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Kamala Harris Should Embrace—and Build Upon—Biden’s Antitrust Legacy
Harris should reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission, signalling that under her administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.
Sep 06, 2024
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket hasn’t just shifted the 2024 electoral calculus—it’s also reignited the battle for the party’s ideological soul. Just as progressives have outlined their hopes for a Harris administration, so too have bad faith actors looking to turn back the clock on the most significant progressive achievement of the Biden era: the reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.
The revival of anti-monopoly politics has been met with predictable ire from corporate interests that have got off scot-free for decades. This has been largely directed at Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair who has taken on some of America’s most entrenched monopolies. Rather than accede to the demands of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, Harris should embrace—and entrench—the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts.
It goes without saying that progressives have the right to be disappointed with the legacy of the Biden administration in many respects. Whether one lays the blame on the White House or congressional math, many of the most promising initiatives pushed in 2021 never made it to law. However, the early Biden administration’s focus on reinvigorating antitrust enforcement is one that has paid dividends in the years that followed. The Reagan-era defanging of antitrust helped pave the way for the present-day monopoly crisis, which has left its mark on everything from the tech sector to the rental market to grocery shopping.
The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.
The Biden administration deserves credit for breaking with his predecessors’ hands-off approach to taking on corporate monopolies. Both Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), have taken a tough line against anti-competitive behavior. Khan and Kanter’s efforts to block illegal mergers have been met with rage from corporate America’s worst offenders. This has resulted in frivolous demands for their recusals from key antitrust cases, as well as broader efforts to kneecap antitrust regulation itself. With a “changing of the guard” on the Democratic ticket, these same actors have taken to demanding Harris abandon Biden-era antitrust efforts, complete with a change in personnel.
Harris should reject these demands, and instead look to Khan and Kanter’s successes as a road map for enacting change in Washington. Time and time again, Khan and Kanter have delivered victories for consumers in the face of a hostile press and a right-wing judicial landscape. In August, the DOJ emerged victorious in its historic U.S. v. Google antitrust lawsuit, one that Kanter fittingly says belongs on the “Mount Rushmore of antitrust cases.” In the years following House Democrats’ 2020 report on monopoly power in the tech sector, Biden administration enforcers have filed antitrust suits against Amazon and Apple, along with a separate Google suit set to go to trial this month.
If successful, these lawsuits stand to rein in some of the tech sector’s worst abuses. But make no mistake: The FTC and DOJ’s antitrust efforts target far more than just the abuses of the “Big Tech” giants. This year, the DOJ launched a blockbuster antitrust suit against Ticketmaster, which was largely given a pass for its abuses in previous administrations. The DOJ Antitrust Division has stood with tenants by filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage over the company’s role in enabling rental price gouging. The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.
Antitrust enforcement is both crucial to building a fairer economy and broadly popular with the general public. For this reason, Harris should firmly reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission. Doing so would send a strong signal that under a Harris administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.
Instead of turning back the clock on antitrust, a Harris administration should build upon the progress of the last three years by launching other needed antitrust initiatives. This could include, among others, taking on YouTube-related competition issues, which advocates have sounded the alarm on. More broadly, the DOJ and FTC under a Harris administration should continue to probe would-be monopolists in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Given the scope of monopolistic behavior in today’s economy, regulators under a Harris Administration must take a vigilant approach to anti-competitive practices across sectors.Keep ReadingShow Less
'Woah!': FTC Applauded for Launching Inquiry Into Surveillance Pricing
"Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. "Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices."
Jul 23, 2024
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday launched an investigation into surveillance pricing and requested information from eight companies on the practice.
The FTC inquiry will look at the effect of surveillance pricing—using data on consumers' behavior or characteristics to manipulate the price for them as individuals—on privacy, competition, and consumer protection.
The agency asked Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, and McKinsey for information on the practice, as well as four less well-known companies that service major corporations.
"Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. "Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices."
"Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC's inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen," she added.
1. Firms harvest a trove of Americans’ personal data, from your browsing history to your biometrics. Now firms could be using this data to target you with an individualized price.
Today @FTC launched an inquiry into these surveillance pricing tactics. https://t.co/G4uc8lHWOV
— Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) July 23, 2024
Progressive advocacy groups, which have long considered Khan to be one of their strongest allies in the Biden administration, and which argue that discriminatory pricing is unfair, celebrated the FTC's announcement.
"We're thrilled to see the FTC crack down on the dystopian practice of surveillance pricing," Lee Hepner, legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement. "It's chilling to think that companies have so much control over our lives that they can leverage personal data they've harvested—including your location, demographic, and shopping history—to turn our habits against us and hike up prices on essential goods. But it's already happening."
Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens also praised the FTC move, warning that "a personalized price might sound nice, but it is actually a three-part corporate strategy to spy on you, isolate you, and overcharge you."
"Today's investigation is an important step in cracking down on the methods big corporations use to spy on consumers to rip them off," Owens said in a statement.
Emily Peterson-Cassin, a director at Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement that Tuesday's announcement was "another strong sign that the FTC is fighting for consumer power over corporate power."
Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University who has helped lead the opposition to surveillance pricing, reacted with excitement on Tuesday.
"Woah!" she wrote on social media. "The FTC is going there! So excited to see the FTC launching a full study into how companies use data to serve different prices to different people. We know the incentive and capacity is there, but the reality of surveillance pricing has been a triple-locked black box!"
Advocates of surveillance pricing sometimes call it personalized pricing and argue that it efficiently allocates resources. Such pricing questions are the subject of great interest among business school academics, especially at elite institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, according to a detailed article in The American Prospect last month.
A crackdown on the practice could conceivably have support across the political spectrum. Stock guru Jim Cramer of CNBC—a frequent and vociferous critic of Khan—praised the FTC's announcement on air on Tuesday, while expressing disbelief that he was doing so.
7/ Even @jimcramer agrees that surveillance pricing is not an honest or ethical way to treat customers.
“How could you live with yourself?” if you’re a business that uses this strategy, he asked this morning.
“That is a great report. I agree with [@FTC].” pic.twitter.com/23HEDk8Yqf
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) July 23, 2024
All five FTC commissioners, including two Republicans, voted to move forward with the investigation, which will focus on intermediary firms—"the middlemen enabling firms to algorithmically tweak and target their prices," according to a blog post the FTC also published Tuesday.
The requests for information don't indicate that the eight firms engaged in wrongdoing, but rather that they can be useful sources of information, an unnamed FTC official toldThe Hill.
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Big Oil's Un-American Scheme to Price-Gouge Consumers
From ExxonMobil's long-running climate denial to Pioneer's recent price-fixing, it's clear this rogue industry's business model is deny, deceit, and delay.
May 09, 2024
You know how the oil industry is always saying the U.S needs to drill more to lower gas prices and protect energy independence? Well it turns out they've actually been scheming behind the scenes with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to do the exact opposite.
A bombshell complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week reveals that Scott Sheffield, the former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources—one of the largest oil producers in the Permian Basin—colluded with OPEC officials in an attempt to artificially limit supply and jack up prices.
The FTC's complaint alleges that Sheffield exchanged private WhatsApp messages with leaders at OPEC, assuring them that Pioneer and other Permian companies would pump the brakes on output in order to keep prices high. He even threatened to "punish" any companies that dared to ramp up production. I don't know about you, but to me it's hard to imagine anything more un-American and anti-competitive than that.
The FTC complaint is the latest proof: The fossil fuel industry will always put their greed above American consumers and fair competition.
This private coordination with OPEC glaringly contrasts with Big Oil's public rhetoric blaming the Biden administration for constraining U.S. production and raising energy costs—a bogus talking point that Republicans have been parroting for months now. The bad faith has been laid bare: Oil executives themselves are colluding with a foreign cartel to throttle supply and price-gouge American consumers to pad their own pockets.
These revelations fit into a broader pattern of the fossil fuel industry's deception and abuse. Just one day before the FTC filing, the Senate Budget Committee held an explosive hearing detailing how oil giants have waged a decades-long, industry-wide disinformation campaign to downplay the catastrophic climate damage that they knew their products would cause, all while raking in record profits. From ExxonMobil's long-running climate denial to Pioneer's recent price-fixing, it's clear this rogue industry's business model is deny, deceit, and delay.
Here's the kicker: Big Oil is about to get a whole lot more powerful. With it looking like the Exxon-Pioneer merger is going to move forward (without Scott Sheffield), and Chevron pursuing a $50 billion takeover of Hess, a few mega-corporations are rapidly consolidating to control our energy grid. Studies show that mergers like these are pretty certain to squash competition, send prices soaring, and concentrate massive political influence to block necessary climate action.
That's the grim future we face if we let them get away with it: A world where a handful of greedy oil oligarchs collude with OPEC to bleed us dry at the pump while knowingly burning our planet. Fortunately, cities and states are fighting back with lawsuits and legislation to make polluters pay for their lies and damages.
Last year, California joined the fight, suing Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, and their lobbying arm for deliberately deceiving the public about fossil fuels' climate impacts, aiming to force them to cough up billions for disaster recovery. And right now, states like Vermont are advancing bills to create climate "superfunds" funded by Big Oil's ill-gotten gains. In fact, New York just passed their polluter pay bill in the Senate this week, bringing New Yorkers and the nation one step closer to accountability for Big Oil.
But in order to truly rein in this reckless industry, we need help at the federal level. At a minimum, Congress should eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and strengthen antitrust laws. At the Department of Justice, leaders must investigate the industry's long history of spreading disinformation. And in the White House, President Joe Biden should declare a climate emergency and wield his powers to rapidly increase the production of clean energy resources.
For decades, Big Oil has ransacked our wallets, ravaged our environment, and rigged our democracy. The FTC complaint is the latest proof: The fossil fuel industry will always put their greed above American consumers and fair competition. It's time to make polluters pay.
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