One More Time With Feeling: The GOP Never Seriously Supported ‘Antitrust Reform’ Or Monopoly Busting

For the last few years, press and policy circles were absolutely dominated by talk about how there was an amazing “new, bipartisan coalition” of folks interested in “reining in ‘Big Tech’,” meaningfully checking corporate power, and finally embracing competent “antitrust reform.”

The problem: it was largely all bullshit.

The GOP in particular, which has, for forty years, embraced and encouraged monopolization and consolidation at nearly every turn (see: telecom, banking, insurance, media, healthcare, air travel, energy, etc.), was repeatedly portrayed by some pundits and journalists as “very serious about antitrust reform this time.”

At least as it applied to “Big Tech.” There are countless U.S. business sectors where monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are rampant that Congress simply couldn’t give any less of a shit about because crowing wildly about them generally doesn’t get you a prime-time spot on corporation-controlled cable news. Legitimate anger at “Big Tech” did provide an opening for dialogue.

For years, many of these same experts quite correctly pointed out that U.S. antitrust reform had grown toothless and frail, our competition laws desperately needed updating in the Amazon era, and “are consumers happy?” (the traditional consumer welfare standard) no longer meaningfully measured all aspects of potential harm in complex internet-connected markets.

The problem: the GOP’s interest in antitrust reform was never really genuine. Politicians like Senators Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz glommed onto a legitimate reform movement primarily to gain leverage over Silicon Valley tech giants, hoping (pretty successfully, as it turns out) to scare them away from moderating the kind of race-baiting hate speech and political propaganda increasingly employed by America’s growing conspiracy theory addled authoritarians.

Some folks, like popular monopoly buster Matt Stoller — the subject of a somewhat glowing profile piece in Politico last week — meaningfully bought into Hawley’s claim he actually cared about the public interest on this subject. The most generous interpretation is that Stoller saw it as an opportunity to develop a meaningful new bipartisan coalition on antitrust reform.

It didn’t go particularly well, something that anybody with even a fleeting grasp of fifty years of GOP policy history probably could have predicted:

For some of Stoller’s critics, the episode put in sharp relief the folly of his attempt to celebrate Hawley’s antitrust work. About ten days after the Capitol riot, a software engineer with his own interest in antitrust built a website — “Why Did Matt Stoller Shut Up About Josh Hawley Dot Com” — complete with a countdown clock noting that Stoller had tweeted about Hawley just before midnight on the 5th but not since.

Politico’s interpretation is that legitimizing and validating the GOP’s hollow performance on antitrust reform was somehow a helpful means to an end, and that, as a result, Stoller has been “winning over Conservatives” despite some strange looks cast his direction by other trustbusters:

The Hawley gambit is part of a broader effort to build a bipartisan consensus around the idea that government should use its might to challenge the power of big business. And amid what some on the right are calling the “Realignment,” which has some conservatives and Republicans reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power, he has a fresh opportunity to do just that.

The problem, again, is that the GOP was never actually interested in “reevaluating their orientation toward corporate power,” and claiming otherwise gave the party unearned policy credibility in the media and policy circles it never had to actually earn.

There’s fleeting evidence the GOP was every actually interested in any of the policy reforms Stoller and friends claimed they were shifting toward.

GOP party leaders are still out there, week after week, defending monopolization across countless sectors, dismantling the regulatory state, undermining the nominations of hugely popular reformers, stacking the courts to the benefit of large corporations, and coddling the most radical whims of unchecked corporate power across nearly every industry.

So unsurprisingly, not much ever actually came from the GOP’s sudden and completely uncharacteristic support of antitrust reform, despite two straight years of sound and fury by Stoller, Glenn Greenwald, and some major news outlets like Politico.

The results were some, sloppy bills, several specifically tailored to only apply to the biggest tech companies, which failed to gain necessary traction in Congress despite endless press rhetoric about a bold new “bipartisan” coalition that was destined to change everything. All while the GOP saw relatively little coverage of efforts like its propaganda-laden assault on FCC nominee Gigi Sohn.

To be clear, despite the press narrative to the contrary, I don’t think either party is particularly serious about antitrust reform. Congress is simply too grotesquely corrupt, and the combined cross-industry lobbying opposition to meaningful reform (see: consumer privacy) is too gargantuan to be overcome without a massive policy and cultural sea change, serious and unified lobbying and campaign finance reform, and an historic, voter-driven upheaval of the affluent, captured, congressional gerontocracy.

By absolutely every indication, we’ll all be waiting a while.

Some key Democrats, like Katie Porter and Lina Khan, do at least actually care about the issue. Some key Republicans, like Ken Buck, kind of care, but are so mired in bigoted partisan fever dreams (see his threat to use antitrust to punish “woke Apple” or his tendency to shoot his own legislation in the ass via strange missteps) he’s effectively useless as any kind of serious reformer.

The peril of taking the GOP seriously on this subject came with a nasty side effect: it normalized and legitimized insurrectionist pseudo-populists like Hawley, who were able to hide their real agendas — namely their assault on content moderation of increasingly unhinged authoritarian propaganda — under the banner of legitimate interest in anti-monopolization and antitrust reform.

That’s not to say there’s no value in bipartisan coalition building, or that even the most corrupt policy makers can never change their stripes. But that’s a far cry from what happened here: the legitimization and normalization of increasingly unhinged authoritarian bullshit artists with a generation-long history of supporting unchecked corporate power on nearly every level.

You needed only look at the last 50 years of GOP policy history to see how this gambit was going to turn out, something ignored by folks like Stoller (whose not so “progressive” China hawkery is ignored by Politico), keen on creating an illusory bipartisan coalition that never actually was.