antitrust can do nothing about Bezos owning Whole Foods and WaPo because they’re not in the same market. It can do almost nothing about united health buying thousands of small doctors offices and then forcing them to only take united insurance.
It’s actually demoralizing antitrust has become so politically salient. I want to go back to boring guppi analysis.
"Antitrust can do nothing about Bezos owning Whole Foods and WaPo because they’re not in the same market."
You are upset that antitrust laws can't do anything about things that have nothing to do with antitrust?
The only reason anyone cares about Bezos owning WaPo is because he hedged more moderate in the last election. No one thinks there is any market power concern. Where is the outrage at Buffett owning dozens of companies? There isn't any because it's not actually a problem. Buffett isn't as political so there is no need for the charade complaining about 'market power'.
I’m not personally upset. But if we’re talking about this kind of alleged corporate malfeasance then a company controlling a few big but different parts of the economy is concerning. Microsoft could buy Coca Cola tomorrow and antitrust has nothing to say on that. That this bothers people is a fact. I’m personally agnostic to it.
A lot of the tech acquisitions which the Biden administration were of similarly far afield businesses unless you think everything which doesn't involve making physical goods is the exact same industry, which unfortunately is something which the US judicial system finds plausible.
I’m not sure what you mean but any antitrust litigation requires setting both a product and a geographic market. It’s really difficult to show two companies are competing both geographically and product wise. Certainly “not making physical goods” doesn’t cut it and never has. If you have a case where the judicial system defined a market so loosely, please share.
N.b. there are of course upstream and downstream markets (leather —> shoes, if you monopolize leather then your competitors can’t make shoes, etc).
The framing of this essay is completely disingenuous. The idea of corporate feudalism is that they use their wealth and power to achieve stable “rents” while simultaneously lowering their tax burden and passing legislation to throttle competition. You need large corporations to scale production and put downward pressure on pricing, but that does not mean we should accept large monopoly power throughout our economy.
Don’t be naive about the tech game plan. They use network effects to lock in customers and then they turn on the profit spigot by implementing a worse but more profitable version of the product which then gives them a war chest to fight off or acquire competitors and fund legislators to acquire tax carve outs. Almost every big tech company engages in some version of this. This activity is seeking stable “rents.” No they don’t have 100% of the market, but come on, you really think DuckDuckGo is a threat to google?
Google will never be replaced in online search is because they are in fact the best at it and invest to keep being the best.
Once a technology is mature and winners emerge it takes extreme mismanagement for the winners to lose to competitors *of the same technology*. How could they lose? They have the best technology plus they have an entire company built around that technology. Any competitor would have equal technology minus the entire company supporting that technology. Of course they are going to lose.
It requires new technology to displace the incumbents. No company will ever displace Google *in online search*. But eventually no one will use online search and some new company will be the leader in whatever replaces it.
Elon Musk could not have created an ICE car company. Jeff Bezos could not have created a Walmart competitor without the internet. Netflix could never have competed without streaming.
If you want more dynamic corporate landscape the solution is:
1. More investment in science and research so new technologies are available.
2. Deregulation to make it easier to build new companies.
I'm not seeing this monopoly power in the tech industry (with a few exceptions like Apple controlling what software you can install on your iphone). Meta was powerless to stop the rise of Tiktok. Google is unable to eliminate Ducduckgo or Kagi. Amazon is powerless to eliminate rival online retailers. The customer faces zero cost to switch.
Huh? Google has an 85% market share. Monopoly has never meant "eliminate all competition", just "eliminate enough that it doesn't matter". Kagi is literally not even a blip in the customer base. Fun fact: even at his peak, Rockefeller "only" controlled 91% of the US oil market and 85% of final sales. Should we have not broken up Standard Oil?
Monopolies aren't illegal. If you have a monopoly because everyone chooses to use your product there is absolutely no law against it and that is the case with Google.
There is a healthy debate to be had about tech monopolies. I do think it is worth noting that AI threatens to disrupt Google’s search business and we have an entirely new class of companies emerging. This is creative destruction at work and it could undermine concerns about monopolistic rents etc.
But regardless, Noah is asserting that most Americans just don’t care or don’t understand. They have other kitchen table issues at hand. And re-industrialization seems a more pressing concern anyway: to lower costs of necessary goods like housing and transportation, to bring about a green energy revolution, to ward off the threat China poses to our economy and the democratic world order, and to unleash innovative technologies like AI that could lead to accelerating drug discovery and robotics that can help drive down manufacturing costs, and all of this hopefully creating a virtuous cycle of building and innovating for the benefit of us all.
Twitter is a great example of capture by network. Why is Noah plowing the fields in Elon’s kingdom? I am sure Noah doesn’t want to choose to enrich Elon, and he is free to leave the platform, but he doesn’t - why?
Noah is small fry in the world of influencers. Maybe he likes X? In any case, I acknowledged that there’s room for debate.
X and the social media platforms represent network effects rather than technological market capture fwiw, as I am sure you also know. Should we legislate the break up of X? Divesture from private ownership? Reclaim the so-called public square as public property? Regular their content? Lots of people fall down on many different sides of these coins.
And the point is that I am not sure it’s the most important thing to confront. And I definitely don’t think most Americans do. I think finding people who can exploit the platforms for the “right reasons” may be the best bet fwiw.
Also, I believe the answer on what to do about network capture is right in front of us. The internet is an open protocol. We should probably steer some of these important global spanning networks in that direction - if possible. Bluesky is trying to do something like this, let’s see if it works. In the cases of natural monopolies, they should probably be treated like utilities - public/private entities. Countries around the world have grappled with these problems and we can accumulate best practices. It’s not as if there are no answers out there.
I believe the information ecosystem is as important to safeguard as our physical world. I believe social media companies are the big oil of the 21st century, as irresponsible of stewards of the information ecosystem as the energy sector has been of our planet. I believe it is absurd to promote the first amendment as so holy when what really matters nowadays is reach and audience and commanding attention, and that monopoly should be broken up immediately and turned into pubic utilities. The current business model is simply not good for our society or world and I don’t give a damn about their business interests.
And I believe that I am in the distinct minority on all of this :)
Is it really appropriate to blame climate change on "big oil", as opposed to blaming it on (for example) the dream of the suburbanized automotive city?
All I am saying is that you can’t frame it as “left hate big corporations - no work on Americans” and then single out people addressing a very specific thing, which is corporations abusing network affects or market position in an effort to seek rents. Once again, you need big companies to scale production and put downward pressure on prices - but it should be fine to call out corporations abusing their position. Corporate feudalism refers to something very specific. Not mentioning that it means something very specific is disingenuous. Furthermore, this was not the top of the liberal platform. If I remember correctly, the main thrust of Kamala’s platform was building more housing - work for all Americans. She wasn’t yelling “big company bad.” That is a rewriting of history. They took her pretty banal price gauging line item and blew it up into something it wasn’t. Straw man stuff.
When I hear “corporate feudalism” I don’t think of one specific thing. It seems like a catch-all to me, although I have zero idea how others have been using it.
They should be specific if they have something specific in mind.
Americans may not care, but it still matters. Also there is an opportunity cost associated with dollars being sucked up into organizations that can provide returns based on rent seeking behavior rather than pushing down the marginal cost of services or products due to innovation.
The most important addressable form of corporate power in any democracy imo is campaign financing. Just ban corporate (and union) political donations and set sharp limits on all others.
How do you do that, though? What counts as a donation? Does Joe Rogan's interview of Trump count? It clearly provided material benefit worth millions. What about propaganda networks like fox and MSNBC? Could a billionaire start his own network and run ads for his favored candidate? If you ban that kind of stuff it would be a violation of freedom of the press. And how is buying a TV add on someone else's network any less of an exercise of freedom of the press than starting your own network?
Fairly simple. One could simply ban any and all private expenditures and force political campaigns to rely on public money. I'd also argue this is a superior method, as forcing billionaires to start their own media simply adds to the preexisting market of ideas while reducing the amount of time politicians have to spend fundraising, making them vulnerable to lobbying and special interests more generally. More news networks and outlets mean more journalists, and more journalists mean greater transparency and a larger role for public dialogue.
I was thinking of direct contributions but you’re right that third party advertising is a difficult issue to find a consensus on. This was just pronounced on by the Supreme Court of Canada in a split decision on an Ontario law
That would make our problems much worse. Our campaign finance system is now heavily weighted toward small dollar donors and activist types. As a result of Bipartisan Campaign Finance (BICRA) reform, the political parties lost much of their power to act as gatekeepers and limit who could run under their name. Parties are supposed to be able to vet candidates and direct funding. If a candidate, for instance, was unwilling to accept the results of the election, didn’t agree with the party, or wasn’t even a member, the parties, as institutions, had an interest in not letting them run under their banner. Or if a young, fresh faced, promising young politician wanted to run for president after being the dog catcher of a small town, they would say “not yet; how about we help you run for mayor, or the House. Or maybe why don’t you work as a staffer with this Congressmen. We need people like you, but you are 35. You aren’t running for president under our banner.” BICRA changed the incentives of candidates, since getting funding depended on much smaller amounts of money from organizations and individuals. Most people don’t donate to campaigns, and those who do aren’t exactly representative of the median voter or “moderate.” They are highly partisan and want people who “fight.” The tea party bomb throwers, and the most over the top progressive left candidates, needed to get the attention of extremely ideological people.
Trump could not have run as a Republican even as recently as the 90s with his 2015 persona/issues. He didn’t agree with the party as it existed and wouldn’t have received party support and funding. In 2015, the GOP was powerless to stop him. He got plenty of money from small donors, much like Sanders.
The Warren Bernie wing taking over the Dems will FINALLy get me to bite the bullet and vote for non Dems up and down the ticket
In 2024, for the first time ever, I voted for “Mickey Mouse” for my congressional representative as I live in a deep blue state and my choices were a squad leader 🙄 or a GOP wingnut
I was the Chief of Staff of the Antitrust Division during the Biden Administration. I’m a fan of much of what you write, so I’m going to assume much of your criticism comes from not fully understanding both the cases before the FTC and DOJ from 2021-2024 and what the FTC/DOJ were doing than from a wilfull misreading of what was accomplished.
I agree, 99.9% of voters will never choose a candidate based on there stances on neo-Brandeisian v. Chicago School. But to say that there wasn’t popular concern about the size and power of corporations is not backed up by the facts. There were two years of highly watched bipartisan hearings on Big Tech during the Trump Administration. There might have been different reasons for the right and the left to try to curb their power, but both Dems and the GOP ran on doing so.
Secondly, this is where I just assume you don’t follow antitrust policy, but the Biden Administration was decidedly not obsessed with tech and very much focused on industries and markets that impact the daily lives of Americans. The Google and Facebook cases were brought by Trump 1.0. These cases take a long time to go to trial. Facebook was filed in 2020, it’ll be in front of a court next month. Yes, DOJ sued Apple (an investigation started under Trump) and FTC sued Amazon (likewise), but:
1) we also won two airline cases, at a time when flying fiascos came to be a regular pain point.
2) won a case to protect the earnings of authors and to stop further consolidation in publishing
3) sued LiveNation-Ticketmaster, another marketplace villain to most Americans
4) sued a company that uses machine learning to artificially inflate the price of rent in most housing markets
5) protected medical innovation by guarding against roll ups of cutting edge treatments and terstings AND stopped additional consolidation in speciality physician practices
6) launched an investigation of UnitedHealthcare, and sued to stop them from taking over the underwriting systems their competitors use
7) Destroyed “the tournament system” which literally drove thousands of poultry growers into poverty.
8) Issued new merger guidelines that have been adopted by the Trump 2.0 Administration because they are non-ideological and they work, meeting antitrust law with modern economics AND also took on non-competes, no poaching agreements, and other conduct that stymies economic opportunity for workers.
I really do appreciate that these things might not have broken through, but to say that the Biden antitrust regime was ineffective or too focused on billionaires for the sake of them being billionaires is just wrong. Antitrust, as we saw it, and as I continue to see it, is not only the “Abundance Agenda” but has been aiming for abundance for years.
I know there are some people who are attacking Ezra, Derrick, Matt, and You. I can’t speak for them. I can only say “welcome to the party, we antitrust hawks have been doing this for years. Let’s work together on this'.”
Welp, hope you read this. I assume you won’t, commenting fairly late as it is.
As someone involved in some of these matters, I agree with this take even if I did not agree with every choice by the administration in antitrust. Noah frustratingly is a prodigious writer but the general post-Biden hysteria lacks a substantial understanding of detail and argumentative charity, particularly on this topic. Thanks for your hard work; I worked with your team and was impressed.
MA voter here. Completely done with Warren for the reasons outlined in this post. She just hasn’t shown up for the big fights and seems slow to understand so much of what’s going on. Two Income Trap is as strong an argument for Abundance as can be made and yet at this point I kind of wonder if she’s a closeted NIMBY?
Noah, I reluctantly must disagree with you on the dangers of corporate gigantism. Did you fall to see the photos of the crowd at Trump's inauguration? Did you note how many of Trump's cabinet are billionaires? Trump's announced taxation policy benefits corporate billionaires almost exclusively. These billionaires may not be an economic problem but they surely are a political economy problem.
Actually I got the exact opposite conclusion from you re the CEOs at the inauguration. It shows that these billionaire builders have nothing political muscle wise, and am forced to kiss ass to a buffoon in order to survive.
Him yeah I agree. Ironically not the one with Google and Amazon which have arguably more monopolistic powers (per our discussion re Trust). Elon got there w/o owning a trust.
It’s just a classic example of elites focusing on issues that primarily affect elites. The average American knows nothing about google search or programmatic ads or anything like that, unless they work in advertising or marketing. These elites however run PACs and 501(c)(3)s and businesses and political parties and campaigns, and so they are keenly aware of digital ads and the cost of getting someone’s attention online in 2025. It’s probably one of their key concerns. They’ve also, like Europe, latched onto “privacy” as if it’s a major problem and major concern for average people. As if the person posting the most intimate details of her life online for the entire planet to see cares about whether Facebook shares the type of Instagram accounts she follows with a 3rd party data broker to sell her more effective ads and targeted products. I used to help manage compliance with California’s CCPA for some small businesses. Out of a portfolio of dozens of clients, we only ever had one person fill out the form to opt out. Nobody cares. It’s a Dunning-Kruger disconnect: they’re so out of touch they don’t even know how out of touch they are.
I'm not sure how anybody buys the "give the government more power to crack down on the corporations that have power over you" line. If you care about people with power over you, the government, who has 1000x times more than any company should be your primary concern. You can call it "class resentment" if you like, but its real name is envy
Seems to be naive to think that Google and Meta have not already seized large amounts of political power. They influence public thought and opinion in ways that men like William Randolph Hearst could’ve only dreamed, not to mention the MASSIVE amount of money they spend lobbying Congress and electing politicians.
I would agree that anti-corporatism is generally bad politics during the current moment, but I find any argument un-compelling that downplays the incredible power and influence that Google and Meta have in directing how people find and access information and news. Not to mention the measurable harm that apps like Instagram have on young people’s attention spans and overall mental health…
It's much less power than the legacy media had over information before the Internet made them obsolete. Their audience was totally captive. And the Democrats never had a problem with that. They aren't really complaining about the amount of power these companies have they are complaining that the power isn't theirs to wield.
To be fair, the GOP does the same whenever they complain about the role of organized labor in politics. They're more than happy to accept donations from big business and celebrate it as a pure expression of free speech, but if a teacher's union endorses a municipal candidate for office they decry it as a prima facie example of corruption and regulatory capture. In fact they're more than happy to decry it: they even fund organizations that deliberately try to undermine public-sector unions, either by banning them in practice or regulating them to death (not that the Left doesn't do this as well, but generally speaking the Right has more money and more resources so they're much better at this sort of skullduggery).
The legacy media had journalistic standards and ethics, though. They obviously did not always get it right, but I trust the NYT or Washington post to report the truth more than I do any influencer on Facebook or Twitter.
It’s not about the CEOs, it’s about the platform itself. Choosing not to moderate your content and having an algorithm that boosts inflammatory posts is the same decision as editorializing your newspapers, just less visible and obvious.
Abundance thinking is the correct approach but you can’t ignore that corporations and billionaires will hoard political power for the express purpose of hoarding wealth. So that system results in abundance for the few, not the many. We need to find a way to creat abundance but ensure it’s shared by the many. Tax policy is one way to do that but the wealthy will block good policy whenever possible so we need measures to prevent that. But in the face of Citizens United and a powerless FEC and massive disinformation via social media (which is mostly controlled by billionaires now), I don’t see how that’s possible.
Why should the government crack down on a free browser like Chrome when the real pain is felt in food, fuel, housing, and healthcare? It feels like a huge waste of government time and resources to go after free stuff that barely impacts consumers (significantly less than GDPR I might add...), when instead they could be bringing down costs of life-saving care by breaking up the healthcare cartels and conglomerates propped up by private equity.
Unfortunately the answer is: Because law professors hang out with, and went to college with, the people who make Chrome, while they haven't even met the people who own the businesses that provide us with food, fuel, and housing.
Yes, that plus a belief that their chosen occupational path was more moral than going into technology or business. They believe that they are more moral, so of course, they should make more money.
But they knew their choice of occupations led to less money, so they cannot complain.
This is much like the resentment of the nobility and clergy against the merchants in the pre-modern era. It is really about status competition, not morality or money.
Interesting! Thanks for this perspective
Surely you jest. The IT engineers who made Chrome are all JD's? And the Blue Chip industries don't all have beefy legal departments?
Noah means COLLEGE, not post college (law school). And in my experience, he's right.
So, you hang with the Googe o
Or the Wall Street blue chip crowd?
I just mean that I went into a tech field while a number of good friends from college went into law. But none of us went into construction or farming or oil drilling.
I worked for these companies and I gotta be real with you: I firmly disagree with this sentiment. I’m not full bore Warren over here, but a broken clock is right twice a day. The tech companies have been way over their skis for at least a decade. They are functional monopolies.
We broke Microsoft’s hold before, we can do this again.
All of these products are “free” through consumption of YOUR data. Your personal information is bought and sold for billions of dollars. It’s not just ad targeting, there’s an entire data broker ecosystem. IMHO give people a tiny piece of that and more control over what’s shared. You hate cookie based ad tracking? Fine gut it. The advertising agencies will pivot to media mix modeling.
There’s also a freaky political aspect to this for ANY politician: the platforms allow a remarkable amount of direct advertising above and beyond just your registered voters. They also box people into groupings via algorithmic content. I’m a man in his late 30s - every time I look up a YT video on rebuilding my pc for fun, I get bombarded with bonkers red pilled content. Why? Because there’s an association and it leads to more watch time and ad revenue. The whole system is poison…
Then again I’m heavily biased so YMMW :)
I am yet to see how I am harmed by all this targeted advertising or an algorithm that predicts.what videos I might want to watch. I don't like the existence of the data collections that make it possible, but that's only because I fear what the government will do with it. Companies just want to try to sell me things with it and I really don't have a problem with that.
It's not the targeted advertising. It's the app stores.
Apple and Google collect a 30% tax on all app store revenue. This absolutely harms consumer welfare and it's not even close.
I agree, Apple and Google should not be allowed to ban alternative app stores. The solution to this though is to... not let Apple and Google ban alternative app stores. Progressives instead just want to break up the big tech companies, because as Noah said they care about perceived political power, not consumer welfare.
They perceive both the political power and economic power inherent in monopolies. Or even mere oligopolies. Because money generates power.
Why is this discussion even quibbling over a false binary? When does extreme economic NOT translate into political power?
Just don’t download paid apps. Problem solved.
Like I said - the political side is what worries me. You wanna sell ads? Fine. The problem I see are the incentive structures around algorithmic content, programmatic advertising and engagement/eyeballs growth to hit revenue targets that tech companies are held to. It’s fascinating to watch things change post ZIRP and post COVID, big clash of expectations and reality.
It will be more important when you are queried on re-entry to the US why you are consuming this or seeing that … and we will detain you awhile pending further investigation/evaluation.
You are making Knife’s point for him… Detained by who? By the government.
Tech oligarchs act in concert with the government- read the news.
By the Religious Police. Shame on you for watching porn.
We are in fact allowed to get the benefits of data tracking, like relevant ads and videos, without also having a 1984 style dystopia.
That depends on who we elect into power, how they exercise that power and, if necessary, how we check their power. We aren’t doing great on any of the three fronts at the moment.
If that's the case we should also ban camera's. Don't want those we elect to power to be able to use camera's to spy on us.
The "benefits" of tracking and surveillance, "like relevant ads and videos"? I'd be fine without any ads at all, and with seeking out the videos I want to watch. The internet was at its best without all the enshittification -- when it was like a giant library.
Thanks but no thanks.
And let me guess, you think these ad free videos should be free as well? And we should have free on demand music with ads as well!
If only those capitalists weren’t so greedy we’d be living in a utopia!
“YT video on rebuilding my pc for fun, I get bombarded with bonkers red pilled content.”
A lot of people make these claims. They are all liars. That’s not how recommendations work. Even if you’re not watching that content on YouTube, you’ve interacted with that content on another platform that has some cross app data sharing enabled.
It’s the modern version of I have no idea how these dirty mags appeared under my mattress.
IDK, about a year ago I started getting pushed redpill content extremely hard on YouTube. Just short after short with Tristan and Andrew Tate.
To my knowledge, I didn't engage in redpill stuff, but perhaps it's because I do martial arts? Some video game? I've tried to think about what did it and maybe it was after a Jimmy Carr special. Is there a big stand-up/redpill overlap? Some combination of the above? IDK. Recommendation algorithms are sometimes black boxes even to the developers.
As far as I could tell, regular video recommendations were fine. This was just happening on shorts.
All I know is once it showed up it was extremely difficult to get rid of. It took about 2 months of extremely dedicated blocking and down voting for the algorithm to chill out a little.
Just an anecdote, do with that what you will.
Didn't Gamergate back in 2014 show that a very ugly current of misogyny had been building among online gamer communities for years?
I’ve literally worked on these platforms I’m not BSing you. It’s based on a combination of personalized user content, trending topics and relevancy.
Relevancy is a really broad term. If I click on a gaming channel to watch a video reviewing a game, and don’t know that creator has a ton of politically tinged videos but I don’t watch those, am I interested in gaming content or political content? How do you square that circle. Things can get mixed in and content can change over time. There’s lots of examples of this out there where content creators went fully for the easy “anti woke” content mill and their channels get reclassified as time goes on.
I’ve heard these cock and bull stories for a long time and I’m not buying it. If it happens on TikTok or Reels there are ways to explain it - like recommendations are based partly on how viral they are. YouTube gives heavy weightage to your viewing history and subscriptions.
IDK what you get out of defending the infallibility of the YouTube shorts recommendation algorithm.
It’s not about YouTube. I have great disdain for liars.
It’s not really clear that you’re making an argument here at all, other than to say that you think OP is a bad person (?). Obviously you get personalised ads and recommendations and obviously that will inevitably have some political valence in many cases, and it’s not at all absurd to worry about the long run aggregate effects of this on society.
You’re being so weirdly pedantic.
Yeah, my YouTube algorithm has stayed very tame for a very long time.
“We broke Microsoft’s hold before, we can do this again. “
The government closed the barn door way after the horse left. Google and the cloud disrupted WinTel. Same thing here, we’re going to break up Google as they’re about to be disrupted by AI.
> We broke Microsoft’s hold before, we can do this again.
Microsoft's won on appeal in 2001. The case was about Internet Explorer and IE is still bundled with Windows to this day. Whatever happened to Microsoft it wasn't because of antitrust legal proceedings.
"Accordingly, we affirm in part and reverse in part the District Court's judgment that Microsoft violated 2 of the Sherman Act by employing anticompetitive means to maintain a monopoly in the operating system market; we reverse the District Court's determination that Microsoft violated 2 of the Sherman Act by illegally attempting to monopolize the internet browser market; and we remand the District Court's finding that Microsoft violated 1 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully tying its browser to its operating system. Our judgment extends to the District Court's findings with respect to the state law counterparts of the plaintiffs' Sherman Act claims.
"We also find merit in Microsoft's challenge to the Final Judgment embracing the District Court's remedial order. There are several reasons supporting this conclusion. First, the District Court's Final Judgment rests on a number of liability determinations that do not survive appellate review; therefore, the remedial order as currently fashioned cannot stand. Furthermore, we would vacate and remand the remedial order even were we to uphold the District Court's liability determinations in their entirety, because the District Court failed to hold an evidentiary hearing to address remedies-specific factual disputes.
"Finally, we vacate the Final Judgment on remedies"
It didn’t help that IE was crap and Chrome became a better more hip browser. The real issue at hand was always about OS + software restrictions. Microsoft had a true monopoly - you automatically got IE with Windows as a “feature” and that ensured high adoption.
Gotta remember that you had to buy/install browsers. The accusation was that Microsoft had manipulated its API to favor its own browser for its OS.
It’s not too dissimilar to Apple forcing all browsers on iOS to run on WebKit and then enforcing their own data management rules through it. I’m shocked that wasn’t a bigger case vs. the App Store stuff with Epic.
"It didn’t help that IE was crap and Chrome became a better more hip browser. The real issue at hand was always about OS + software restrictions. Microsoft had a true monopoly - you automatically got IE with Windows as a “feature” and that ensured high adoption."
Meanwhile the government almost completely missed the first part of bundling in the 1980s when Microsoft devastated Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3. And the IE stuff was still way late in the day after Netscape got hammered.
Fellow tech worker and agree with almost all of your sentiment. But ultimately I can just put my phone down. Or we can legislate these platforms to open up their algorithms to user configuration or some other thing I don't know about. I am worried about our priorities. I agree social media algorithms are holding us back from thriving as people, but we have to pay attention to our survival needs first. It wasn't until I got smacked with my own health issues that I started to be disappointed with the government's priorities. I know for a fact that the "harm" I've felt from big tech companies of all types is nothing compared to what I've experienced trying to fix this dumb body of mine.
Indeed: without Facebook there could have been no Cambridge Analytica.
Some interesting thoughts on "a free browser like Chrome", and other tech productivity enhancements to our lives from Paul Krugman today at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-the-economics?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=277517&post_id=159582550&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=knd0a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I also want to chime in here; Chrome influences huge swaths of business; it isn't a problem in itself, but Google is. Google's search index controls the internet and they have used this to leverage out every competitor in businesses connected to that. And they continue to destroy competition by promoting their properties over others.
They’re very bad at crowding out others, and in any case Google is about to be disrupted by AI search.
I doubt it, they have the brand and rep, their own Chat Bot will take over and keep people further trapped in their walled fortress.
How will AI search disrupt Google. Just curious? Because isn't Google making a big play with AI to further refine the effectiveness of their engine?
"Because isn't Google making a big play with AI to further refine the effectiveness of their engine?"
It's pretty bad so far, and Google is one of multiple AI companies at this point.
"How will AI search disrupt Google"
If you type search terms into ChatGPT
a- You might just get your answer.
b- Even if you go on to a website from ChatGPT, you didn't need to use Google to click through to a website to read more about it.
Non Google search traffic is growing.
Can you name some of these competitors that Google used its search index to leverage out of the market?
Yep, every business whose Google rankings have been destroyed by an in house Google product, Google Travel, Google Reviews, Google maps. Just do a search, tons written about this in every country Google uses their search index to abuse. That isn't even touching the advertising market which is a tax on every business that needs to gain customers.
Hospitals have a monopoly on healthcare. That was one of the intentions of Obamacare, and it succeeded. Now what used to be regular old doctor’s offices and urgent care places can charge “facility fees” and receive higher Medicare reimbursement than doctor-run clinics. Criminal.
Sorry, I had in my head "healthcare cartels" (players coordinating to keep prices high, competition low, etc.) and "conglomerates propped up by private equity" as two separate things when writing, but you're right that PE does play a huge role in healthcare too. Veterinarian consolidation comes to mind. Those anti-competitive effects would be regional or local I bet. I was actually thinking of food, where production and distribution consolidation has created these monopsony situations. Farmers lose all their margin and get locked into restrictive contracts. Grocery store chains lose their margin on the other end. Something like a Walmart effect and its generalized form.
At this point, I think it’s hard not to psychologize people. When I was younger, I feel like the pseudo-religious, quasi-scientific people who yelled their pet theories from the rooftops that it really was all the bourgeoise, corporate power, the government, or the aliens that controlled everything were rare.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, it feels like they’re everywhere now.
If I were to use unnecessarily harsh wording here, I feel like these Warrenite types are essentially sore losers resentment project.
By that, I mean, just like you wrote in multiple articles, they are the ppl who got (overwhelmingly non stem) degree at prestigious undergrads or grad schools who had a really high expectation for their future and got super disappointed as they couldn’t get what they felt deserving. And I imagine they end up resenting ppl who had success - and post 2008, that’s tech ppl by and large. I feel like their obsession w Google and Meta are the epitome of it. And by extension, I think they also resent math or anything related - after all that’s the subject they struggled while giving money to ppl they resent in their view. I think that’s why their (voodoo) economics are highly ideological but lacking in the mathematical basis. At the same time, if you think of them as bunch of super highly educated ppl who struggle with math, their insane obsession with “languages” and “messaging” is a bit more understandable.
They're not even sore losers. They're sore winners. I can understand a sore loser, but a multi millionaire senator eaten by envy of billionaires is beyond my capacity for empathy.
It's resentment of one group of elites against another. This type of intra-elite friction and petty resentment is totally normal, and we can't stop it. Humans just work like this. Businesspeople resent the law professors just as much.
We just can't reorient our politics around that resentment, especially now.
yeah, I think the problem is one group of elites happened to dominate the institutes that has the political power(non profits org, congress staffer class etc)
And I also suspect this faction is better at coining catchy (but galaxy brain) phrases and spreading it as they have more non stem academia and journalists... and part of their extreme obsession to procedurism and "community input" can be explained by the composition of them (aforementioned ones and bunch of lawyers).
I wish they just saw the big picture and join forces with normie and pro growth liberals recognizing the banal fact "Orange man (and ketamine addict wannabe entertainer) bad (or as of right now horrible)"...
I think your overall essay is strong - its counter-productive to lean on anti corporate populism as an electoral strategy, many of the issues seized upon are wrong on the merits, and there likely is an intra-elite resentment component to it all (as you say, welcome to the story of basically all of history).
But I also think the tone of your essay downplays the true potential threat to prosperity from concentrations of power (market or otherwise) and the effects of the “free at point of use” model on politics and news media more broadly, given that suddenly *attention* and engagement becomes the new commodity.
Do you have anything to say on those issues, abstracting from your specific complaints from the essay? Or do you reject that they are worth monitoring?
Or is what you're really saying is, "We can't orient our politics around that resentment *for the wrong reason(s)*"??
To my ears, Warren is totally on top of the bad economics of extreme market concentration; just that her primary emphasis is on how it hurts *consumers*, not macroeconomic health. Or, if you feel it's her CFPB which is a waste of space, you should state your case. And/Or, if you feel that Monopoly/Oligopoly does not both result in macroeconomic negatives, and accretion of excessive political power, then also say so.
With all due respect I don't think it's envy that drives Warren. I think it's politics pure and simple. Warren has convinced herself that the best way to appeal to the progressive crowd is using these tactics. She may be wrong on the merits of the case but I don't think Envy is the actual issue.
Noah, you put forth the proposition that the Warrenite crowd went to school with the tech Bros and they're envious that they didn't make the kind of money the tech Bros make. Do you think Elizabeth Warren ran into the tech Bros at the University of Houston? Or at Rutgers law school? I don't think so. No more than you, I don't want to psychologize people but least in Warren's case I don't think Envy is the problem
I hit enter too soon. I had meant to preface what I wrote with the fact that I agree with you and the abundance movement on what needs to be done and think Warren is wrong and her opposition to it. I just wanted to make that clear.
The irony at the same time is, after seeing a comment on CHH article, it is young male tech worker who’s engaging in resentment project in the form of manosphere online… (i.e. in their view, CS degree should’ve promised success including romantic one but post Covid isolation plus tech job slashing made it very hard for them according to the commenter)
Because coding and intimate relationships are two different skill sets. With little if any overlap.
Which brings us full circle back to being a mid-30's male and getting deluged with with red pill ads. I mean what guy couldn't benefit from certain sexual lifehacks, yes?
Yeah exactly! I personally have been frustrated by this lack of introspection in American society from bottom to up.
And when it comes to the phenomenon in American elite, my galaxy brain take is both American way of upbringing (what Noah called out as over praising and no instilling of humility) and straight up Tiger Mom way of upbringing (oftentimes, they tell kids to study saying if you go to good school and programs, you’ll succeed) are to blame… at the same time, i def understand it really is hard to come up with a good message to convince kids to study and pursue good degree - like “you have a high likelihood of success if you’re comfortable constantly updating yourself, and that takes the form of studying” is prob the most accurate take but will convince 0 kids to study…
And those Tiger Mom-raised kids will then later apply their excellent study skills to mastering the Kama Sutra!
I think there's something to that. In Seattle, we've had years of blaming the rising housing costs on tech bros who make too much. We've had taxes on high salaries enacted and in many cases the advocates clearly state that increases in housing costs and visible homelessness are a result of tech bros making too much money not housing supply lagging behind demand, moving from a shelter to housing model by closing down shelters before you construct the housing, more tolerance of public camping and the spread of fentanyl.
Some of that is not wanting your city to change, but there's also plenty of "I went to school with people who became tech bros and they weren't that smart so it's wrong to pay them so much money". And maybe, but there's a reason that people with those skills are paid so well, namely that those skills are valuable. I've taught many people to code. All were smart and motivated enough to make a career of it but less than half stuck with it because it was boring , there was too much drudgery, or they just didn't like all the debugging, which is fine but it's also why its such a valuable skill. What's interesting is that I don't see the same arguments about orthopedic surgeons or even doctors and nurse practitioners. And definitely not about nonprofit executives making six figure salaries.
yeah 100%!
And I guess this hyping up of college education (and as Noah wrote here, the increased presense of knowledge economy) kinda created the worship of intelligence, which could be described as "IQ = the value of person" (here IQ does not necessarily mean the conventional IQ measured by the test, it is subjective scalar value of how smart one person is). And this resulted in weird source of cope and resentment, which I think is really really counterproductive. (Like, I believe that intelligence and skills are more of high demensional vector and if ppl started to think that way, we get more chill and have more productive conversation but I digress lol)
And as for nonprofit, I feel like it is so ironic that they started to behave way less strategic after the academic credential of members gets superb.
I suspect, as a result of education polarization and post 2008 job market, they sucked up a lot of disgrunted highly educated population, which made the non profit really prestigeous but very emotionally driven and puritanical. And I feel like non profit orgs get away exploiting employees with this prestige and am not a huge fan of it...
Google and Meta between them have wrecked traditional journalism by taking away the advertising revenue that traditional media relied upon. I suppose that could be one reason why non-STEM grads were particularly resentful (as journalism was a common career path for such grads) but it also has the greater harm of making it easier for disinformation to thrive.
Yeah, and plus internet overall made the journalism really competitive which destroyed the payment scale of journalism too
And for misinformation, I have a mixed feeling - overall, I think accusing of and requiring Meta and Google to monitor misinformation is a futile effort - that said, I think trying to regulate ever improving recommendation algo would’ve been more productive way - not only it has one of the reason misinformation spread but also it seems to radicalize ppl. And tbh that algo is almost like a very addictive drug and is kinda wild that there’s no regulation around it
I certainly don't advocate "requiring Meta and Google to monitor misinformation", especially as that this would create a huge additional barrier to entry that would only entrench the dominance of those firms in the first place.
What could be done is to require social media platforms to allow users to downvote posts (as is already possible on Slashdot or Reddit) with heavily-downvoted posts being hidden from view: this would prevent far-right activists (or anyone else) from shoving their stuff in the faces of unwilling readers.
Robert Nozick made a rather insightful argument about why intellectuals and scientists are generally opposed to capitalism: the issue of resentment is especially apparent among grad students, adjunct professors, and basically anyone in academia who was fed the BS line of "go to college or become a fry cook," partly because education has been really hyped up over the past for decades as a surefire path to upward mobility. Successful intellectuals, on the other hand, are probably jealous of how powerful and influential capitalists are without having to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops of academia.
<And by extension, I think they also resent math or anything related - after all that’s the subject they struggled while giving money to ppl they resent in their view. I think that’s why their (voodoo) economics are highly ideological but lacking in the mathematical basis.>
To be fair, there is a case to be made that the prolific use of mathematics in economics comes with certain tradeoffs. Yes, mathematical equations allow for immaculate levels of precision in theoretical work, but with higher precision comes a higher level of complexity and greater difficulty in conveying such information to the broader public. Economists are a notoriously defensive bunch (not entirely without reason), and their obsession with mathematical models at the expense is probably one reason (among many) that the public seems to distrust them.
I disagree (source: am academic). I don’t think it’s envy, I think it’s taste: people who invest in the prestige economy that fuels academia think that business people are often ignorant philistines.
They find them distasteful, in my experience. Most people who’ve made careers in academia (actually pretty hard to do) knew they were pursuing something other than money (though whether they’d admit how much of their ambition was still tied to status and prestige, I’m less confident).
Yeah, I think that tradeoff argument is makes a lot of sense - one of my pet peeves in American politics is lack of understanding of econ 101 stuff like price theory (on the left side) and how GDP is calculated (on the right side) (i increasingly feel lack of understanding of basic game theory by top figures in politics is also harming but i think it is besides the point) but part of it is econ is thought to be too theoretical for a lot of ppl like you said.
That said, the level of math to conceptually understand Econ 101 (or intro to game theory too tbh) is not that hard imo (prob the hardest math is Lagrange multiplier to solve for maximizing utilization function, which I don’t think is that hard imo but I can digress). I know this is super biased take as someone growing up in East Asia but I wish more ppl are a tiny bit more comfortable with math overall here…
It's important to remember that mathematics can be very intimidating to someone unused to dealing with it, and even more so for someone who is used to being seen as exceptionally brilliant (this happened to me in middle school when I had trouble learning about negative numbers).
Also, Econ 101 can be very misleading, so when people do their research and realize that (for example) price controls aren't always destructive or that free trade creates winners and losers, they feel betrayed by the people who initially taught them. It's one of the reasons why I think economists would do themselves a big favor if they did work with other social science disciplines and avoid the temptation to assume that mathematical prowess is the same as scholarly rigor. There's a culture war in academia between mathematically inclined economists and the more literary and verbal crowd, which I find fascinating.
yeah, I think math resembles a little bit to Peter's principle in a sense that "you feel comfortable with level of abstraction until you don't" and I def have to confess I tend to be oblivious to the fact that the level of abstraction ppl feel comfortable is vastly different (but somewhat trainable at the same time i think - linear algebra required a little bit of time for me to get used to but eventually got pretty comfortable). I remember watching a youtube video "teaching trigs to middle schooler" and I vividly remember when he reiterated "now we have to remember that we expand the definition of cosine and sines to use unit circles so that it takes angles outside of 0~pi/2 as we used to using right triangles" - this expansion came very natural to me back when I was a kid, so I never imagined that some ppl would struggle.
And yeah, while part of me feels there's a reason econ 101 is econ 101 - there's a lot of exceptions, this is def not well communciated or understood. Also, I think the challenge with econ 101 is oftentimes, at what level are you analyzing it is very confusing - sometimes, it is at a market level, and othertimes, it is at individual level but it is often not communicated well either I think. And tbh, I think the issue comes down to "the (econ) researcher is not necessarily good at teaching". I feel like this is prob really a missed opportunity as having more ppl with econ degree who's actually good at teaching would benefit a lot of ppl.
As for the culture war, one thing I find fascinating is econ is not the only social studies field having "math faction" and "verbal faction" - I think sociology and poli-sci could also be math (or in case of sociology, stats?) heavy but idk if they are the center of that debate lol
Antitrust lawyer here. I partially agree. The view from inside the government is that focusing exclusively on consumer welfare leads some anticompetitive companies to be able to degrade services without consequences. It would be silly to pretend that just because something doesn’t have a cost to the consumer that it doesn’t have a cost at all.
And yet. The problem is that the antitrust laws have no way of dealing with a lot of how our economy functions today. Google and Meta are sort of low hanging fruit. Antitrust can do nothing about Bezos owning Whole Foods and WaPo because they’re not in the same market. It can do almost nothing about united health buying thousands of small doctors offices and then forcing them to only take united insurance.
It’s actually demoralizing antitrust has become so politically salient. I want to go back to boring guppi analysis.
"Antitrust can do nothing about Bezos owning Whole Foods and WaPo because they’re not in the same market."
You are upset that antitrust laws can't do anything about things that have nothing to do with antitrust?
The only reason anyone cares about Bezos owning WaPo is because he hedged more moderate in the last election. No one thinks there is any market power concern. Where is the outrage at Buffett owning dozens of companies? There isn't any because it's not actually a problem. Buffett isn't as political so there is no need for the charade complaining about 'market power'.
I’m not personally upset. But if we’re talking about this kind of alleged corporate malfeasance then a company controlling a few big but different parts of the economy is concerning. Microsoft could buy Coca Cola tomorrow and antitrust has nothing to say on that. That this bothers people is a fact. I’m personally agnostic to it.
A lot of the tech acquisitions which the Biden administration were of similarly far afield businesses unless you think everything which doesn't involve making physical goods is the exact same industry, which unfortunately is something which the US judicial system finds plausible.
I’m not sure what you mean but any antitrust litigation requires setting both a product and a geographic market. It’s really difficult to show two companies are competing both geographically and product wise. Certainly “not making physical goods” doesn’t cut it and never has. If you have a case where the judicial system defined a market so loosely, please share.
N.b. there are of course upstream and downstream markets (leather —> shoes, if you monopolize leather then your competitors can’t make shoes, etc).
The framing of this essay is completely disingenuous. The idea of corporate feudalism is that they use their wealth and power to achieve stable “rents” while simultaneously lowering their tax burden and passing legislation to throttle competition. You need large corporations to scale production and put downward pressure on pricing, but that does not mean we should accept large monopoly power throughout our economy.
"The framing of this essay is completely disingenuous."
(proceeds to say bland, uncontroversial things that don't disagree with the essay)
OK, man.
Don’t be naive about the tech game plan. They use network effects to lock in customers and then they turn on the profit spigot by implementing a worse but more profitable version of the product which then gives them a war chest to fight off or acquire competitors and fund legislators to acquire tax carve outs. Almost every big tech company engages in some version of this. This activity is seeking stable “rents.” No they don’t have 100% of the market, but come on, you really think DuckDuckGo is a threat to google?
Google will never be replaced in online search is because they are in fact the best at it and invest to keep being the best.
Once a technology is mature and winners emerge it takes extreme mismanagement for the winners to lose to competitors *of the same technology*. How could they lose? They have the best technology plus they have an entire company built around that technology. Any competitor would have equal technology minus the entire company supporting that technology. Of course they are going to lose.
It requires new technology to displace the incumbents. No company will ever displace Google *in online search*. But eventually no one will use online search and some new company will be the leader in whatever replaces it.
Elon Musk could not have created an ICE car company. Jeff Bezos could not have created a Walmart competitor without the internet. Netflix could never have competed without streaming.
If you want more dynamic corporate landscape the solution is:
1. More investment in science and research so new technologies are available.
2. Deregulation to make it easier to build new companies.
I'm not seeing this monopoly power in the tech industry (with a few exceptions like Apple controlling what software you can install on your iphone). Meta was powerless to stop the rise of Tiktok. Google is unable to eliminate Ducduckgo or Kagi. Amazon is powerless to eliminate rival online retailers. The customer faces zero cost to switch.
If you don’t understand how stable “rents” and feudalism are synonymous, then I can’t help you.
> Google is unable to eliminate Ducduckgo or Kagi
Huh? Google has an 85% market share. Monopoly has never meant "eliminate all competition", just "eliminate enough that it doesn't matter". Kagi is literally not even a blip in the customer base. Fun fact: even at his peak, Rockefeller "only" controlled 91% of the US oil market and 85% of final sales. Should we have not broken up Standard Oil?
Monopolies aren't illegal. If you have a monopoly because everyone chooses to use your product there is absolutely no law against it and that is the case with Google.
There is a healthy debate to be had about tech monopolies. I do think it is worth noting that AI threatens to disrupt Google’s search business and we have an entirely new class of companies emerging. This is creative destruction at work and it could undermine concerns about monopolistic rents etc.
But regardless, Noah is asserting that most Americans just don’t care or don’t understand. They have other kitchen table issues at hand. And re-industrialization seems a more pressing concern anyway: to lower costs of necessary goods like housing and transportation, to bring about a green energy revolution, to ward off the threat China poses to our economy and the democratic world order, and to unleash innovative technologies like AI that could lead to accelerating drug discovery and robotics that can help drive down manufacturing costs, and all of this hopefully creating a virtuous cycle of building and innovating for the benefit of us all.
Twitter is a great example of capture by network. Why is Noah plowing the fields in Elon’s kingdom? I am sure Noah doesn’t want to choose to enrich Elon, and he is free to leave the platform, but he doesn’t - why?
Noah is small fry in the world of influencers. Maybe he likes X? In any case, I acknowledged that there’s room for debate.
X and the social media platforms represent network effects rather than technological market capture fwiw, as I am sure you also know. Should we legislate the break up of X? Divesture from private ownership? Reclaim the so-called public square as public property? Regular their content? Lots of people fall down on many different sides of these coins.
And the point is that I am not sure it’s the most important thing to confront. And I definitely don’t think most Americans do. I think finding people who can exploit the platforms for the “right reasons” may be the best bet fwiw.
Also, I believe the answer on what to do about network capture is right in front of us. The internet is an open protocol. We should probably steer some of these important global spanning networks in that direction - if possible. Bluesky is trying to do something like this, let’s see if it works. In the cases of natural monopolies, they should probably be treated like utilities - public/private entities. Countries around the world have grappled with these problems and we can accumulate best practices. It’s not as if there are no answers out there.
I believe the information ecosystem is as important to safeguard as our physical world. I believe social media companies are the big oil of the 21st century, as irresponsible of stewards of the information ecosystem as the energy sector has been of our planet. I believe it is absurd to promote the first amendment as so holy when what really matters nowadays is reach and audience and commanding attention, and that monopoly should be broken up immediately and turned into pubic utilities. The current business model is simply not good for our society or world and I don’t give a damn about their business interests.
And I believe that I am in the distinct minority on all of this :)
We are in agreement. That is why i am rooting for Bluesky and the AT protocol, even though I believe what they are doing is imperfect. https://observer.com/2025/03/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wants-world-without-caesars/
Is it really appropriate to blame climate change on "big oil", as opposed to blaming it on (for example) the dream of the suburbanized automotive city?
All I am saying is that you can’t frame it as “left hate big corporations - no work on Americans” and then single out people addressing a very specific thing, which is corporations abusing network affects or market position in an effort to seek rents. Once again, you need big companies to scale production and put downward pressure on prices - but it should be fine to call out corporations abusing their position. Corporate feudalism refers to something very specific. Not mentioning that it means something very specific is disingenuous. Furthermore, this was not the top of the liberal platform. If I remember correctly, the main thrust of Kamala’s platform was building more housing - work for all Americans. She wasn’t yelling “big company bad.” That is a rewriting of history. They took her pretty banal price gauging line item and blew it up into something it wasn’t. Straw man stuff.
When I hear “corporate feudalism” I don’t think of one specific thing. It seems like a catch-all to me, although I have zero idea how others have been using it.
They should be specific if they have something specific in mind.
https://sandersinstitute.org/technofeudalism-explained-with-yanis-varoufakis
It is derived from essays and a book written by Greek’s old finance minister.
Americans may not care, but it still matters. Also there is an opportunity cost associated with dollars being sucked up into organizations that can provide returns based on rent seeking behavior rather than pushing down the marginal cost of services or products due to innovation.
If you don’t understand how tech has leveraged network effects to achieve something similar to rents, then I can’t help you.
They crushed TikTok.
The most important addressable form of corporate power in any democracy imo is campaign financing. Just ban corporate (and union) political donations and set sharp limits on all others.
How do you do that, though? What counts as a donation? Does Joe Rogan's interview of Trump count? It clearly provided material benefit worth millions. What about propaganda networks like fox and MSNBC? Could a billionaire start his own network and run ads for his favored candidate? If you ban that kind of stuff it would be a violation of freedom of the press. And how is buying a TV add on someone else's network any less of an exercise of freedom of the press than starting your own network?
<How do you do that, though?>
Fairly simple. One could simply ban any and all private expenditures and force political campaigns to rely on public money. I'd also argue this is a superior method, as forcing billionaires to start their own media simply adds to the preexisting market of ideas while reducing the amount of time politicians have to spend fundraising, making them vulnerable to lobbying and special interests more generally. More news networks and outlets mean more journalists, and more journalists mean greater transparency and a larger role for public dialogue.
I was thinking of direct contributions but you’re right that third party advertising is a difficult issue to find a consensus on. This was just pronounced on by the Supreme Court of Canada in a split decision on an Ontario law
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-election-advertising-supreme-court-ruling-1.7477371
That would make our problems much worse. Our campaign finance system is now heavily weighted toward small dollar donors and activist types. As a result of Bipartisan Campaign Finance (BICRA) reform, the political parties lost much of their power to act as gatekeepers and limit who could run under their name. Parties are supposed to be able to vet candidates and direct funding. If a candidate, for instance, was unwilling to accept the results of the election, didn’t agree with the party, or wasn’t even a member, the parties, as institutions, had an interest in not letting them run under their banner. Or if a young, fresh faced, promising young politician wanted to run for president after being the dog catcher of a small town, they would say “not yet; how about we help you run for mayor, or the House. Or maybe why don’t you work as a staffer with this Congressmen. We need people like you, but you are 35. You aren’t running for president under our banner.” BICRA changed the incentives of candidates, since getting funding depended on much smaller amounts of money from organizations and individuals. Most people don’t donate to campaigns, and those who do aren’t exactly representative of the median voter or “moderate.” They are highly partisan and want people who “fight.” The tea party bomb throwers, and the most over the top progressive left candidates, needed to get the attention of extremely ideological people.
Trump could not have run as a Republican even as recently as the 90s with his 2015 persona/issues. He didn’t agree with the party as it existed and wouldn’t have received party support and funding. In 2015, the GOP was powerless to stop him. He got plenty of money from small donors, much like Sanders.
"Populism Without Popularity" perfect ☆☆☆ Say no to PwP
Say Yes to Abundance Liberalism!!
Focus. Simple message. Build. Produce results that you can buy, touch, travel upon/on, live in.
Maybe (gasps to self), be the Political Wal-Mart.
Lib-Mart. We enable - you to get more things
As is typical with your posts., this one is beyond brilliant
The Warren Bernie wing taking over the Dems will FINALLy get me to bite the bullet and vote for non Dems up and down the ticket
In 2024, for the first time ever, I voted for “Mickey Mouse” for my congressional representative as I live in a deep blue state and my choices were a squad leader 🙄 or a GOP wingnut
Unless Mickey is actually trans-Minnie.
Noah,
I was the Chief of Staff of the Antitrust Division during the Biden Administration. I’m a fan of much of what you write, so I’m going to assume much of your criticism comes from not fully understanding both the cases before the FTC and DOJ from 2021-2024 and what the FTC/DOJ were doing than from a wilfull misreading of what was accomplished.
I agree, 99.9% of voters will never choose a candidate based on there stances on neo-Brandeisian v. Chicago School. But to say that there wasn’t popular concern about the size and power of corporations is not backed up by the facts. There were two years of highly watched bipartisan hearings on Big Tech during the Trump Administration. There might have been different reasons for the right and the left to try to curb their power, but both Dems and the GOP ran on doing so.
Secondly, this is where I just assume you don’t follow antitrust policy, but the Biden Administration was decidedly not obsessed with tech and very much focused on industries and markets that impact the daily lives of Americans. The Google and Facebook cases were brought by Trump 1.0. These cases take a long time to go to trial. Facebook was filed in 2020, it’ll be in front of a court next month. Yes, DOJ sued Apple (an investigation started under Trump) and FTC sued Amazon (likewise), but:
1) we also won two airline cases, at a time when flying fiascos came to be a regular pain point.
2) won a case to protect the earnings of authors and to stop further consolidation in publishing
3) sued LiveNation-Ticketmaster, another marketplace villain to most Americans
4) sued a company that uses machine learning to artificially inflate the price of rent in most housing markets
5) protected medical innovation by guarding against roll ups of cutting edge treatments and terstings AND stopped additional consolidation in speciality physician practices
6) launched an investigation of UnitedHealthcare, and sued to stop them from taking over the underwriting systems their competitors use
7) Destroyed “the tournament system” which literally drove thousands of poultry growers into poverty.
8) Issued new merger guidelines that have been adopted by the Trump 2.0 Administration because they are non-ideological and they work, meeting antitrust law with modern economics AND also took on non-competes, no poaching agreements, and other conduct that stymies economic opportunity for workers.
I really do appreciate that these things might not have broken through, but to say that the Biden antitrust regime was ineffective or too focused on billionaires for the sake of them being billionaires is just wrong. Antitrust, as we saw it, and as I continue to see it, is not only the “Abundance Agenda” but has been aiming for abundance for years.
I know there are some people who are attacking Ezra, Derrick, Matt, and You. I can’t speak for them. I can only say “welcome to the party, we antitrust hawks have been doing this for years. Let’s work together on this'.”
Welp, hope you read this. I assume you won’t, commenting fairly late as it is.
As someone involved in some of these matters, I agree with this take even if I did not agree with every choice by the administration in antitrust. Noah frustratingly is a prodigious writer but the general post-Biden hysteria lacks a substantial understanding of detail and argumentative charity, particularly on this topic. Thanks for your hard work; I worked with your team and was impressed.
MA voter here. Completely done with Warren for the reasons outlined in this post. She just hasn’t shown up for the big fights and seems slow to understand so much of what’s going on. Two Income Trap is as strong an argument for Abundance as can be made and yet at this point I kind of wonder if she’s a closeted NIMBY?
Noah, I reluctantly must disagree with you on the dangers of corporate gigantism. Did you fall to see the photos of the crowd at Trump's inauguration? Did you note how many of Trump's cabinet are billionaires? Trump's announced taxation policy benefits corporate billionaires almost exclusively. These billionaires may not be an economic problem but they surely are a political economy problem.
Actually I got the exact opposite conclusion from you re the CEOs at the inauguration. It shows that these billionaire builders have nothing political muscle wise, and am forced to kiss ass to a buffoon in order to survive.
One of those billionaires is currently leading the US government.
And he contributed about a quarter of a billion dollars to electing Trump.
That level of corporate $$$ power is way, way over the top.
Him yeah I agree. Ironically not the one with Google and Amazon which have arguably more monopolistic powers (per our discussion re Trust). Elon got there w/o owning a trust.
Yes but SpaceX and Starlink are both government subsidized monopolies.
It’s just a classic example of elites focusing on issues that primarily affect elites. The average American knows nothing about google search or programmatic ads or anything like that, unless they work in advertising or marketing. These elites however run PACs and 501(c)(3)s and businesses and political parties and campaigns, and so they are keenly aware of digital ads and the cost of getting someone’s attention online in 2025. It’s probably one of their key concerns. They’ve also, like Europe, latched onto “privacy” as if it’s a major problem and major concern for average people. As if the person posting the most intimate details of her life online for the entire planet to see cares about whether Facebook shares the type of Instagram accounts she follows with a 3rd party data broker to sell her more effective ads and targeted products. I used to help manage compliance with California’s CCPA for some small businesses. Out of a portfolio of dozens of clients, we only ever had one person fill out the form to opt out. Nobody cares. It’s a Dunning-Kruger disconnect: they’re so out of touch they don’t even know how out of touch they are.
I'm not sure how anybody buys the "give the government more power to crack down on the corporations that have power over you" line. If you care about people with power over you, the government, who has 1000x times more than any company should be your primary concern. You can call it "class resentment" if you like, but its real name is envy
Not everyone is a hardcore libertarian.
It’s just plainly empirically true.
Seems to be naive to think that Google and Meta have not already seized large amounts of political power. They influence public thought and opinion in ways that men like William Randolph Hearst could’ve only dreamed, not to mention the MASSIVE amount of money they spend lobbying Congress and electing politicians.
I would agree that anti-corporatism is generally bad politics during the current moment, but I find any argument un-compelling that downplays the incredible power and influence that Google and Meta have in directing how people find and access information and news. Not to mention the measurable harm that apps like Instagram have on young people’s attention spans and overall mental health…
It's much less power than the legacy media had over information before the Internet made them obsolete. Their audience was totally captive. And the Democrats never had a problem with that. They aren't really complaining about the amount of power these companies have they are complaining that the power isn't theirs to wield.
To be fair, the GOP does the same whenever they complain about the role of organized labor in politics. They're more than happy to accept donations from big business and celebrate it as a pure expression of free speech, but if a teacher's union endorses a municipal candidate for office they decry it as a prima facie example of corruption and regulatory capture. In fact they're more than happy to decry it: they even fund organizations that deliberately try to undermine public-sector unions, either by banning them in practice or regulating them to death (not that the Left doesn't do this as well, but generally speaking the Right has more money and more resources so they're much better at this sort of skullduggery).
The legacy media had journalistic standards and ethics, though. They obviously did not always get it right, but I trust the NYT or Washington post to report the truth more than I do any influencer on Facebook or Twitter.
My take is William Randolph Hearst’s political influence far exceed that of ceo of Google and meta.
It’s not about the CEOs, it’s about the platform itself. Choosing not to moderate your content and having an algorithm that boosts inflammatory posts is the same decision as editorializing your newspapers, just less visible and obvious.
One obvious point is that without Facebook there could have been no Cambridge Analytica.
It does manipulate search results for political ends (against the right), that's been well established for years.
Abundance thinking is the correct approach but you can’t ignore that corporations and billionaires will hoard political power for the express purpose of hoarding wealth. So that system results in abundance for the few, not the many. We need to find a way to creat abundance but ensure it’s shared by the many. Tax policy is one way to do that but the wealthy will block good policy whenever possible so we need measures to prevent that. But in the face of Citizens United and a powerless FEC and massive disinformation via social media (which is mostly controlled by billionaires now), I don’t see how that’s possible.