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Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are forecast to deploy $4 trillion in capital expenditures over the next five years! Most of this is earmarked for data centers that host AI services. These investments are risky and speculative like the infrastructure investment booms of previous years. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has warned that if AI growth forecasts are off by even a year, companies face bankruptcy.

Still ordinarily we celebrate private infrastructure investment – it is the engine of US economic growth. However, AI investment is different given its scale, yes, but also because it is competing for relatively scarce electricity and water resources.

The combined energy demand for these data centers will be the equivalent of adding a country the size of Spain to the American grid in just three years, and communities are bearing the costs of these developments. Residential electricity prices jumped 7.1 percent in 2025, more than double the rate of inflation, with increases topping 20 percent in some states. And yet communities bearing the brunt of this transformation have had almost no say in whether, where, or how these facilities are built. The secrecy surrounding these projects is remarkable. In Virginia, 25 of 31 communities with existing or proposed data centers had signed nondisclosure agreements with local officials, effectively shutting residents out of decisions that would reshape their neighborhoods. (See Consumer Reports – AI Data Centers: Big Tech’s Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More)

It is also unclear what benefits if any these data centers provide to local communities. Research shows that despite billions in state tax incentives—Virginia and Texas each provide roughly $1 billion per year in data center tax exemptions—there is no clear evidence that data centers stimulate local growth in technology employment.

Think about that. Local politicians are subsidizing data centers and signing NDAs for projects that often raise electricity prices and create little local benefit. What does that say about the power of these tech companies?

Thankfully, there is growing awareness and backlash against the unchecked proliferation of AI data centers. Leaders like Bernie Sanders and AOC have taken note. We are also seeing candidates like Elizabeth Ferris, running for the West Virginia State Senate, who understand this issue. In a state being courted by billions in data center investment, she represents a new generation of policymakers willing to ask hard questions about who benefits and who pays.

The data center gold rush does not have to be a story of extraction and abandonment. As Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue in their book Power and Progress, (illustrated in this comic), the broad-based prosperity we enjoy today was not an automatic consequence of technological advancement— it was the result of citizens and workers organizing, challenging elite-dominated choices, and forcing ways of sharing the gains more equitably. From the industrial revolution to electrification, every transformative technology has required democratic engagement to ensure it serves the many rather than the few. We need an engaged public demanding accountability from both the companies reshaping their communities and the officials elected to protect them.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Americans Agree: The Government Shouldn’t Use AI Tech to Spy on Us

Three out of four Americans oppose giving the government unrestricted access to AI technology to surveil citizens, but Congress is asleep behind the wheel. In a new op-ed in Common Dreams, NextGen Competition Executive Director Sumit Sharma breaks down how OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon are enabling a domestic surveillance apparatus while hiding behind terms of service. Read it here.

Settling with an Illegal Monopoly: Welcome to the Era of Trump Antitrust

The strategy to avoid antitrust scrutiny by the Trump DOJ is now crystal clear. Hire the right lobbyists, pay off the President, and voila, you can sidestep an antitrust trial. Live Nation just proved it.

This month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Live Nation announced a settlement in the government’s landmark antitrust case. The same company whose employees called fans “stupid” and bragged about “robbing them blind” is now out of hot water. Instead of a breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, the parent company will cap fees at 15% and pay $200 million in damages. The acting antitrust chief, Omeed Assefi, called it a deal to be “proud of.” The judge called the outcome “mindboggling,” and many Ticketmaster users agree.

Here’s how it happened. Live Nation was reportedly in talks with DOJ officials outside the antitrust division (going around the career enforcement staff) to cut a deal. Gail Slater tried to shut that down, objecting to a settlement and pushing for trial. Slater abruptly left her position on February 12. Less than a month later, the settlement was done.

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general is already pledging to continue the case to protect consumers because they were not part of the settlement discussions. Sen. Klobuchar and six Democratic colleagues sent a letter to AG Pam Bondi demanding DOJ records related to Slater’s ouster and communications between department leadership and Live Nation lobbyists. Sen. Warren put it plainly: “Under Donald Trump, antitrust enforcement has become a growing cesspool of corruption.”

In our recent interview with congressional candidate Carleigh Beriont, she said it directly: “When the administration uses antitrust enforcement as a political weapon or a prize, that’s corruption.” Live Nation’s settlement is Exhibit A.

Antitrust enforcers didn’t fail because they lacked the legal authority. They failed because the people at the top were working a different agenda. Many of the DOJ career staff did their jobs. The state AGs are doing theirs. It was the political appointees who folded after answering the right lobbyist’s call.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Google Settles with Epic: After a jury found Google’s Play Store an illegal monopoly and the Supreme Court was one rejection away from complete victory for Epic, both companies agreed to settle. According to Android Authority, the settlement reduces Play Store fees, allows third-party in-app and web payments, and streamlines competing store installs.

That sounds like a victory. But Judge James Donato isn’t so sure:

“The only changed circumstance that I can see right now is Epic and Google — two mortal enemies who pounded each other relentlessly in this courtroom for many years — are suddenly BFFs…right now I’m not saying it’s a bag of nothing, but it’s a bag of not great.”

He has since requested “friend of the court“ briefs before making a final decision, and the settlement remains unapproved.

Slater Gets the Last Word: After her abrupt departure last month, former AAG for Antitrust Gail Slater used The Regulatory Review to present her tenure at DOJ as a steady, principled effort to preserve competition amid political and bureaucratic turbulence. She highlighted several of the year’s major antitrust matters, including the Google search remedies trial, the RealPage settlement, and conditions on the Constellation-Calpine merger, while defending a pragmatic enforcement philosophy focused on “pocketbook markets” and institutional capacity. Whether that record ultimately matches the rhetoric is, of course, open to debate, but Slater leaves little doubt about how she wants her time to be remembered. ⚖️

A standout line:

“What I am most proud of during my tenure is that I never compromised on principles. I made decisions based on what I thought was best for American competition and consumers. The inevitable noise was not my concern—remember, a public servant is a temporary fixture and a steward for others. The noise is now quiet, while the signal persists.”

And on Live-Nation Ticketmaster (Would she have settled? 🤔):

“The Antitrust Division has twice tried to fix competition issues in the live entertainment market, but both consent decrees failed. Again, some cases just need to go to trial. We shall see if the third time will be the charm for the remaining states who chose to proceed to trial in the wake of the DOJ’s recent settlement announcement.”

DOJ in Shambles: If Slater’s piece offered a polished account of her time at DOJ, The Wall Street Journal supplies the darker version, detailing the chaos, pressure, and threats that reportedly led to her departure in February amid the HPE-Juniper controversy. According to the paper, Mike Davis, a lawyer for HPE and close Trump ally, allegedly told Slater, “If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ.” 😳

Fixing Search Remedies: In a new paper, Executive Director Sumit Sharma lays out how to effectively implement and strengthen the remedies ordered in the Google search case, focusing on syndication, web search indexing, and user-side data sharing. He argues that while the current remedies provide key inputs for competition, their success will depend on flexibility, which would allow competitors to mix, match, and build on these tools over time. Sumit also highlights the need for ongoing industry engagement and potential adjustments to ensure the remedies can support a diverse group of competitors, not just replicate Google’s vertically integrated model.

Big Tech Commits to…Nothing: Earlier this month, Big Tech signed a “nonbinding” pledge that the current administration has touted with a White House event as a win to ensure taxpayers aren’t on the hook for the massive amount of electricity tech giants’ data centers will need.

Ari Peskoe, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, summed the event up nicely:

“This is theater. This is a press release designed to make it seem like they are addressing this issue. But this issue can only really be addressed by utility regulators or Congress. The White House doesn’t really have a lot of moves here, and I don’t think the tech companies themselves are the most important parties on cost issues.”

For a more extensive deep-dive on this smoke-and-mirrors pledge, check out Jenna Ruddock’s piece in Tech Policy Press, where she highlights the “technical, logistical, and legal hurdles to the plan” as well as how Big Tech uses NDAs and lobbying to broker backroom deals. 👀

AI Takes Center Stage: This past month was a big one for AI, from the Defense Department-Anthropic drama (and resulting spike in Claude downloads) dominating the news cycle to President Trump announcing his appointments to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (full of tech billionaires 🙄), the question inquiring minds are asking is how do you actually regulate such a fast-moving technology, particularly when the major players are so tied to the administration?

TechCrunch’s Russell Brandom dove into this very question, writing:

This is a difficult position for any company to be in — and while politically aligned players may benefit in the short term, they’ll be just as exposed when political winds inevitably shift. There’s a reason why, for decades, the defense sector was dominated by slow-moving, heavily regulated conglomerates like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Operating as an industrial wing of the Pentagon gave them the political cover they needed to avoid the politics, staying focused on the technology without having to press reset every time the White House changed hands.

Comparatively, in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner writes that, “It is increasingly hard to serve both Big Tech and the national interest,” and that “The AI industry wants self-regulation—basically no regulation—and the Trump administration is totally captive to the industry.” He even highlights the fact that Democrats are divided, notably due to the massive amount of money AI companies can donate. The answer is that there’s no clear answer from anyone right now, particularly with this administration.

Acquihires are Back in the News: It’s good to see growing clarity from antitrust enforcers: acquihires aren’t a loophole in avoiding antitrust scrutiny. Acquiring a company means acquiring all assets, including talent and IP. Over the last year, we’ve been raising concerns about Big Tech’s nasty habit, notably how it quietly eliminates competition. In August, alongside Public Citizen, we urged the FTC to launch a full investigation into Meta’s investment in Scale AI, and earlier this year, we supported an effort led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Richard Blumenthal to push federal regulators to investigate this very issue.

Europe On Edge: According to a recent survey from SWG and Polling Europe, 86% of Europeans believe the U.S. could withdraw the region’s access to key tech platforms, with 56% believing the risk is very real. This comes on the heels of calls for “tech sovereignty” for Europe, which is a great idea that will no doubt be difficult to execute given the hold monopolists have. But as the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen recently stated,

“During the last year, everybody has really realized how important it is that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to some very critical technologies. In these times ... dependencies, they can be weaponized against us.”

Stopping the Surveillance: Concerns about Amazon’s Ring surveillance abilities are very real, and The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy covers exactly how you can secure yourself and your communities, with to-dos like turning off specific features, avoiding the Cloud, and recommendations for similar products that rely on end-to-end encryption. 🔒

On a Positive Note: Former FTC Chair Lina Khan made a recent stop at Harvard Law School, where she reflected on her time at the FTC, the “strange coalitions” she found there, and warned of the consequences of overturning Humphrey’s Executor. Sharon Block, Center for Labor and a Just Economy Director, remarked to Khan at the event, “As a labor lawyer, we miss you.” Same. 😭 To stream the conversation, click here.

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X, BlueSky, and subscribe to our Substackfor the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

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Executive Director Sumit Sharma Interviews Carleigh Beriont on Why Big Tech’s Power Threatens Communities and What Congress Can Do About It

At NextGen Competition, we are working to create a fair and competitive technology ecosystem that empowers consumers, workers, and small businesses. Key to this mission is the fight against the market and political power of the largest corporations. We need legislators who understand this challenge and are willing to take on corporate monopolies.

Carleigh Beriont is a Democratic candidate for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District. She is a Harvard lecturer, the Vice Chair of the Hampton Select Board, and a mother of two. Beriont has made headlines for running an entirely social media–free campaign, branding herself the “anti-social Democrat.” She is also known for her vocal commitment to taking on Big Tech, and her campaign doesn’t take corporate PAC money. To learn more about Carleigh, visit her campaign website.

It’s great to talk to you, Carleigh. You’ve called yourself the “anti-social Democrat” and you’re running for Congress without any social media presence. What motivated that decision, and what motivated you to run for Congress?

• It was a combination of so many different things! I first got really involved in organizing and politics when we had our first kid. The cost of paying for things like childcare, health insurance, and housing is obscene. I was looking at these bills thinking, “wait, where is all of this money supposed to come from?” But, as hard as it was for us, I knew it was just as hard and harder for other people. About a year before I launched my campaign, my daughter became good friends with the girl who lived next door. She moved in after her mom was hit by a car, ended up in the hospital for months and lost her job, health insurance, and their home. They had nowhere else to turn, so the woman next door opened her home to them for a few months so they could get back on their feet. Long story short, I spent the better part of a year trying to help her and her daughter find a place to live (they ended up moving to a city 45 minutes away) and learning firsthand how incredibly broken our housing system is. I love helping people. It’s why I ran for local office. But it’s ridiculous when the barriers to helping people are created or made worse by broken state and federal policies and politicians who seem to want to help themselves and nobody else.

• As for social media, I haven’t used it since before the pandemic. I quit Facebook after watching a classmate get into a vicious argument with one of my grandmother’s childhood friends over Black Lives Matter. I care about these people, and I think that if they had met in person, they would have found that they had a lot in common and maybe found a way to agree or maintain disagreement constructively. But when it comes to social media platforms, the more conflict they create, the more money they make. I’m not anti-technology or anti-communication, but I don’t want my leadership or this campaign to be driven by algorithms or outrage. Time and attention are two of our most valuable resources. I support raising the minimum wage (in New Hampshire it’s still only $7.25 an hour!) and livable wages, universal healthcare, and policies that make life better for families so that we can have our time back and maybe use it to volunteer, sit around the table and talk, or run for local office. And, we’re not going to get out of the mess we’re in as a country by investing time and money in platforms that literally incentivize and profit from our division. We need to invest in building real communities and capacity on the ground, in person. I’m really proud to say that I’m not putting a penny of what I’ve raised in the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Every dollar that people contribute gets spent on organizing in our district, supporting local candidates, and listening to people from across the political spectrum.

As an educator and a parent, you’ve discussed the impact of social media on young people. New Hampshire, like the rest of the country, is seeing declining test scores and rising youth mental health challenges. How does that connect to your broader critique of Big Tech’s business model, which profits from keeping young people glued to screens?

• I’m a mom of two young kids, and my husband is a middle school English teacher. I also taught and worked with college students for the past decade. I have watched as young people–and their parents and grandparents–have become totally dependent on screens and as our society has been shaped by the priorities of these faceless corporations. How often do you realize you can’t pay for parking, get into a movie, or do some basic task without your phone? We’ve gotten to the point where it feels like our lives are beholden and secondary to the priorities and profits of these corporations, and we never had a say in it. I want to see much stronger privacy protections for minors, including limits on data collection, and real investments in our schools and families so that they can thrive. Kids’ health should always be prioritized over profits. And I want to enforce anti-monopoly laws against these companies. They have amassed so much political and cultural power by virtue of their sheer size, which helps shield them from accountability for the harm their platforms cause.

• I am eagerly following the Facebook/Instagram and YouTube trials seeking to hold Meta and Google (Snap and ByteDance (aka TikTok) settled before the case went to trial) accountable for harming children. It’s refreshing and a little terrifying to see the private conversations of these tech billionaires about the harm their platforms cause made public. We’ve been getting this drip, drip, drip of news about these platforms enabling human trafficking, driving disordered eating among teens, fomenting genocide, and meanwhile, we’re seeing a cultural shift among younger people away from digital platforms and towards a more analog life. I don’t think it’s a question of whether the influence of these platforms will be greatly diminished. But when, and whether, politicians will wake up to the demands of a younger generation looking for something real and tangible in our political system.

New Hampshire has a strong tradition of small business and local entrepreneurship, from Main Street shops in Portsmouth to startups along the I-93 corridor. Why is it important to take on Big Tech and how does Big Tech’s dominance hurt these local business owners? What solutions do you propose to fight for?

• At a kid’s birthday party the other week, the dad of my daughter’s classmate was telling me how much he pays to ensure his business appears reliably in Google searches. And it was staggering. I love reading a zany, enthusiastic Google review as much as the next person, and I absolutely base decisions about where to get coffee or a haircut in large part on reviews. But we’re getting to the point where a handful of companies control the main routes to customers and information AND they set the rules for everyone else. In New Hampshire, as with my kid’s friend’s dad, for all the benefits of technology (and there are many!), these companies and their platforms too often function like a tollbooth between him and customers. They have the power to raise the toll and they collect and keep it! I think that’s what Cory Doctorow means when he writes about enshittification. Once these companies control such a vast amount of the market, they can crank up their profits while diminishing the quality or experience for consumers and the companies that partner with them.

• To make sure that small and local businesses can compete fairly, I’ll push for stronger antitrust enforcement AND rules that encourage data portability and interoperability so that business owners aren’t trapped on one platform, as well as clearer dispute processes for bogus reviews or leads.

Do you think voters understand how monopoly power impacts their daily lives? What’s your go-to way of explaining it?

• I love this question. I think people have a general sense of how this works with cable or internet providers because for so long in our communities, we only had one option. I’ve found talking about tech or media monopolies really resonates (and unites people) on the campaign trail. When one company controls how you access information and what that information is, that’s a monopoly! And when there’s no competition, they can take your data, implement or raise fees, and change the rules or user agreements whenever they want. And when they do this with no repercussions, because where else can you really go, that’s monopoly power. We need to check that power!

Big Tech companies spend enormous sums lobbying Congress and fighting reform. How would you build coalitions, including across party lines, to get reform passed?

• I think that this is probably the best area for coalition-building in Washington. The divisions over monopoly power and corporate greed aren’t partisan ones. Working people recognize that corporations are helping themselves and nobody else, and the politicians who are willing to call that out are usually the ones willing to forego the corporate PAC checks and the fancy, closed-door fundraisers with billionaires and their friends. One way that I’d go about this is by working to neutralize the impact of lobbying, pushing for increased transparency, enacting and enforcing anti-revolving door rules, and looking for where we can build and apply public pressure. You can’t take their money, depend upon their platforms for reaching your voters, and then credibly claim to want to take away their power. It just doesn’t add up.

• I also really do love finding places to work together, particularly when they are unexpected. My experiences serving in local government and as a union organizer have taught me to believe there are always areas where agreement can be found. The key is to find those places and work together to get something done. That builds the relationships and trust necessary to keep working through substantial division. It’s also what we need. Listening to people across my district, I’m talking about Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, I’ve found there is substantial agreement when it comes to issues like housing and healthcare. And one of the biggest areas of agreement is that corporations, including Big Tech, have way too much power in Washington, and that political corruption and out-of-touch politicians are making life really difficult for ordinary people in this country.

The FTC and DOJ have been central to recent antitrust enforcement against Google, Meta, and others. But those agencies face political pressure and funding challenges. What role should Congress play in protecting and strengthening antitrust enforcement, particularly at a time when the current administration appears to be using enforcement selectively as political leverage?

• When the administration uses antitrust enforcement as a political weapon or a prize, that’s corruption! We want antitrust enforcement to be credible and consistent, and the agencies need better funding so they have the capacity to carry it out. What I wouldn’t give to have Lina Khan back at the FTC!

• First, Congress needs to increase funding for the FTC and DOJ so they can take on these corporations with their enormous legal budgets. Second, I will be pushing for us to understand harm to include things like weakened privacy protections and degraded quality (to call back to “enshittification”) rather than just higher prices.


What other policies will you champion to help working families?

• Where to start!? Capping the cost of childcare and eldercare, Medicare for All, paid leave, fully funding IDEA, and better support for our public school students and teachers (including keeping them safe from gun violence), incentivizing municipalities to rewrite their zoning ordinances for workforce and affordable housing and providing funding for upgrading water and sewer infrastructure so that towns can accommodate new housing with density. Passing Back from the Brink legislation to ensure that the president doesn’t have the sole authority to launch a nuclear strike and trigger a global catastrophe. There is so much that we need to do, and can do, to help working families in this country.

Anything else that you would like to share with our readers?

• I think it’s so great that you have this newsletter. We need to build power, provide actionable information, and connect with people in meaningful ways. Social media is not a reliable place to build lasting coalitions. Networks like this one are absolutely crucial to building the future we all want to live in. Keep doing it, and please, keep me in the loop! And, if you want to see what a real, effective grassroots campaign looks like, check out my blog: On The Trail. All the information in one convenient place with no ads and no trolls!

Thank you for your time. I look forward to having more conversations like this throughout your campaign and, hopefully, soon on Capitol Hill.

Welcome to NextGen Competition’s monthly recap, delivering insider insights on antitrust battles, industry shakeups, AI trends, and more.

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Amazon’s dystopian vision of an interconnected AI-enabled mesh network of cameras constantly surveilling our neighborhoods is the basis of its latest service, ‘Search Party’, evangelized by its CEO Jamie Siminoff. Its Super Bowl ad brought this panopticon into focus.

Amazon Sidewalk, the low-bandwidth wireless network that underlies Ring’s “Search Party” feature, now blankets over ninety percent of the U.S. population. The feature is also turned on by default, meaning millions of cameras across the country are scanning their surroundings without their owners or passers-by having actively chosen to participate.

Even fewer consumers are likely aware that Amazon then repurposes Sidewalk, built using home Wi-Fis, Ring cameras and Echo devices, and offers this connectivity to third party manufacturers of asset trackers, motion detectors, and other connected devices. A fascinating study by researchers in the Netherlands explains how this enables even more data to be collected from our homes and neighborhoods, further undermining privacy.

It also allows Amazon to dictate standards and protocols for a whole ecosystem of connected devices, and funnel them to its own cloud services (AWS). It’s already removing Wi-Fi and Z-Wave (open standards) from its latest smart home sensors and will soon be pushing the industry to adopt Amazon’s proprietary service—if they want to keep integrating with Ring. This leverage allows Amazon, the world’s largest company by revenue, to further entrench and expand its market power from the cloud (AWS) and its e-commerce platform (Amazon.com) into our homes.

This dynamic should concern anyone who cares about competition. The 2023 Merger Guidelines issued by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission warn specifically about consolidation trends that allow dominant firms to gain bargaining leverage over trading partners, triggering cascading consolidation across an industry and increasing barriers to entry. Amazon’s Sidewalk playbook fits this pattern precisely. By controlling a network that reaches into ninety percent of American homes, and by conditioning access on compliance with its own proprietary standards, Amazon doesn’t just sell doorbells—it positions itself as the infrastructure layer for all consumer IoT.

Yet all this still misses another cost of Amazon’s vision of an automated and impersonal neighborhood. As the Super Bowl ad implies, you just press a button on your phone, and the algorithm handles the rest. But clicking a notification does not build community. These algorithms isolate and atomize. What we need more of today is going out and having those awkward conversations and interactions face to face. When we outsource our neighborhood to algorithms, we lose the excuse to walk the block, to strike up a conversation, to build the kind of trust that no AI can replicate.

Some political leaders recognize this challenge. In New Hampshire, congressional candidate Carleigh Beriont is running a campaign entirely without social media, going door to door to have the kinds of conversations that algorithms cannot mediate.

The Super Bowl ad asked us to believe that surveillance is safety and that clicking is caring. We should know better.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Washington Is Catching Up on Acquihires

NextGen Competition has long sounded the alarm about Big Tech’s merger workarounds. This month, Senators Warren, Wyden, and Blumenthal urged the FTC and DOJ to scrutinize AI “acquihire” deals for potential antitrust violations. They called out Meta’s $14.3B Scale AI play, Google’s $2.4B Windsurf deal, and Nvidia’s $20B Groq purchase. The letter reads:

“[These deals] function as de facto mergers, allowing the companies to consolidate talent, information, and resources, all while apparently attempting to bypass the scrutiny typically applied to mergers and acquisitions.”

Sound familiar? It’s because NextGen Competition has been leading a coalition making exactly this argument for nearly two years. In February 2024, NextGen Competition led a coalition letter applauding the FTC initial inquiry into Big Tech’s AI investments, including Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. That September we called on the FTC to investigate Amazon’s reverse acquihire of Adept. And last August, we led a twelve-group coalition urging the FTC to block Meta’s $14.3 billion Scale AI deal.

The deals are all cut from a simple playbook: Avoid getting labeled as a merger and avoid the scrutiny. FTC Chair Ferguson has acknowledged the trend, signaling the agency is “beginning to look very closely” at these structures. It’s a start, but the question is whether Ferguson will act or if for reasons we explore in the next lead story, it won’t matter. Either way, we’ll keep pushing.

Gail Slater’s Cardinal Sin: Taking Antitrust Seriously

Gail Slater’s abrupt departure as Trump’s antitrust enforcer unfortunately didn’t surprise us. Her exit offers a revealing window into this administration’s approach to antitrust enforcement.

From the start, Slater was working at the margins. While she pushed for the ability to police mergers without political interference, others, including Pam Bondi and her deputy Todd Blanche, made clear that neither Slater nor career antitrust staff would be calling the shots. The clashes began almost immediately. She wasn’t the first casualty and is unlikely to be the last.

When her team raised concerns about a proposed settlement in Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, Slater was reportedly overruled by Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle, who greenlit the deal. The next day, DOJ quietly dropped its challenge to the Amex GBT–CWT merger, a merger backed by Ballard Partners, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s former lobbying firm.

Slater began as Vice President Vance’s hawkish pick, a genuine skeptic of Big Tech and an advocate for strong antitrust enforcement. For a brief moment, the anti-monopoly movement dared to hope. But that hope looks naive in retrospect.

Slater’s exit confirms what we at NextGen Competition have been warning about all year… this administration’s golden rule is simple. Those who pay make the rules. Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have collectively spent over $100 million lobbying Washington and donated lavishly to Trump’s inauguration and causes. While cases and investigations are continuing, will these companies really face meaningful antitrust scrutiny amid all that spending?

The uncertainty is real. The Google search monopoly remedy—already a disappointment—now faces an uncertain appeal. Cases against Apple, Amazon, and Google are in similar limbo and may follow the same path: cosmetic remedies that tinker around the edges rather than dismantle monopoly power.

Even though Washington may not hold Big Tech accountable, the states increasingly will. State attorneys general have become the most reliable front in the antitrust fight. Last November, NextGen Competition joined a coalition led by the American Economic Liberties Project urging state AGs to appeal the Google remedies decision. On February 3rd, they did just that.

They Perfected the System in China. Now They’re Deploying It Here.

American tech companies spent two decades helping China build one of the world’s most extensive surveillance systems. IBM licensed analytics technology used in an AI-driven predictive policing app targeting Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, China. Microsoft, Oracle, and Cisco supplied tools to Chinese police. The model didn’t stay in Xinjiang. Researchers have documented it spreading across China, to Gaza, and into parts of Africa.

Now those same companies are bringing that mass surveillance playbook to the U.S. ICE has access to driver’s license data for roughly three-quarters of American adults. It’s deploying facial recognition apps for biometric identification in the field. Palantir signed a $30 million contract to build something called ImmigrationOS, an AI system designed to identify, track, and deport suspected noncitizens. It runs on Microsoft’s Azure, which also hosts ICE’s most sensitive unclassified data. Amazon Web Services carries much of the rest.

And as this domestic mass surveillance apparatus grows, the Trump Administration is making it harder than ever to track. According to 404 Media, this month the “government stopped supporting FPDS.gov, an indispensable resource for finding what ICE, the FBI, and every other agency is buying.” Its replacement is deliberately harder to search, harder to navigate, and less transparent making it nearly impossible for journalists, researchers, and citizens to see what’s being built.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Data Center Duels: In 2026, if there’s an issue that unites Republicans and Democrats, rural and urban, working families and local officials, it’s disdain for Big Tech’s AI data centers. As Anvee Bhutani and Amrith Ramkumar wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, communities around the country are seeing unlikely allies coalesce around their efforts to delay or dismantle plans for data center construction. As former Democratic Oklahoma congressman Brad Carson says in the piece, “There is a growing rebellion. It’s cutting across every demographic and every partisan line that otherwise seems to divide the nation.”

• The article cites a study from Data Center Watch, which found that twenty projects, worth $98 billion, were postponed or prevented in just the second quarter of 2025.

• Worried about data centers in your community? 🤔 Check out the American Economic Liberty Project’s detailed brief on the issue, covering taxpayer burden, the use of NDAs, and the policy steps needed to combat Big Tech.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The European Union continues to spar with Big Tech after accusing Meta of restricting access to competing AI assistants on WhatsApp. But officials insist it has nothing to do with President Trump and everything to do with preserving competition, as Competition Chief Teresa Ribera told Bloomberg:

“The abuse of a dominant position in a given market that prevents any other alternative for final users is not good news for anyone… it’s not good news in Europe; it’s not good news in the United States,” she said. “This is the message that we wanted to send to Meta.”

• Additionally, the EU lodged an antitrust complaint against Google over its AI Overviews, who according to publishers, is using their content to generate summaries without paying them. 😳

• But, the EU also cleared Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz this month, further integrating cybersecurity into Google’s Cloud, tightening bundling in a market already dominated by tech giants.

Appeal or Agenda? In what should have been routine in a long-running antitrust battle, the FTC’s appeal of its Meta loss has taken on a distinctly political hue. As Lauren Feiner reports in The Verge, the agency didn’t just signal disagreement with Judge James Boasberg’s ruling, it publicly attacked him, reigniting impeachment chatter from Trump and allies in Congress. That’s not standard fare for an “independent” regulator.

• But as former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic noted in the article, “My sense is the audience for that comment was the White House.” Shocker. When antitrust starts looking like leverage, or loyalty signaling, it stops looking like law enforcement. 🫠

• On that same note, the New York Times Editorial Board is out with a scathing piece on the President’s effect on independent regulators like the FTC and FCC, writing:

“The Trump administration has ruined that independence. President Trump’s appointees have weaponized the agencies and transformed them into instruments of ideological enforcement. The changes not only threaten their core responsibility to ensure a fair business playing field but also directly undermine the First Amendment.”

“Tech Insider” to “Truth-Teller:” In a revealing TIME profile, Billy Perrigo spoke with Dex Hunter-Torricke, former Mark Zuckerberg speechwriter and Big Tech insider on his time in the industry, what he regrets about “only telling half the story,” and his thoughts on the future of AI:

“There is no plan. I do not believe for a second that winging it through the biggest economic and technological transition in human history is a responsible way to do things…we are sleepwalking into disaster.”

• In an effort to change this, Hunter-Torricke recently launched The Center for Tomorrow, which Politico reports will “bring policy makers, researchers, industry figures and civil society groups together to devise ways to safely prepare the world for AI.”

Dumping Big Tech: Now that Valentine’s Day is behind us, it’s time to dump that toxic, co-dependent partner: Big Tech. Looking for advice on how to do that? The Guardian’s Steve Rose has you covered, with recommendations for everything from browsers and email to shopping and AI. Time to leave Big Tech in the dust. 💨

Standby For Our Next Q&A: We’re gearing up for the second entry in our Q&A series. Any guesses on who’s next? 👀 In the meantime, catch the first installment with attorney, advocate, and Illinois’ 7th District congressional candidate Reed Showalter here.

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X, BlueSky, and subscribe to our Substackfor the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

Apple is falling behind on AI. What happened to the AI-powered ‘more personal Siri’ we were first promised in June 2024, which has been repeatedly delayed and has yet to launch?

In its Amicus Brief filed on 5 May 2025 in the US v. Google search trial, the main reason Apple argued that it should be allowed to continue receiving payments from Google for non-exclusive distribution was because those payments help close a competitive gap:

Compensation for search distribution provides a stable revenue stream that enables Apple to have patience and confidence to invest in innovative and disruptive technologies… Apple is, for instance, pioneering new AI technologies that enable users to more easily access and use their personal data—a product called Apple Intelligence. ... If this Court implements a remedy that strips Apple of all compensation it receives for distributing Google, that would threaten the pace of innovation, including with respect to AI partnerships that enable more effective competition with Google. [emphasis added]

Now, Apple has signed a multi-year, multi-billion dollar deal with Google to incorporate Gemini into Siri!

Not many details of the deal are forthcoming, but it lays bare Apple’s facetious claims that the money it receives from Google enables more innovation and effective competition with Google. Apple has over a hundred billion dollars of cash in hand – it never needed a cut of Google’s monopoly profits to innovate. This was always a flawed argument.

What these financial transfers do instead is to effectively eliminate competition between Apple and Google on AI and search and reduce Apple’s investment incentives. The Cupertino giant was just beginning to feel the heat as competitors like Samsung introduced superior Generative AI features on their smartphones, posing a challenge to Apple. However, this arrangement with Google allows Apple to largely neutralize this threat with minimal innovation and little investment.

The deal also locks up the most important distribution channels (Android and iOS) for AI voice assistants, which are likely to become key gateways for general internet search as well. As was shown in the US v. Google search trial, defaults matter. The best AI assistant for most consumers will be the one that’s already integrated into their smartphone.

The DOJ should challenge the Gemini deal between Apple and Google. It could do this during the appeal process in the search case. The Gemini agreement is another proof point for the need for stronger prohibitory injunctions on the type of default contracts that Google is allowed to sign for any of its services with Apple.

It may also be possible for existing or potential competitors with Google’s general search services like Microsoft, Perplexity, or OpenAI to challenge this agreement. These companies could argue that this multi-year Gemini agreement effectively circumvents the one-year term limit that the Court imposed in its Final Judgment on Google’s default agreements. And to the extent that general search queries on iPhones are increasingly made via an ‘upgraded’ Siri, the agreement undermines the data sharing remedies ordered by the Court.

The DOJ should also consider the anti-competitive effects of this agreement in its separate antitrust case against Apple. Is this not another example of how Apple maintains its market power by shutting out competitors from its ecosystem and degrading interoperability for competing products and services?

We will be following this matter closely.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Why Americans are Skeptical of Trump’s Big Tech Ties

Few things unite Americans more than our shared distrust of the bromance between Big Tech and Donald Trump. It’s a trend that has remained remarkably consistent throughout this Administration.

Last June, The New York Post reported that 54% of Trump voters – and 70% of voters overall – believe that Big Tech’s campaign to “suck up” to Trump was part of a cynical ploy to sway the president. This is a president after all whose fragile ego can easily be massaged by fawning praise and whose only north star is how much he and his family can profit from the Presidency.

Seven months later, reporting on a poll from The Tech Oversight Project, Axios cites that 61% of voters believe Big Tech has too much influence over D.C. policy.

• 49% of voters think Trump is “carrying out a pro-Big Tech agenda when he makes AI policy.” The poll also found that 69% think AI will eliminate or reduce job opportunities, and 45% think it will make the economy worse.

A December poll from right-leaning Rasmussen found the “overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats think Big Tech firms have “run wild” and that President Trump should do more to enforce antitrust laws.”

• It goes on to find 84% of Democrats, 68% of Republicans, and 58% of unaffiliated voters “believe that it is at least somewhat likely that vigorous antitrust enforcement would lower prices for regular Americans.

None of this has stopped tech companies from flooding Washington. The biggest tech and AI firms spent a record $109 million on lobbying in 2025, and that is just what gets reported. The political spend is escalating too. Meta and Elon Musk are doubling down on efforts to elect tech-friendly candidates.

The result is a familiar disconnect. Voters are wary, but Big Tech’s influence operation keeps accelerating. If you’re waiting for that voter skepticism to change Trump’s tune, don’t hold your breath.

He nominated mega donor and corporate crony, David MacNeil, to serve at the FTC after Melissa Holyoak vacated her seat in November. Chair Andrew Ferguson seems more interested in auditioning for a job at DOJ than taking on Big Tech, echoing his boss’s disinterest in antitrust policy.

The bottom line: There is good reason voters are concerned about Big Tech’s alignment. But will antitrust make an appearance at the polls in November? We hope so – especially with candidates like Reed Showalter. Until then, expect the bromance to continue.

FTC Eyes Big Tech’s AI Talent Grab

Despite all that, we were pleased to see the Federal Trade Commission is now scrutinizing Big Tech talent acquisitions — deals where major tech firms like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google recruit startup teams without buying the company to sidestep merger reviews. This growing workaround by Big Tech has drawn antitrust attention for potentially entrenching dominance rather than fostering competition.

NextGen Competition has long warned against exactly this playbook. We’ve led letters urging the FTC to investigate Meta’s investment in Scale AI for effectively controlling critical AI infrastructure and poaching top talent and pressed the agency to challenge Amazon’s reverse acqui‑hire of Adept employees. Since Big Tech controls the critical inputs that many of these AI companies depend on, they exert tremendous power over these companies’ future.

The bottom line: Will Ferguson follow through with holding these companies accountable? Or is this just another tool for Ferguson and Trump to exert leverage over companies on unrelated issues, like browbeating companies over supposed ‘anticompetitive’ DEI hiring.

The Crackdown on Grok has Begun

We all watched in horror as Grok’s account on X generated approximately 3 million photorealistic sexualized images, including 23,000 of children. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, during the 11-day period beginning December 29 to January 8, the AI assistant generated millions of images with zero guardrails.

The backlash was swift and nearly universal. The European Union announced an investigation into Elon Musk’s platform, X, after authorities indicated that it had failed to stop the spread of harmful images. Three Democratic senators sent letters to Apple and Google, urging them to enforce their terms of service for app developers by removing the X and Grok apps from their app stores. Unsurprisingly, Apple seems willing to ignore its own terms when they’re violated by an app like X—one with political power.

At least 35 state attorneys general published an open letter to xAI demanding that it take immediate and comprehensive measures to protect the public and users of its platforms, particularly women and girls, who are the primary targets of non-consensual images.

While Democrats were swift to express outrage, Republicans mostly remained silent. Condemning all content moderation as “censorship” has apparently become core to the MAGA movement. The Administration attacked the EU and UK, threatening retaliatory tariffs for probes into the abusive images. The Administration used its tired soundbites to attack UK regulators for wanting to “curate a public square” and “suppress political viewpoints.” Even Vice President Vance chimed in, saying the attacks on American companies were “over garbage.”

After these threats from Musk’s cronies in the administration did not work, Musk backed down and X has implemented measures to restrict the feature. An example of how unified opposition can even check the billionaire oligarch. But it does little to stop the AI fueled surge in deepfake abuse.

It’s truly disappointing that the MAGA movement seems so indifferent to issues like child pornography and non-consensual nudity. But I guess we shouldn’t be surposed, it’s the same party protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplices and that’s accepted this type of content as part of Musk’s business model to “hook users.“ While it may seem obvious, we appreciated Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office responding clearly by stating, “This is about the generation of criminal imagery of children, women, and girls, and it is not acceptable.”

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Playing the Long Game: It’s clear that the US’s antitrust push against Big Tech will be a long fight, but the lesson, at least according to Former AAG for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter, isn’t to stop, it’s to keep going. In the Financial Times, he got candid about why we’ve seen some legal setbacks, and what can be done to propel the antitrust movement forward.

“Convincing courts to exercise their authority was ‘one of the reasons why it’s important to bring big, ambitious cases’, he said. ‘Once you establish that the rule of law applies, in time, the remedies will follow. This was never going to be easy,’ he added. ‘We were basically reviving an area of law from the dead. And that takes time.’”

But a Hail Mary Pass Isn’t Always Needed: Just because we didn’t get a break-up of Google doesn’t mean the cases against Big Tech are totally failing. As James Hercher writes for AdExchanger:

But despite the fact that the very biggest tech platforms continue gaining ground and dodging hits, there are still reasons to value these antitrust suits, including the ones that end in modest, behavioral-only punishments instead of breakups.

This is an important point. You don’t need total victory to make a positive impact, Hercher even points to changes Google recently made to remove Unified Pricing Rules from its publisher ad stack in Europe. That change now lets publishers set channel-specific bid floors, a practice Google had previously blocked because it often resulted in less favorable terms for its own ad-tech. Pressure does move the needle. 👏

Things You Should Not Do: Users of ChatGPT will now be able to submit data such as medical records to the AI platform so that it can give more tailored responses to questions regarding health and nutrition. There are so many problems with this, we can’t even begin to describe them, but suffice it to say, you should not give AI access to your private health records. Don’t believe us? We went straight to the source.

Move Fast, Break Everything: In The Hill, Adonis Hoffman makes the case that unlike the monopolies of yesteryear, Big Tech is built differently, moves quickly, and “breaks accountability.”

Industries with physical assets operate under dense rulebooks built over decades. Broadcast media answers to licenses. Banks answer to regulators. Telecom providers meet access and interconnection requirements. Energy companies operate under public utility oversight. Big Tech routinely enters these same spaces while playing by entirely different rules.

Technology is not the enemy, and innovation is not the problem. Neither scale nor success is the sin. The problem is unbounded power operating inside systems built for a different century. Every prior industrial revolution required new rules to preserve competition, accountability and trust. Digital markets require the same response, even if harms appear less visible and more personal.

Big Tech Picking Up the Utility Tab? As communities across the country rally against the construction of data centers used to quench Big Tech’s insatiable thirst for electricity for AI, Big Tech is apparently picking up the tab of one of the main concerns: rising utility bills for consumers. President Trump took to Truth Social to proclaim that, “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”

• It’s unclear though how this would work in practice. As Ella Nilsen writes for CNN, in responding to an inquiry from the Senate, Big Tech companies committed to covering the electricity costs for their data centers, but with little specifics. “These commitments do not explain how Big Tech companies – not American consumers – will bear the full cost of data centers,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

• In an opinion piece for the Ohio Capital Journal, Michi Trota writes, “Everyday people bear the costs of Big Tech’s hunger for profits. We pay it in rising energy bills, our worsening climate, our lack of access to safe water, increased noise pollution, and risks to our health and safety.”

Even if miraculously consumers pay nothing for Big Tech’s data centers, there’s been little to address the draining of valuable resources (like water), the effect of the data centers on the climate, and exactly what kind of effects these data centers will have on local communities.

Never Underestimate the Power of Public Shaming: That’s the message from Jessica Grose in her op-ed for The New York Times. In her piece, she points to the recent public outcry against Mattel following their announcement of an OpenAI collaboration on AI-powered toys after the debut of an AI teddy bear that was…not suitable for children. She writes:

It might be harder to shame the tech companies themselves into making their products safer, but we can shame third-party companies like toymakers, app stores and advertisers into ending partnerships. And with enough public disapproval, legislators might be inspired to act.

We may not be able to dictate how tech giants operate, but by hitting them where it hurts – their partnerships, their public image, and ultimately, their coffers, change is possible. 💪🏼

Ring Under Fire, Thanks to ICE: In a more disturbing use of tech, activists are crying foul at Ring after it was announced that the company would join forces with an AI surveillance tool. The company has pushed back on the accusations that they are working with ICE in any capacity, but “they stopped short of saying that video collected by Ring devices couldn’t be obtained by ICE or other federal agencies through legal means.” 😳

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X, BlueSky, and subscribe to our Substack for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

It’s open enrollment season for millions navigating the Affordable Care Act and for monopolists currying favor at the White House. And what a contrast! We have an administration that is happy to protect narrow monopoly business interests but not lift a finger to make healthcare affordable for millions.

But when you are making billions via corrupt dealings, you can call affordability a hoax and experiment with economically illiterate tariff policies that raise prices and decimate small businesses.

Big Tech has been at the front of the line of supplicants to avoid scrutiny and receive special treatment from the Trump administration:

• Google, Apple, and Amazon would like a weak settlement in their antitrust cases. (Court decisions have found that Google illegally maintains its monopoly in general search and digital advertising, and there are active antitrust cases against Amazon and Apple).

• Meta wants to be free to continue to target children and teens without any regard for their safety while profiting from 15 billion scam ads a day.

• Microsoft would rather not face scrutiny of its various AI partnerships and investments like those with OpenAI.

• OpenAI would like to con the government into believing that it is too important to fail and deserves a bailout.

• Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple already have dominant market positions in key inputs required to develop Gen AI and control ecosystems of products and services where they can deploy and commercialize this technology. They would rather not have acquisitions scrutinized. And the administration has obliged, for example by waiving through Google’s acquisition of Wiz.

This is not the way.

We will continue our fight to hold this administration and Big Tech accountable as we have done consistently and forcefully throughout this past year.

Until then, wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,
Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

2025 Antitrust Scoreboard

Leadership in Action: Defending Institutions, Elevating Voices, and Growing Our Movement

In a year that tested the independence of our institutions and the strength of our antimonopoly movement, NextGen Competition rose to the occasion. From defending the Federal Trade Commission’s independence in the face of unprecedented political interference to welcoming new leadership and spotlighting future champions in Congress, our commitment to strong, accountable leadership has never been clearer.

• We proudly joined over 40 privacy, consumer protection, and competition groups in filing an amicus brief in Slaughter v. Trump, urging the Supreme Court to uphold decades of precedent and reinstate FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter after her illegal removal. We stood firmly behind both Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya, who have spoken out forcefully against the President’s power grab, warning of the dangerous precedent it sets for corporate accountability.

• This year also marked a new chapter for NextGen Competition, as we welcomed economist and policy expert Sumit Sharma as our new Executive Director. Sumit brings deep experience from his time at Consumer Reports and across the public and private sectors, where he has long fought to ensure markets work for the many, not the monopolists. We thank George Rakis for his leadership and continued service on our board as Executive Director Emeritus.

• Looking to the next generation of champions, we launched our Q&A series with a timely conversation with Reed Showalter, a former DOJ and FTC attorney now running for Congress in Illinois. His campaign reflects the kind of bold, informed leadership this moment demands.

In 2025, we protected institutions, welcomed new leadership, and doubled down on the people who will lead the next phase of the antimonopoly movement.

Exposing the AI Power Grab: Big Tech’s AI Empire

This year, NextGen Competition helped lead the charge to expose and challenge the consolidation of power in artificial intelligence, a space increasingly dominated by the same corporate giants who already control search, cloud, commerce, and communications.

• We started early with a letter to the House Judiciary Subcommittee, underscoring the transformative potential of generative AI-based foundation models and advocating for strong policy guardrails to minimize harms like privacy breaches, misinformation, and malicious uses.

• As Big Tech scrambled to lock up AI infrastructure behind closed doors, we spoke out. In August, we joined over 100 experts and organizations urging OpenAI to increase transparency around its restructuring plans. And when Meta made a $14.3 billion play for Scale AI, we led a coalition letter calling on the FTC to block the deal and prevent Meta from dominating the data pipelines that fuel generative AI.

• Our blog, DeepSeek Blows Up Big Tech’s Monopoly Myth, told the truth Silicon Valley doesn’t want Washington to hear. While Big Tech has spent years pushing the false narrative that antitrust enforcement would give China an edge, DeepSeek’s rapid ascent shows that China’s AI advancements are happening regardless.

• Meanwhile, the cracks in Big Tech’s AI alliances are starting to show. OpenAI is now reportedly considering asking the FTC to investigate Microsoft, its own billion-dollar partner, over anticompetitive behavior. We’ve warned that these so-called “partnerships” are really acquisitions in disguise. Now even Sam Altman seems to agree.

As we enter 2026, one thing is clear: Big Tech’s AI dominance is not inevitable, and we’re not backing down from the fight to keep innovation open, hold tech giants accountable, and work to ensure a competitive market.

Enabling Competition: Countering Big Tech’s Influence Operation

We began 2025 with a new presidential administration, one we were cautiously optimistic would continue to tighten the reins on monopolies. We were encouraged by AAG for Antitrust Gail Slater, for example, who we thought would continue the fight of her predecessor. Sadly, the year went from disappointment to disappointment, which led to a more active year than ever for NextGen as we called out the pandering for what it was: Big Tech flattery.

• Earlier in the year, we were deeply alarmed by the sheer number of billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook in the Capitol rotunda when President Trump took the oath of office, authoring a blog calling the behavior out for exactly what it was. The “oligarchs only” section was clearly in recognition of their donations of $1 million each to the President’s inaugural fund, with some even hosting lavish celebrations with high-profile Republican donors.

• In May, we joined fifteen other public interest organizations calling on newly-installed FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson to resist political pressure and preserve the agency’s ability to hold powerful corporations accountable.

• Additionally in May, Sumit had the opportunity to speak to Omar Gallaga at CNET about the app developer class action suit against Apple after the company refused to comply with court orders on its monopolistic practices in subscriptions and in-app purchases.

• Later in the summer, Sumit didn’t mince words in The Well News when he called out the DOJ for “gutting competition” in the form of “pay-to-play” antitrust. He pointed to the HPE-Juniper approval over staff objections, the firing of senior antitrust deputies, and the sudden reversal in the AmEx GBT–CWT case as part of a pattern that rewards lobbyists closely connected to the attorney general over consumers and competition.

• In the fall, we also signed on to letters to both the FTC and state attorneys general, the former urging the agency to investigate the market structure and systemic risks posed by dominant cloud providers like Amazon, and the latter, imploring state officials to appeal the Google remedies decision.

• When the disappointing Google remedies decision was released, Sumit published an analysis in Tech Policy Press explaining why the court’s approach fell far short of restoring competition. He warned that allowing Google to keep paying for default search placements all but guarantees its dominance will continue, and urged the DOJ to appeal and pursue remedies that directly dismantle Google’s monopoly instead of betting on AI to solve the problem.

• Most Americans were appalled in November when newly released photos showed complete demolition of the East Wing at the White House to make way for President Trump’s ballroom. It should surprise no one that Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Palantir were among the top donors on the White House list. We applauded Rep. Bennie G. Thompson for sending a letter to over 20 corporations demanding answers, “including the amount of their donations and whether they had been promised anything in return.”

• Finally, in Common Dreams, Sumit lamented that under Rep. Jim Jordan, House Judiciary hearings have devolved from bipartisan investigations into corporate power to “theater,” “viral hearings,” and a “waste of taxpayer dollars,” with Rep. Jordan himself earning the moniker of Big Tech’s most effective lobbyist in Congress.

NextGen Competition wishes you and yours a wonderful holiday season and a bright start to 2026. 🎄🕎

We’ll keep fighting, and we hope you’ll stay in the fight with us. In the meantime, you can always find us on X, Bluesky, and Substack, where we’re tracking Big Tech’s power grabs, exposing fake “partnerships,” and spotlighting real solutions to protect competition and innovation.

Let’s make 2026 the year we finally turn the tide. 💪🏼

It seems that Meta’s strategy of making its products worse (Enshittification) to compete with TikTok has paid off. Facebook and Instagram’s shift from mainly featuring posts from friends and family to unconnected AI content is one key reason why Judge Boasberg dismissed the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta. And Zuckerberg is excited to continue filling our feeds with even more AI sludge!

Meanwhile, Meta can continue to target children and teens without any regard for their safety—even after repeatedly being presented with evidence of the abuse and harms caused by its products. The company also continues to profit to the tune of billions of dollars from sending up to 15 billion scam ads a day.

Courts alone it seems are insufficient to check the corrupting influence of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, who has sole control of Meta, on society and in our politics. We desperately need legislators who understand the importance of challenging the power of the largest corporations and their owners.

That’s why we’re excited to launch our new Q&A series spotlighting the leaders who are stepping up to meet that challenge.

This month, we sat down with Reed Showalter, an antimonopoly attorney and advocate now running for Congress in Illinois’ 7th District. Reed has served at the FTC, DOJ, and the White House National Economic Council, as well as on Capitol Hill as a Judiciary Committee staffer. His campaign reflects a rare combination of legal expertise, policy experience, and a commitment to protecting the public from corporate abuse.

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did and stay tuned for more Q&As in the months ahead. To learn more about Reed, visit his campaign website.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Q&A with Antimonopoly Attorney and Congressional Candidate Reed Showalter

It’s great to talk to you Reed. First off, I’d like to hear about what motivated you to run for Congress?

• We have seen the country become dominated by corporate power. More than ever, people’s lives are determined by the whims of a few companies that dominate the marketplace and our politics. I believe this system cannot hold up under its own weight if it does not deliver freedom from this dominance. I am running for Congress to fight for a progressive vision of our country, where people have real freedom from economic and political dominance and the freedom to afford housing, healthcare, food, and the necessities to live a life with dignity.

Why do you think there is an affordability crisis in the country today?

• The affordability crisis is the result of decades of surrendering power to concentrated markets and growing multinational corporations. Health care costs keep rising because a few giant, vertically-integrated companies can deny coverage, jack up rates, and avoid the legal structures that are supposed to keep costs down. Housing costs keep rising because private developers and major landlords do not have incentives to produce and offer affordable housing at scale. Food prices keep climbing because a few major processors, distributors, and brands own the critical parts of the system and can take profits without losing business. Markets only work when there are ways to push back on market power. This doesn’t happen on its own. If we want these markets to be affordable, we need to use democratic power to break the hold that dominant corporations have over us.

Do you think voters understand how monopoly power impacts their daily lives? What’s your go-to way of explaining it?

• The easiest way to find out a voter’s experience of monopoly power is to ask them: who’s ripping them off? Every day, I hear people talk about the choices they are forced to make because they can’t afford their lives. I met a woman in the 7^th District who told me that she has to move out of Chicago because housing is too expensive. While working at the White House, I met a family whose son died because a big pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) decided not to cover his asthma medication. I’ve talked to people who say their grocery bills are so high that they have to skip lunch so their children can eat. These are not abstract issues. We all feel what it means to not have the freedom to make our own economic decisions. And it doesn’t take much explaining to say that the company that’s ripping you off, that’s monopoly power. It doesn’t have to be like this.

What would be your top priority to curb monopoly power, and why?

• I want to push the Democratic Party and our politics more generally to recognize that the response to many of the crises we are facing requires taking on monopoly power. The affordability crisis is a monopoly power issue. Political censorship is a monopoly power issue. Even the excesses of the Trump administration are enabled and empowered by the monopoly power of the businesses that sat front row at his inauguration and sit in the gilded state dinners at the White House. We can build a meaningful popular Democratic party, but that requires breaking away from the old assumptions that leaving markets alone and subsidizing our way out of market failure is the only thing that government power is good for. We need to be much more active in our imagination of how to respond to our crises and start from the knowledge that if a market is broken, chances are we can’t fix it without addressing monopoly power.

How would you build a cross-partisan coalition in Congress to advance your goals?

• Monopoly power has reached such a crisis that voters in both parties are calling to fix it. The core of this political message is that the conflict isn’t about left and right, it is that regular people are being ripped off by the very wealthy. There have been several places where antimonopoly politics has been a point of bipartisanship. The investigations of big tech companies, the efforts to tackle PBMs and abusive healthcare monopolies, and the problems of big agriculture companies like Tyson and John Deere, are all examples of places where these issues have cut across partisan lines. I would fight wherever possible to return power to regular people from this monopoly power. That fight has allies on both sides.

How about in the technology sector? Why do you think it is important to take on Big Tech?

• Big Tech has increasingly become a pseudo-government, controlling the way that people interact, communicate, and get information online. As major digital platforms become more dominant, they have control over the information we see and the way we interact with the world. This concentration of power creates obvious threats to a properly functioning democracy, especially when Big Tech opposes or disfavors certain discourse. But beyond that, the fact that a few large companies control social media, smartphone operating systems, online search, video streaming, music streaming, and online commerce, means that our entire digital economy is also bent towards the unspoken preferences of those few companies. This stifles innovation, flattens discourse, and creates a sort of “sameness tax” on the American digital economy that hurts our ability to be dynamic and flourish in the future.

Big Tech spends millions to fight reform and government regulation. How will you build public support and withstand industry backlash?

• This is not just limited to Big Tech. We know that monopolized industries spend more money on lobbying and are more effective at getting their voices heard in Congress and in government than regular people and small businesses. Fighting corporate power is an uphill battle, but I am committed to doing so publicly, and targeting all the shady ways that big business tries to influence Congress and the lawmaking process. And in my campaign, I am rejecting corporate PAC money, including Big Tech and crypto money.

What role do the FTC and DOJ have in ensuring that our economy works for consumers and small businesses, and not just the largest corporations?

• The FTC and the DOJ are our most critical tools in our fight to make sure that giant companies cannot break the law with impunity and roll up our markets into monopolies. They are the enforcers that stop monopolization, mergers, and unfair restraints of trade by the biggest companies in the world on behalf of the American people. The FTC has the additional ability to make federal rules that can protect people from the abuses of monopolization. These agencies are historically underfunded, and every year, they face a rising tide of consolidation across markets and a hostile court system. One of the key pathways to deconcentrating our economy and making sure that it works for regular people is through funding and supporting these agencies in their mission to protect Americans from tyrants of trade.

What would you do to ensure that our antitrust laws are enforced effectively and without fear or favor?

• In recent months, the Trump Administration has shown that high-ranking officials are willing and able to meddle in antitrust enforcement at the FTC and DOJ in exchange for political favors for their friends. There has always been a threat that the power to take on giant corporations could be abused by authoritarians. In Congress, I would fight to strengthen protections against political enforcement at the FTC and DOJ, strengthen Tunney Act proceedings against weak settlements, and protect funding for these agencies across years so they can continue their missions without interruption. But beyond this, we need to protect the original mission of the antitrust laws from the creeping deterioration that has been implemented by conservative courts over the past several decades. This includes strengthening the standards for merger, monopolization, collusion, and unfair practices cases.

Anything else that you would like to share with our readers?

• It is important to remember that the antimonopoly movement is more than just antitrust. It is a fundamentally democratic way of organizing the economic sphere of our lives. People do not have freedom when they are dominated by monopoly power. And we have a responsibility to protect that freedom using the levers of our democratic government. This includes antitrust enforcement, but it also includes sectoral regulators like the USDA and the Department of Transportation. And it includes pursuing new government action, like a public works program that distributes power not to existing economic giants but to regular people. We are living in a time of crisis, from affordability to democratic corruption, but we have lived through crises like this before. The way forward requires us to take on and break up the power that giant monopolies have over the rest of us.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to having more conversations like this throughout your campaign and, hopefully, soon on Capitol Hill.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you may have missed:

Big Tech Takes Hollywood: Tech giants aren’t just corroding the internet, they’re coming for Hollywood, too, as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are reportedly circling Warner Bros. Discovery. If past mergers are any guide, we can expect fewer voices, more consolidation, and an industry controlled by tech giants. 😒

• The Wall Street Journal reports that “the initial deadline to submit nonbinding first-round bids is Nov. 20…Warner Discovery is holding the auction process in the hopes of having it completed by the end of the year…”

Europe Backs Down: In The New York Times, Adam Satariano and Jeanna Smialek argue that, after 10 years of heavy tech regulation, the EU is now in an existential crisis, questioning whether this is the best path forward economically and diplomatically. 🤔 They write on the uncertainty:

How far Europe’s policy shift might go remains to be seen. The proposals, already the target of heavy lobbying from Silicon Valley and other interest groups, are relatively narrow. But they reflect a growing belief in Brussels that changes are needed to revive Europe’s competitiveness. Criticism from the Trump administration that the bloc’s rules unfairly target American firms has added to the urgency.

Brutal Big Tech Takedown: In The New York Times, Aaron Zamost lambasts Big Tech for losing their innovative, competitive edge, instead becoming the “villain” in the story, cozying up to the administration, becoming a rudderless version of their former selves.We especially loved this excerpt:

Google, Apple and their peers now act like the self-preservation-obsessed incumbents they once disrupted. They move slower, talk safer and patrol the moat. They’ve traded risk for complacency — too afraid of offending the president, losing access or inviting a subpoena. Big Tech now serves power before it serves its users.

When faith in government and Wall Street disappeared during the financial crisis, technology was the last industry standing — its leaders’ idealism mirrored the public’s confidence in it. But over time, as they grew more dominant, they put corporate self-interest ahead of customers, and they made their products worse. Tech now looks a lot like finance: power without accountability, and profit without purpose.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers! 🦃

Until our final issue of 2025 drops next month, follow us on X, Bluesky, and subscribe to Substack for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

Two key themes stood out for me in this year’s Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt.

The first is Joel Mokyr’s work, which helps us better understand the conditions under which technological progress can translate into sustained economic growth. One of the key prerequisites he identified is that we must understand how and why a technology works for it to produce growth. As he explains (see scientific background):

“When no one knew why things worked, even radical technological shifts failed to generate the applications that made them useful in production processes. In such a world, economic resources were not allocated towards improving technologies, as potential investors were just as likely to waste valuable resources on fruitless inventions that would never work, such as perpetual motion machines or artificially created gold”

Change that last bit to generative AI foundation models (Gen AI) and we are seeing this dynamic play out today with unsustainable circular investments in a technology whose inner workings we do not understand. Not knowing how Gen AI works also results in unforeseen effects like increased cybersecurity risks and harm to children.

These investments combined with Big Tech’s role as gatekeepers to markets and customers has also led to Big Tech’s market dominance becoming even more extreme. As the article notes:

“Eight of the 10 biggest stocks in the S&P 500 are tech stocks. Those eight companies account for 36 per cent of the entire US market’s value, 60 per cent of the gains in the index since the market bottomed in April and almost 80 per cent of the S&P 500’s net income growth in the last year.”

This dominance of Big Tech is linked to the second theme that stood out for me. The work of Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt shows that another key component of technology leading to sustained growth is the ability of new companies and innovators to challenge and take business from incumbents. This is the process of creative destruction whereby successful innovators can destroy, fully or partially, the monopoly rents of incumbent firms.

This technology dynamism has been in decline recently. We can see this decline in aggregate US data since the mid-2000s as shown in the figure below which shows firm entry and exit rates and the rates of job entry and creation.

Declining U.S. Dynamism Since the Mid-2000s

Source: Figure 8, Scientific background to the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2025

Big Tech’s dominance is likely a key part of this story. For example, analysis by the UK’s CMA finds that Google and Apple have persistently (over the last ten years) earned in excess of the normal rate of return (see figures below), signaling a lack of competition in key technology markets. The CMA also concludes that there is no prospect of this changing without policy intervention in general search and search advertising services, and the mobile ecosystem.

Apple Return on Capital Employed has been much higher than a competitive market rate of 10-15%

Source: Figure B.7, Appendix B, Strategic Market Status Investigation into Apple’s Mobile Platform.

Google Return on Capital Employed Has Been Much Higher Than a Competitive Market Rate of 10-15%

Source: Figure B.4, Appendix B, Strategic Market Status Investigation into Google’s Mobile Platform.

Big Tech’s lock on our economy and on technology development results in a lack of dynamism which means we are all losing out on potential growth and productivity gains. The work of this year’s economic noble laureates reinforces the need for a competitive technology ecosystem that we at NextGen Competition are fighting for. It is essential to have more competition to unlock growth and empower consumers, workers, and small businesses.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Big Tech’s Most Effective Lobbyist Is Temporarily Constrained

It’s Day 35 of the government shutdown, and there’s little to celebrate as millions go unpaid and SNAP benefits lapse, leaving families hungry. Still, NextGen Competition’s executive director argues in Common Dreams that one small upside is this: it has sidelined House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, who is quickly becoming Big Tech No. 1 lobbyist.

Sumit argues that under Jim Jordan, House Judiciary hearings have shifted from bipartisan investigations into corporate power of prior years. Now, it’s just “theater,” “viral hearings,” and a “waste of taxpayer dollars.”

The House Judiciary Committee under Jim Jordan has not merely diverged from bipartisan concerns over corporate power and its harms to children. It has become the perfect rhetorical counteroffensive by helping neutralize any meaningful legislative solutions by redefining the very nature of the threat. Where most see a market failure requiring economic intervention, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jim Jordan alleges political persecution requiring investigations into government “weaponization.” This redefinition is the single most valuable outcome a regulated industry could hope for from its oversight body, transforming a legislative threat into a political shield.

House Republicans keep promising a crusade against Big Tech’s power. If they were serious, they’d likely find support from Democrats. But as long as Jim Jordan leads the House Judiciary Committee, we’re stuck watching Big Tech’s errand boy “traveling the world on our dime” to defend Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft from meaningful reform. Read Sumit Sharma’s full op-ed here.

Bending the Knee for a Ballroom: Big Tech’s Capitulation

We all watched in horror as construction crews demolished the East Wing of the White House. In what has quickly become a defining symbol of Donald Trump’s presidency, it should surprise no one that Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Palantir were among the top donors on the White House list.

We laughed, then cried, when Mother Jones reporter Tim Murphy sent a photo of the demolished East Wing—and a request for comment—to these companies to make sure they were aware of the destruction they had underwritten. None responded, aside from a dismissive quote from Microsoft.

Given how corrupt and transactional this administration is, who could blame these companies? They have spent lavishly on the president and, in return, have largely avoided tariffs, significant court fines, and meaningful regulation.

But while these companies may be able to avoid responding to reporters, it’s a lot harder to ignore Congress. That’s why we applauded Rep. Bennie G. Thompson for sending a letter to over 20 corporations demanding answers, “including the amount of their donations and whether they had been promised anything in return.”

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you may have missed:

David vs. Goliath: New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is making headlines for taking Meta to court, alleging the company’s algorithms enable child exploitation at scale. The suit, one of the first of its kind, is expected to go before a jury next year, a historic moment in the push to hold social media giants accountable.

“Warnings were disregarded, over and over and over again. It’s a series of decisions that demonstrate a pattern of conduct that favors profit over safety.”

With Congress gridlocked, it’s state leaders like Torrez who are stepping in to confront Big Tech’s most egregious harms.

Making (Undemocratic) Waves Across the Pond: We enjoyed this insightful piece from Tech Policy Press’ Dr. Courtney C. Radsch on Big Tech’s role in “the fusion of corporate and state power” and how it’s undermining European democracy. This quote was especially powerful:

[T]he lack of regulation, the free-for-all that Big Tech’s move-fast-and-break-things ideology promotes, and the failure to rein in the power of Silicon Valley pose the real authoritarian threat to Western democracies. The increasingly cozy relationship between the world’s only superpower and the most powerful tech corporations in the world is creating an unprecedented concentration of power that threatens to undermine the pillars of democracy at home and around the world.

An Alliance on Shaky Ground: In The Baffler, Lizzie O’Shea outlines what antitrust efforts have looked like so far under President Trump, and why the Big Tech/MAGA alliance’s foundation is shakier than it appears.

The relationship between MAGA state power and Big Tech is, therefore, perhaps better understood as volatile attempts at mutual containment, underwritten by a common commitment to imperialist dominance. Navigating such complexity, as in any common cause of diverse actors, is not straightforward.

You Khan’t Erase Her Legacy: The FTC appears to be cherrypicking blogs authored by former FTC Chair Lina Khan and scraping them from the agency’s website, according to Wired. No one has issued a public statement, which is par for the course for this administration. Since the start of President Trump’s second term, the FTC has removed hundreds of posts crafted during the previous administration.

Doctorow Talks Enshittification: Jacobin spoke with author Cory Doctorow this past month about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. He argues that platforms follow a three-step decay: woo users, pivot to squeeze them for business customers, then extract from everyone once lock-in and consolidation remove real choices. He traces the rot to weakened antitrust, regulatory capture, and legal tools that block interoperability and “right to tinker.”

I think that virtually everyone in the world underestimates how seismic the growth of antitrust has been. If you read political scientists, they will tell you that billionaire preferences are the single biggest determinant of policy outcomes. Things billionaires want, we get. Things billionaires don’t want, we don’t get. There is nothing more billionaire-friendly than monopoly. And yet, we have seen a surge of antitrust energy and action all around the world. We’re at this moment where the bedrock principle of political science has crumbled. Pigs are flying, water is flowing uphill, and things billionaires hate are happening all over the world — it’s a remarkable circumstance.

Despite these setbacks, Doctorow sees global momentum in antitrust and rules like the EU’s DMA and DSA, plus state AG actions in the U.S., as reasons for cautious optimism.

Google’s “Judicial Shrug:” In a remedies wrap-up piece for Inc., Lindsey Witmer Collins highlights why the remedies decision was such a letdown, why we can’t rely on the tech giants to act responsibly, and why judges should be held to a higher standard for having the knowledge and technical expertise to make sound decisions.

I don’t care how judges and courts achieve the understanding necessary to make effective rulings and regulations around Big Tech. But I do know it’s a travesty for these years-long trials to end in a judicial shrug. It sets dangerous precedents, wastes millions of taxpayer dollars, and gives the green light to other monopolistic forces.

OpenAI’s…Choices: The $500 billion company and its founder have been raising eyebrows this month, from announcing an app geared for AI videos, to ChatGPT’s ability to have…intimate conversations with consenting adults, to Sam Altman proclaiming that jobs eliminated by AI weren’t “real work” to begin with. Yikes. Remember when OpenAI had a nonprofit, public benefits mission? 🤯

Fresh Face at the FTC: Bloomberg reports that President Trump will nominate White House National Economic Council staff member, Ryan Baasch, as the next FTC Commissioner, replacing Melissa Holyoak. Lexington Institute has more information on Baasch, who worked for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and led the AG’s investigations into Big Tech. But will he take on Big Tech from the FTC or side with those within the Administration okay with selling access to monopolists? 🤔

Bring Back Internet Optimism: In The New York Times, Tim Wu laments the loss of the excitement and eager anticipation we had when the Internet was in its infancy, when many believed it would lift everyone’s wealth. Today, Big Tech functions like private tax collectors, capturing outsized “takes” that drain innovation and concentrate wealth.

No one can deny that the big tech platforms have become essential, the default infrastructure of much economic activity. But being essential should not entail an unfettered power to extract wealth from everyone else.

His fix is not nostalgia but policy: restore market balance with neutrality rules, limits on self-preferencing, and collective bargaining so builders and innovators reap the gains.

Coming Full Circle: The Microsoft–Activision merger was one of the first wake-up calls that led to the creation of NextGen Competition. In this post from the American Economic Liberties Project, Former FTC Chair Lina Khan remarked that she knows when Microsoft hikes up prices because gamers send her personal apologies. 😂 On a serious note, it’s encouraging to see more people now recognizing what we saw then: When Big Tech swallows entire industries, jobs suffer, quality erodes, and innovation dies.

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X, BlueSky, and subscribe to our Substack for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

Both Google and Apple stocks rose following Judge Mehta’s decision on how to remedy Google’s monopoly in general search and general search text advertising. The headlines suggest that this is partly due to Google avoiding a break-up, but I never thought this was in the cards.

A more plausible reason is that the remedies ordered are insufficient because Google can continue to pay to be the default service on iPhones, carriers, OEMs, and browsers.

Judge Mehta mentions the prophylactic effect of the on-going search case on Google’s distribution contracts (page 111 of the liability decision). Well, the remedies decision has had the opposite effect – encouraging Google and Apple to further strengthen their cozy relationship by integrating Google’s Gemini into the iPhone.

This is a missed opportunity. An important path to a more competitive online ecosystem is for Apple and Google to compete vigorously with each other on all services. None of Judge Mehta’s remedies makes this a more likely outcome than before.

As a result, the tacit agreement between Apple and Google not to compete on certain services can continue. This is based on the tens of billions of dollars in yearly payment that Apple receives from Google for search - these can continue and be extended under the remedy decision.

A remedy that restricts all payments from Google to Apple for the distribution of any of Google’s products is what is required. This could play out in a number of different ways, all of which would result in better outcomes for consumers:

1. Apple could keep Google’s services as the default and get paid nothing. This will incentivize Apple to develop its own search engine and fast track its own AI products resulting in more competition, innovation, and benefits for consumers. Apple did this for mapping services, and consumers benefit from the competition between Apple Maps and Google Maps. It could have the added benefit of more competition in syndication if Apple chooses to license its search engine to others.

2. Apple could introduce choice screens for search engines, including Google search as one of the options as it has done in the EU. The auction mechanism will be more open and transparent than the tacit agreements between Apple and Google today, and, compared to the current situation, more users will try and potentially switch to one of Google’s competitors.

3. Apple could sign a default agreement with another search engine or AI assistant, providing a valuable distribution channel for one of Google’s competitors. This would help that competitor grow and introduce more competition in the market.

Note that Apple has over $100 billion in cash on hand, so while it might miss the easy, free monopoly money from Google, it will still have the ability to invest and the added incentive to innovate because it no longer has a tacit non-compete agreement with Google for certain services.

The DOJ and State AGs must appeal the decision to strengthen the remedies. Such an appeal could focus on further restrictions on Google’s ability to pay to be the default search or AI Assistant and ensuring Google offers better syndication terms than existing commercial terms – which is all that the remedies decision seems to require.

Thank you for reading and for your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

More on Judge Mehta’s Google Search Remedies Ruling

As Sumit shared, Judge Mehta’s remedies in the Google search monopolization case fall short of opening up real competition. From our statement:

Microsoft Wants You to Pay—or Throw Away—Your Computer

NextGen Competition joined an open letter led by PIRG urging Microsoft not to “abandon hundreds of millions of computers” as it prepares to end ongoing support for Windows 10. Here’s why we’re joining many others in raising the alarm.

This is a looming security disaster for millions of users. Microsoft is no stranger to the dangers of how widespread the impacts could be from vulnerabilities discovered in its operating systems – remember last July’s global IT outage? Now the company is set to leave millions of devices exposed, swapping free updates for forced upgrades.

According to PIRG, after October 14, anyone who wants security updates must “pay or enroll in other Microsoft services.” For businesses, that starts at $61 per device and doubles each year for up to three years. Individuals get one year—if they pay a $30 fee. What if you want to upgrade to Windows 11 instead? Microsoft’s advice: “Consider purchasing a new PC.”

We’re watching this closely. It’s a clear example of how corporate concentration and an unwillingness to make a system inoperable creates a global risk.

Do you have one of these devices and are wondering what to do? Check out this guide from Consumer Reports.

NextGen at the 2025 Anti‑Monopoly Summit

Thank you to the American Economic Liberties Project for convening an extraordinary Anti‑Monopoly Summit. From lawmakers to labor leaders, the message was clear: concentrated corporate power threatens both our economy and our democracy. Conversations on Big Tech, AI, and competition policy underscored why this movement is gaining momentum across parties and industries.

In packed panels and breakout rooms, it became clear that advocates, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are ready to act. From Lina Khan’s keynote to grassroots organizers sharing frontline stories, the Summit reminded us what’s at stake — and what’s possible. Read more about the conference from AELP Executive Director Nidhi Hegde.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Lina’s Not Done: It’s been a busy month for Former FTC Chair Lina Khan, who’s been making the rounds on her antitrust crusade, even having to dodge rumors of a congressional run. In The New Statesmen, Freddie Hayward dives into Lina’s career and legacy, and the growing split in the Democratic party between what he calls the “abundantists” and the left populists. It’s a must read, and we especially loved this piece:

Khan’s theory is that these companies have squashed competition and acquired insurmountable market share by absorbing suppliers and competitors. In practice, this has meant that Amazon could own the predominant online marketplace and sell its products there. For years, Google blocked companies from selling adverts next to its search bar, even though it was a player in the very marketplace it controlled. Or consider the false choice that awaits you in supermarkets: a vast variety of brands, all owned by a few huge conglomerates, such as Unilever, Mars and Nestlé. Why is Boeing the only major aircraft manufacturer left in America?

Google’s Victory Lap: Amidst the disappointing outcome of the remedies ruling, Google seems to be flying higher than ever, achieving $3 trillion company status. You may be wondering, why did a monopolist of Google’s stature walk away with just a slap on the wrist? Former AAG for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter penned an op-ed in the New York Times addressing just that, calling it a “weak remedy,” “deflating,” and that it “fell short.” More importantly, he lamented the message it sent:

My disappointment is not just that Google was not properly held accountable, for the stakes extend beyond this particular case. If companies can flout the rules, reap trillions of dollars and face only modest constraints, the deterrent effect evaporates. The message to other companies is plain: It pays to break the law.

Mr. Showalter (Maybe) Goes to Washington: On the heels of last month’s AELP Anti-Monopoly Summit, David Dayen of The American Prospect profiled an alum of the DOJ Antitrust Division, FTC, and White House National Economic Council running for Congress in Illinois’ Seventh Congressional District. He discusses Showalter’s path to Congress, one paved by NH Rep. Maggie Goodlander, but notes it’ll be an uphill battle due to an influx of Big Tech cash and an “anointed successor.” 🏛️ Regardless, we especially love this quote from Showalter:

We are not free to make our own economic decisions, because there are people hundreds of miles away, whether traders on Wall Street or in C-suites or in the halls of Congress making those decisions,” Showalter said. “If we don’t find ways to expose people selling out the country, we don’t deserve the power.

Amazon’s Wrist Slap: The FTC settled their case with Amazon for $2.5 billion, what Former FTC Chair Lina Khan called a “drop in the bucket” for the tech giant. The case alleged Amazon misguided customers into Prime subscriptions and made the process of cancelling intentionally difficult. While FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson celebrated what he saw as a win for consumers, Khan wasn’t convinced:

This week marked the start of a historic jury trial, where American citizens would hear details of Amazon’s business practices and determine if it had broken the law. A couple of days into trial, FTC announces it has settled all charges, rescuing Amazon from likely being found liable for having violated the law and allowing it to pay its way out.

White House Ballroom, Brought to You By YouTube: In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel laments what he calls the era of “Big Tech capitulation,” citing the $24.5 million settlement YouTube paid to Trump last week, which the majority of which is going to the Trust for the National Mall, which, you guessed it, is raising money for the previously announced White House ballroom. Warzel goes on to demonstrate the “embarrassing” downward spiral for tech giants, who are a far cry from where they were just several years ago. ⏳

In her best-selling memoir this year, the former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams wrote of the company’s executives that “the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become.” These words are also as good an epigraph for the Trump era as any. Rereading them in light of Big Tech’s full capitulation to the current administration makes clear that, although these about-faces are politically convenient, they reflect a broader harmony between the tech platforms and the MAGA movement.

• While we’re on the topic of Big Tech flattery, President Trump hosted a dinner at the White House earlier in the month for over thirty tech leaders, including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook. The President got billions of dollars in investment commitments, and Big Tech checked off another box on their “capitulation”checklist. Notably absent from the gathering? Elon Musk. 😬

Silicon Valley’s Faustian Bargain: In a searing essay for Wired, journalist Steven Levy traces how once-idealistic tech giants have lined up to kiss the ring of Donald Trump, abandoning civic values for regulatory favor. As tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook cozy up to the administration, longtime insiders warn this transactional alignment threatens not only democracy, but tech’s own future. 😵‍💫

Data Center Damage: While Climate Week unfolded in New York, OpenAI’s Sam Altman was across the country, expanding his company’s already-massive data center footprint in Texas, part of Silicon Valley’s accelerating race to dominate AI infrastructure. But as The Free Press’s Jenna Ruddock reports, this growth comes with enormous environmental costs: staggering water use, rising utility bills, new fossil-fueled power plants, and communities kept in the dark until it’s too late. Her media call to action is especially poignant:

As more journalists and outlets take up this story — and we desperately need more reporters and newsrooms on the beat — keeping the bigger picture in frame becomes increasingly critical. It’s too easy to frame the rapid buildout of this infrastructure as an investment in our collective future. After all, a data center is making it possible for you to read this piece.

But this unprecedented explosion in data-center construction is an investment in one specific vision for the future — one that entrenches the power of dominant technology companies and enriches only those, like Sam Altman, who are at their helm.

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X, BlueSky, and subscribe to our Substackfor the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

Congratulations, you are now an Intel shareholder! Welcome to the Socialist Republic of America.

Exhibit one: The administration is undermining the dynamic, competitive capitalism that has historically been America's strength.

This administration thinks it is better than markets at allocating capital and choosing winners in the marketplace. As the Financial Times writes:

Trump’s arbitrary interventions in the economy are more redolent of the ways that despotic regimes, such as Russia or China, operate rather than the traditional practices of the global champion of free markets.

One example of this is President Trump strong-arming Intel into giving up a 10% equity stake in the company. The administration did this by holding hostage funding to incentivize the reshoring of advanced computer chips that Congress mandated in the bipartisan CHIPS Act. As James Surowiecki argues, the government owning a piece of a major corporation like Intel is profoundly damaging to the principles of a market economy. It undermines the government’s role to set broad, fair rules for the entire market, not to act as a proprietor with a vested financial interest in the success of one competitor over others.

And President Trump has said, this is just the start.

Whose bingo card had the United States adopting the corrupt state-led economic model of China and Russia?

Exhibit two: The administration is undermining the legal framework underpinning market rules.

The administration is allowing TikTok to operate illegally in the United States. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which passed with broad bipartisan support, mandates that ByteDance divest TikTok's U.S. operations or face a ban. The deadline imposed by the law to do this was upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025.

President Trump, via executive orders, has extended the deadline three times. This effectively grants Oracle, Apple, and Alphabet/Google permission to ignore the law! As Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mark R. Warner (D-VA) says:

“Once again, the Trump administration is flouting the law and ignoring its own national security findings about the risks posed by a PRC-controlled TikTok. An executive order can’t sidestep the law, but that’s exactly what the president is trying to do.”

Finally, as I write in my op-ed for The Well News, antitrust enforcement has also been corrupted. Decisions are now being made by political appointees and lobbyists with no antitrust expertise against the advice of the administration's own experts. Trillion-dollar corporations like Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon seek to neutralize antitrust enforcers' competition concerns with campaign checks, shallow commitments to invest in America, and well-connected lobbyists. Pay-to-play antitrust enforcement creates incredible uncertainty for all companies looking to expand through acquisitions and hurts American consumers.

Where are the Republicans who believe in capitalism, freedom, and the rule of law that underpins both?

As always, thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Apple Bets on an Authoritarian State

This week, the Digital Progress Institute (DPI) hosted Financial Times reporter Patrick McGee to discuss his book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. The book, which tells the story of corporate capture by an authoritarian regime, is a stark warning to anyone cheering Washington’s move to take equity stakes in private firms like Intel.

McGee shows how a pursuit of “efficiency” turned into dependence on a state-directed system. Apple’s manufacturing success in China created political entanglements and turned a brand that once celebrated “rebels” and “troublemakers” into a company that now complies with a belligerent regime that can shape its fate. The book has quickly become required reading for everyone on the team!

The New York Times’ Hannah Beech said it best in her review:

China may have enabled Apple to become one of the most profitable companies in the world, but the exploitation goes both ways: This is not just a story of China making Apple, but of Apple making China. Given Xi’s authoritarian hold on power, what began as a feat of manufacturing has troubling consequences for the entire world.

There’s no shortage of reasons to be worried about Apple and its quest to become a global monopoly. From its walled garden to monopoly rents, it’s time for accountability. Thanks DPI for the invite!

Microsoft’s “Digital Escorts,” Vendor Lock-in, and a Single Point of Failure

ProPublica reports that Microsoft used engineers based in China to help support Defense Department cloud systems, relying on U.S. “digital escorts” who often lacked the expertise to police what those engineers were doing. After the reporting, the Pentagon issued a formal letter of concern citing a “breach of trust,” opened an investigation, and Microsoft said China-based staff would no longer work on DoD projects.

But DoD’s leverage over Microsoft is limited because so much of the agencies’ systems depend on Microsoft. The American Prospect documented how the DoD was forced to upgrade to Microsoft’s E5 productivity just to gain simple security updates. It’s called vendor lock-in, and has forced the government’s most powerful agency to “bow down to its tech master in Redmond.” When one vendor controls the software and the cloud, the buyer not only has fewer levers to push for accountability, but companies like Microsoft know how to take full advantage by limiting interoperability with other vendors.

This is exactly the risk NextGen has warned about as Microsoft seeks more control over cloud, AI, and content pipelines. And the ultimate fix isn’t a press release and “formal letter” outlining a customer’s displeasure. A true fix requires the government using its procurement power to insist on greater interoperability among systems which would allow it to mix and match systems from different vendors - tailoring its systems to match the DoDs unique needs. The Federal Government has the buying power to make these changes, but it requires the DoD and other agencies to build critical in-house expertise to manage these systems internally—and leadership with a long term vision. Unfortunately the current administration is getting rid of expertise, not building it.

Fresh Off the Press: Pay-to-Play Antitrust

In The Well News, Sumit argues that President Trump’s Justice Department is gutting competition law by sidelining career experts and letting lobbyists and political appointees call the shots. He points to the HPE-Juniper approval over staff objections, the firing of senior antitrust deputies, and the sudden reversal in the AmEx GBT–CWT case as part of a pattern that rewards lobbyists closely connected to the attorney general over consumers and competition.

He urges Congress to use the Tunney Act and bipartisan oversight to restore the rule of law.

Pay-to-play antitrust enforcement and political interference also creates incredible uncertainty for all companies looking to expand via acquisitions, and hurts U.S. consumers. Congress foresaw this danger. The Tunney Act requires federal courts to review antitrust settlements to ensure they serve the public interest and not private interests.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Big Tech Flattery Continues: We kicked off the month with a blatant show of Big Tech flattery, as Apple CEO Tim Cook gifted President Trump a gold and glass sculpture in the White House. Axios reports that the “the gold bauble is the latest lavish gift presented to Trump in an attempt to curry favor with the president this year, raising both ethical and legal concerns.”

• Big Tech executives also joined President Trump for dinner last week in a scene reminiscent of Trump’s inauguration. According to the Financial Times, the invite list included “Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and other CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook.”

• Columnist Rana Foroohar also appeared on CNN to warn that economic inequality and populism are setting the stage for Trump’s authoritarianism and that silence from the business community is enabling it.

Public Patience with AI is Wearing Thin: More people distrust Big Tech, and being forced to interact with AI through its platforms is accelerating the backlash, according to Martin Hart-Landsberg. In Monthly Review, he explains why that skepticism is justified and sees organized pushback as a way to curb platform power:

The most organized opposition to the unchecked use of AI systems currently comes from unions, especially those representing journalists, graphic designers, script writers, and actors, with some important victories to their credit. But given the rapid introduction of AI systems in a variety of public and private workplaces, almost always because employers hope to lower labor costs at worker expense, it shouldn’t be long before many other unions will be forced to expand their bargaining agenda to seek controls over the use of AI. Given community sentiments, this should bring new possibilities for unions to explore the benefits of pursuing a strategy of bargaining for the common good.

Kanter Drops the Mic: Former AAG for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter penned an op-ed for Financial Times this month on acqui-hires, calling out Big Tech’s bad habit of absorbing AI start-ups like a parasite and leaving an empty shell behind. There are so many good lines, but we especially love this one:

“Tech giants can quietly absorb innovative start-up teams — in effect neutralising nascent competitors — without ever encountering antitrust scrutiny.”

• Last month, alongside Public Citizen and ten other public interest groups, we urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to launch a full investigation into Meta’s investment in Scale AI, an effort we viewed as a deliberate ploy to exploit gray areas in traditional merger law. Read our full letter here.

Dubious Case, Legit Issue: Elon Musk is suing Apple and OpenAI over monopolistic claims. The lawsuit states:

"This is a tale of two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance in a world rapidly driven by the most powerful technology humanity has ever created: artificial intelligence."

Apple’s monopoly power deserves scrutiny, but we shouldn’t confuse this effort with meaningful reform, especially when you consider the source.

Deeply Concerning and Unsurprising: Public Citizen is out with a report with the bold fact: “The Trump administration has halted or withdrawn one third of targeted investigations into suspected misconduct and enforcement actions against technology corporations.”

• David Dayen of The American Prospect did a deep dive on the report, stating:

  “The report intimates that the tech industry is benefiting from a significant return on investment. Public Citizen estimates that the industry, as broadly defined in the report, spent $1.2 billion in “political influence” since the 2024 election cycle, including direct political spending ($863 million), payments to Trump’s own businesses ($222 million), lobbying ($76 million), and donations to Trump’s inaugural festivities ($25 million).

• Big Tech flattery, indeed.

Clippy’s Back, and He’s Woke: Now the face of Big Tech protests, Clippy was resurrected by consumer rights advocate and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, who said:

“If you told Clippy that you were having a bad day, he wasn’t going to use that information to try and figure out which advertiser to sell you to, nor was he trying to steal your personal data or get you to purchase other Microsoft products. He had no ulterior motives,” Rossmann explained in the now viral video. “Clippy just wanted to help.”

• Rossman is hoping Clippy will continue to catch on, and bring awareness to Big Tech’s behavior in the process.

Potential Peril Across the Pond: What would happen if a volatile U.S. leader decided to “weaponize” technology capabilities for Europe? Nothing good, according to Daniel Thomas of the BBC.

“‘Critical data would become inaccessible, websites would go dark, and essential state services like hospital IT systems would be thrown into chaos,’ says Robin Berjon, a digital governance specialist who advises EU policymakers.”

Europe would most surely face an uphill battle to achieve true “digital sovereignty,” but could make some strides with a “limited sovereign cloud” to protect government data, according to Zach Meyers, of the Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE).

The bigger problem: this administration keeps turning U.S. tech dominance into leverage, leaving allies exposed to platform lock-in and political whims. Instead of pressuring Europe to soften its guardrails, Washington should help allies diversify, back open standards, and stop giving Big Tech veto power.

Amnesty Joins the Fight: In the name of human rights, Amnesty International is calling on governments to “break up with Big Tech.” The fifty-three page briefing, aimed at curbing the influence of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, which was unveiled last week, outlines the human rights harms that have occurred at the hands of Big Tech. Hannah Storey, the organization’s Advocacy and Policy Adviser on Technology and Human Rights, remarked:

“Addressing this dominance is critical, not only as a matter of market fairness but as a pressing human rights issue. Breaking up these tech oligarchies will help create an online environment that is fair and just. Failure to address Big Tech dominance can have serious consequences offline, as our investigations into Facebook’s role in the Tigray war in Ethiopia and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar have shown.”

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

With Big Tech investing billions in the promise of AI, there is a dangerous risk that this key technology will be controlled by just a few firms and individuals.

While AI is a catch-all term that can include predictive algorithms and social media recommendation algorithms, and generative AI foundation models (Gen AI) is the rapidly developing technology and focus of Big Tech’s investment spree.

Given Gen AI’s widespread use and potentially transformative impact across industries, competition is essential to maximize the benefits and to ensure they’re widely shared. Effective competition among suppliers of Gen AI technologies will ensure companies downstream – drug companies, car manufacturers, and health service providers – freely deploy, innovate, and commercialize this technology on their own terms. More competition and the freedom to bring disruptive innovations and business models to market will also benefit consumers and make the market more responsive to their preferences.

The challenge is to decide when to intervene – when are the competition problems most likely to arise?

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple have dominant market positions in key inputs required to develop these transformational tools and control ecosystems of products and services where they can deploy and commercialize this technology. These market positions, and their large scale of operations across related ecosystems of services, also means these companies are best placed to make the huge ongoing investments in cloud infrastructure and specialized chips required to develop Gen AI models.

Any acquisitions by these companies must be put under a microscope. We support agency investigations and policies such as the FTC’s January 2025 Staff Report on AI Partnerships and Investments which shed light on three Big Tech-AI partnerships: Amazon-Anthropic, Google-Anthropic, and Microsoft-OpenAI.

In addition, remedies in any on-going monopolization cases against these companies must ensure that their alleged monopolies in related markets—Google in search and digital advertising, Meta in personal social networks, Microsoft and Amazon in cloud computing, and Apple in iOS – are not used to monopolize the development and deployment of Gen AI models. The DOJ’s March 2025 proposed remedies in the Google Search case is an example where remedies try to take into account AI developments in general internet search.

It is essential that the DOJ and FTC continue to take targeted action to ensure that this developing ecosystem remains open. Smaller companies should be able to operate free from the market power of the largest technology firms and seize disruptive opportunities to challenge them.

If this key technology is controlled by a few firms, it will allow these firms to tax and control every other company and sector of the economy that uses this technology – much like Apple and Google do via monopoly control of their respective app stores on our smartphones. We need plurality and diversity of competition to ensure that downstream business users and end consumers get their fair share of the considerable benefits that this technology is likely to unlock.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Growing Tension as DOJ Does Lobbyist Bidding

Jefferson linked liberty to dispersed economic power; antitrust once upheld that ideal.

In the Trump administration, it appears lobbyists are now in control. After firing two veteran deputies, and ignoring analysis by the antitrust division that raised competition concerns with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion Juniper merger, Chad Mizelle, Chief of Staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi blessed the deal – and the next day the DOJ quietly dropped a challenge to a $540 million Amex GBT–CWT merger pushed by Ballard Partners, Bondi’s former firm.

If HPE and Amex can pay lobbyists to make the DOJ look the other way, what stops Alphabet, Meta, Apple, or Amazon from doing the same?

According to The Wall Street Journal:

[Assistant Attorney General Gail] Slater has told top Justice Department officials in recent weeks that she needs discretion to police mergers and that her team shouldn’t be subject to political interference, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Others in the department believed she had an unrealistic expectation of how much deference the antitrust division would have under the Trump administration, which favors cutting deals and says all executive-branch appointees are accountable to the president.

What the Administration calls accountability, we call corruption. The House and Senate Judiciary Committees must launch a bipartisan probe into this interference, and the courts must scrutinize the HPE-Juniper settlement under the Tunney Act, which protects against bribery in antitrust enforcement. We commend Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Booker, and Blumenthal for their letter to the District Court asking that a review be undertaken under the Tunney Act. More Senators, including Republican Senators, must join them in holding this administration accountable.

An Open Letter to OpenAI

OpenAI gives the world plenty of reasons for concern. Its alliance with Microsoft skirted antitrust review. Sam Altman’s power play, threatening to withhold computing power to regain the CEO seat, exposed troubling governance. The company also pursued a quiet attempt to convert its nonprofit into a for-profit venture behind closed doors. And that’s only the beginning.

NextGen Competition has joined more than 100 academics, organizations, and public figures in demanding that OpenAI bring real transparency to its proposed corporate restructuring. The plan appears set to dilute, if not eliminate, the safeguards enshrined in the organization’s original charitable mission.

We call on OpenAI’s board to publish detailed information on how the restructuring will change its legal duties to humanity and to affirm, in writing, that it will preserve robust public-interest protections. Anything less betrays both the spirit and the letter of its founding charter.

As Jacob Hilton, a former OpenAI employee, penned in Time Magazine, offering a prescription for getting the organization back on track:

OpenAI's next steps will determine the trajectory of the company for years to come. Instead of irreversibly abandoning its commitments to the public's interest, it could step back from the brink and reaffirm them, by enhancing the nonprofit board's ability to fulfill its duty of oversight.

Read the coalition’s full letter here.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Europe vs. Big Tech: Regardless of how the Trump administration feels about Europe’s crackdown on Big Tech, Europeans in France, Spain, and Germany are in agreement: don’t let up on keeping U.S. tech giants in check.

• People vs. Big Tech and WeMove Europe conducted a joint poll earlier this month, finding that 68%, 65%, and 63% of respondents in Spain, Germany, and France respectively feel that “Europe should continue to enforce European laws on Big Tech companies, even if this damages relations with President Trump.”

• The poll also found that regulations are too relaxed, and that more respondents believe Big Tech has more of a negative, than positive, impact on European democracy.

Trade-Talk Double Standard: While Trump’s antitrust enforcers talk tough on Big Tech at home, in trade talks abroad, it’s a different story. Trump is doing tech giants’ bidding abroad, undercutting “Little Tech” companies in the U.S. that benefit from stronger competition rules overseas. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, formal investigations may have taken hold at home, but internationally the President and Vice President have become Big Tech’s personal lobbyists:

[T]here is far more evidence that Trump and Vance are happily doing the bidding of the biggest tech firms, while claiming to be adversaries. You see it in the friendliness toward AI, which Google and Microsoft and Meta are certainly thrilled about. You also see it in how the Trump administration is using its clout all over the world to force other governments to take down their sovereign laws that impact Big Tech. Any more of this and Trump and Vance might have to register as personal lobbyists for Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Even FTC Commissioner Rebecca Anne Slaughter is skeptical as to whether the administration can both talk the talk and walk the walk:

“There’s been a lot of rhetoric about working for the people and populism, and a lot of action in the other direction,” she said.

Medical Data on Tech’s Terms? In a move that will surprise no one, Big Tech is trying to learn more about our personal health to make its surveillance advertising even more pervasive. Last week, President Trump announced a collaboration with Big Tech to launch a system to keep track of medical records using apps and programs manned by tech giants. If you’re skeptical, so are we. Big Tech can’t keep user data safe and already knows far too much about us, why on Earth would we trust them with private medical records? 🤯

Andrew Crawford, a senior policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says he has concerns about how the data will be collected and used by the companies involved in the initiative, what consumers will be told about their data privacy, and what limits there will be on how the data can be used and shared.

Taking Up the Mantle: While we wait to see what kind of effect flattery will have on the administration’s FTC and DOJ investigations, it appears that state officials are taking up the antitrust mantle. According to The Nation:

The good news is that state leaders around the country are rising to meet the moment. Lawmakers and law enforcers from Rhode Island to Minnesota to Arizona are taking action to protect a public increasingly bullied, ripped off, and scammed by a cabal of predatory corporations. They are penning and often passing new laws aimed at checking corporate power and its harms—high prices, shuttered stores, lost jobs—and are dragging monopolists to court for their villainy.

The article goes on to discuss efforts across states, including Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison’s efforts, which have resulted in numerous antitrust bills crafted by his team making their way through state government.

At an event hosted by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and the State Innovation Exchange, Ellison said:

“I think antitrust really has the answers to a lot of the economic questions that are bothering people. Why are wages stagnant? Why do we have disappearing pharmacies around our state? Why are grocery prices up, why are rental prices up? I think there’s one overriding answer, and that’s the consolidation of markets.”

Water, water everywhere, and Meta’s taking all of it: A recent New York Times investigation details the firsthand effects of a massive data center Meta is constructing in Georgia. Straining local water supplies to the point of their wells running dry, residents like Jeff Morris are understandable outrage. Deeply affected by the water deficit, he believes the issue lies with increased sediment caused by Meta’s construction. To make matters worse, “water rates are set to increase 33 percent, more than the typical 2 percent annual increases,” in the next few years, according to a local mayor. Meta’s response to the situation is both telling and unsurprising:

When Ms. Morris said she was afraid to cook with the tap water because of the sediment, the Meta employee suggested that she try boiling the water before using it. The company has denied that its employee said that.

No doubt, this is just one anecdote underscoring how Big Tech’s insatiable appetite for resources can leave communities high and dry.

Trillion-Dollar Spotlight: Rounding out July, while Microsoft just became the world’s second $4 trillion dollar company (behind NVIDIA), that’s not stopping the tech giant from receiving well-deserved scrutiny. The article attributes the growth to the tech giant’s cloud computing business, which we’ve discussed previously with regard to the (ongoing?) FTC probe:

From restrictive cloud computing bundling to its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has taken advantage of its dominance in desktop computing. Businesses hit by higher prices, exit fees, and barriers to switching platforms deserve accountability.

And we’re not the only ones watching: Brazil just opened an investigation into Microsoft, while the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority called for a probe into both Microsoft and Amazon’s dominance in the cloud computing market. Enjoy that four trillion while it lasts. 😎

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust. ⚖️

This Apple has fallen far from the tree.

It has betrayed its key promises to its customers and partners. It is no longer innovating, falling behind on AI, and eking out incremental iPhone improvements year after year. Its privacy promises are broken. It sells iPhone user data to Google for close to 20 billion dollars annually.

It also imposes onerous terms on app developers that make a phone ‘smart,’ including taking a 30% cut of many app developers’ revenues. In some cases, users pay the entire 30% tax as developers simply charge more for purchases made through Apple’s app store. So let that sink in – you pay over a thousand dollars for an iPhone and then pay Apple more money when you download and use apps not even developed by Apple!

This 30% cut also hurts privacy-first subscription-based service providers and encourages ‘free’ services that hoover up user data as Proton explains in its recent class-action lawsuit.

One estimate suggests the company extracted over $10 billion in 2024 from US users and app developers and users this way. No wonder it refuses to comply in good faith with laws and legal rulings requiring it to make changes to the way it operates its app store. Instead, it delays and disassembles as Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found in May.

You may be wondering: how then can Apple still control over 65% of the smart phone market in the US?

The DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple provides an answer. Apple maintains its market power by shutting out competitors from its ecosystem (see illustration below) and degrading interoperability for competing products and services.

Apple’s closed ecosystem of products and services locks in users – just when I thought I was out they pull me back in.

Apple’s closed ecosystem makes it harder for users to switch to Android or other platforms and makes it harder for consumers to mix and match services to access cheaper and innovative options. For example, Apple forces iPhone users to back data on Apple’s iCloud service for which it is facing a separate consumer antitrust lawsuit.

On June 30, District Judge Neal denied Apple’s motion to dismiss the DOJ’s antitrust case against it and found that:

…the Court finds that Plaintiffs adequately allege Apple maintains "a dominant share" in both the smartphone and performance smartphone markets…

The Court finds that Plaintiffs have set forth adequate allegations of entry barriers and "[o]ther germane factors" that support Apple’s monopoly power.

… Apple acts in a manner to protect its monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone market, are sufficient to establish a prima facie case…

…Complaint includes numerous statements allegedly made by Apple executives regarding the barriers set in place to maintain its monopoly.

Apple now faces a reckoning, and we look forward to the DOJ fully prosecuting this case to enable a more open and interoperable smartphone ecosystem. This will provide more opportunities for companies big and small to innovate and offer more choices for consumers. It will give us, the users, more say on how we use our smartphones and not be denied access to services on phones we have already paid for by Apple.

As always, thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Will Europe Hold the Line Against Apple’s Malicious Compliance?

In a brazenly unapologetic attempt to dodge its €500 million fine for violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple has submitted revised terms of service that still fall short. The fine stems from Apple’s anti-steering restrictions—rules that blocked app developers from telling users they could subscribe elsewhere for less.

According to CNBC, Apple’s new terms are “not a complete departure from the company’s previous policy that drew the European Commission’s attention in the first place.” The tech giant’s convoluted new rules are clearly designed to evade the fine. They might impress lawyers, but they fail app developers in every meaningful way.

Apple’s new Digital Markets Act malicious compliance scheme is blatantly unlawful in both Europe and the United States and makes a mockery of fair competition in digital markets. Apps with competing payments are not only taxed but commercially crippled in the App Store. – Tim Sweeney, EPIC Games CEO

The good news for Sweeney—and for the dozens of American startups who joined Y Combinator that have voiced support for real competition over gatekeeping—is that the EU isn’t backing down. European Commissioner for Competition Teresa Ribera said it plainly in a recent interview with MLex, “[w]e are not going to open our sovereignty so as to allow someone else to decide how we need to adopt a regulation. Of course, not.”

Trouble in Paradise? OpenAI Turns on Microsoft

OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft has soured so badly that Sam Altman and his team are now considering asking the FTC to investigate Microsoft’s investment on antitrust grounds. It’s a stunning reversal from just a few years ago, when Altman was lobbying Satya Nadella to help oust the old board and reinstall him as CEO.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership, people familiar with the matter said. That effort could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign, the people said.”

Yes, even Sam Altman has finally come to terms with the reality that OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft is anticompetitive and gives Microsoft too much control over how OpenAI operates its business. It’s a stunning admission from the company that Microsoft has propped up to the tune of $13.75 billion.

We’ve long warned about how these “partnerships” are really acquisitions in disguise, including in our recent blog: Sam Altman Just Confirmed What We’ve Been Saying All Along.

Reading the Tea Leaves: Closing Arguments in Google’s Search Remedies Trial

In closing arguments for Google’s search remedies trial, Judge Mehta signaled openness to limiting Google’s default search payments and requiring syndication and transparency remedies.

The DOJ argued that Google’s dominance in general search and text ads has harmed competition and that meaningful remedies must open up distribution and provide access to critical search data. But what’s top of mind for the court? According to NextGen Competition’s Sumit Sharma: network effects, proportionality, spillover effects on adjacent markets, and whether remedies are actually workable.

Following the day long marathon of closing arguments, Sumit wrote a piece in Tech Policy Press reading the tea leaves:

The discussion at closing arguments suggested that the court is comfortable enough with its findings in its liability decision to impose injunctive remedies and forward-looking remedies, stopping short of structural separation with an important caveat.

The important caveat for forward-looking remedies is that these should target inputs for general search services and general text advertising that Google has acquired because of its monopoly, and the fact that potential competitors cannot replicate them without the benefits of network effects that Google enjoys.

A final decision is expected in August. Sumit’s full thoughts are available here.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

A Profile on Lina: In a June sit-down with The New York Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast, the former FTC Chair reflects on her career, the state of the economy, and what’s ahead for the agency under President Trump. It’s definitely worth the read (or listen). One of the most striking moments comes during her comments on Big Tech’s outsized power:

The third thing I would note is that a through line across these big tech companies is that they came to dominate key arteries of commerce and communications. They ended up becoming gatekeepers. That meant that you had all sorts of users that were dependent on them, but you also had businesses — major Fortune 500 businesses — that all of a sudden were also suddenly dependent on the whims of a Google or an Amazon and could see how a single tweak of the algorithm could end up being devastating.

As always, Khan offers a clear-eyed view of the structural problems she spent years trying to solve.

Keeping Out the Crawlers: This week, it was reported that Cloudflare will begin rolling out protections for publishers and other domain owners to prevent AI crawlers from stealing their work without proper compensation. Known crawlers will be blocked, and publishers will have the option to allow “AI scrapers” to “Pay Per Crawl.” Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, remarked:

“If the Internet is going to survive the age of AI, we need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model that works for everyone – creators, consumers, tomorrow’s AI founders, and the future of the web itself. Original content is what makes the Internet one of the greatest inventions in the last century, and it's essential that creators continue making it. AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone.”

• To read the full Cloudflare statement, click here.

Google Braces for Impact: The European Union isn’t backing down from regulating Big Tech, with Google recently losing an appeal to reverse a $4.7 billion fine levied against the tech giant back in 2018 over Android dominance and the company’s attempt to “throttle competition and reduce consumer choice.”But fears persist that President Trump could use Big Tech’s allegiance as a weapon in Europe. Heck, he’s already successfully held Canada hostage.

• The New York Times’ Adam Satariano and Jeanna Smialek report that “Concerns about how else Mr. Trump might leverage technology for political advantage has jump-started efforts across the region to develop alternatives.”

  • This comes on the heels of an executive order issued by President Trump in February, which Microsoft immediately complied with in removing the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor’s access to his email account over his decision to pursue Israel’s leader for war crimes.

  • When Big Tech acts at the President’s behest and U.S. tech dominance goes unchecked, how should other countries respond? 🤔

Big Tech and…the military? This month, we’ve seen several pieces on how Big Tech’s influence is seeping into the U.S. Army, with The Bulwark reporting that the Department of Defense (DoD) recently promoted four tech executives as lieutenant colonels. This comes on the heels of OpenAI announcing a partnership for a $200 million pilot program to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” according to DoD.

While informed AI and tech expertise is crucial in keeping our military at the forefront of new technology, Jackie Snow of Quartz illustrated our concerns best:

“The arrangement creates an unprecedented level of integration between private companies and military planning. The executives won't work on projects involving their own employers, but they'll have direct input into military strategy while their companies compete for massive defense contracts.”

Should Google Do The Unthinkable? David Streitfeld thinks so. And by the unthinkable, he means breaking itself up before the DOJ has the chance to:

“That would be a very Silicon Valley power move: Break yourself up before courts can break you up. In an era when Big Tech is under suspicion, a maneuver like this would probably be applauded across the political spectrum. For a company that used to have the motto ‘Don’t be evil,’ such redemption might be irresistible.”

• A self-imposed breakup, Streitfeld argues, could bring redemption, financial upside, boost competition, and a wave of new innovation from engineers who “might create things as amazing as the original Google search engine, which awed people who first used it a quarter-century ago.”

Big Tech’s Downward Spiral: Julia Angwin doesn’t hold back in her latest column, arguing that the era of unchecked Big Tech dominance may finally be coming to an end, and that consumers could be the biggest winners:

“Reining in Big Tech appears to be one of the few bipartisan policies that has spanned the Biden and Trump administrations, despite the tech titans’ attempts to curry favor with the new president. Taken together, these developments could end years of stagnation and usher in more competition, smaller companies and better services. I personally can’t wait for competition in the search market…”

• Angwin walks through each of the major platforms, the mounting legal and regulatory pressures they face, and why real competition, not just antitrust enforcement, is the path to better services, smaller companies, and a healthier tech ecosystem.

Stay Vigilant: We’ve long warned about the ways Big Tech quietly exploits consumer data, and Shira Ovide of The Washington Post published this helpful piece on how to safeguard your privacy, breaking down the “scuzzy tactics” tech giants like Meta use to track users, and what you can do about it.

• Her practical advice: avoid Chrome, delete Meta apps from your phone, and use company websites instead of their apps for tasks like booking travel. It's a timely reminder that privacy protections often start with individual choices, especially when companies refuse to play fair. 🕵️

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust. ⚖️

The courts have ruled that Google illegally maintains its monopoly in two critical areas: general search – Google.com search services and related text advertising – and digital advertising on non-Google-owned websites via its control of some of the tools online publishers and advertisers use to price, sell, and buy ads.

At last Friday’s closing arguments in the search remedies trial (more on that here), I couldn’t help but think about how Google’s monopolies in these different markets are related. In particular, remedies in the search case may impact markets in the digital advertising case. So as we wait for Judge Mehta’s ruling (expected in August) and Judge Brinkema’s (expected after the September remedies trial) lets explore how what happens next could reshape digital markets for years.

Google’s illegal monopolies in general search services and general text advertising are also at the heart of Google’s control of digital advertising on the open web. As Judge Brinkema’s decision explains, Google uses the unique small advertiser demand driven by Google search (AdWords) to monopolize and illegally maintain its monopoly over key tools online publishers and advertisers use to price, sell, and buy ads on the open web. One monopoly feeds the other.

By requiring Google to syndicate general search text ads, competitors could offer credible alternatives to publishers, which would help drive down prices. On the ad tech side, non-discrimination would prevent Google from favoring its own products and charging excessive fees. The DOJ’s proposed remedies in search and digital advertising include measures to achieve these aims.

The rapid development of GenAI also highlights the importance of injunctions and interim measures while Google exhausts its appeals. Everyone seems to agree that search and digital advertising technologies are at an inflection point with the development of GenAI. As Y Combinator (a startup accelerator and venture capital firm) explains in its Amicus Brief:

“Experience has taught us that technological inflection points are critical moments for competition and innovation. The rise of novel, transformative technology can create an opening for nimble startups to disrupt established incumbents…the rise of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”), query-based AI, and agentic AI tools has the potential to be an especially significant inflection point.”

Timing is everything. The DOJ must ensure that injunctions and some interim measures are in place as soon as Judge Mehta makes his ruling on the search case. Waiting until Google exhaust its appeals would likely mean that nothing changes till 2027. This would be fatal to the DOJ’s efforts to pry open competition given how fast GenAI technology is evolving and how quickly Google is incorporating this technology into its products like search.

Strong, swift enforcement isn’t just about correcting the past, it’s about shaping the future of the internet.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Pressure Mounts on Google in Europe and the UK

The Justice Department’s effort to break up Google’s adtech business and open up search distribution across browsers, Android, and Apple devices isn’t just making waves in the U.S, it’s adding fuel to ongoing investigations abroad.

In Europe, the DOJ’s proposed remedies are expected to bolster the European Commission’s resolve to fully enforce the Digital Markets Act, while the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority continues its own scrutiny of Google’s conduct.

As antitrust lawyer Damien Geradin told POLITICO EU:

“In this tense geopolitical environment this [DOJ proposal] is good news for the European Commission.” At a time when the EU executive is “concerned not to aggravate the U.S. administration,” the Commission “can operate under the cover of the DOJ,” he said, as they can claim they are doing “the same thing.”

For regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, the message is clear: momentum is shifting, and excuses for inaction are running out.

Judge Holds Apple in Contempt

On May 1, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California held Apple in contempt, saying the tech giant “willfully chose not to comply with this court’s injunction” from 2021, doing so “with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers” and that “Apple engaged in tactics to delay the proceedings.

Let that sink in.

Apple has been referred for a possible CRIMINAL contempt investigation after wilfully violating Judge Rogers’ injunction and a top Apple executive outright lied under oath. In response, NextGen Competition released the following statement and read all about it in an investigative piece by The New York Times’ Tripp Mickle.

Developers Sue Apple Over In App Payments

NextGen Competition had the opportunity to talk to Omar Gallaga at CNET about the app developer class action suit against Apple after the company undercut subscriptions and in-app purchases by refusing to comply with a court injunction.

Here’s Sumit on how the developer lawsuit fits into a global picture:

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

OpenAI’s Consolidation and Control: The AI behemoth announced that its nonprofit board would retain control of the company, walking back a proposed shift that would have given investors more direct influence. Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, was among the first to criticize the potential change, claiming the company had become “too focused on profits” and had strayed from its original mission to prioritize safety in AI development.

• OpenAI also had a big month on the M&A front. It announced the acquisition of Windsurf, a programming tool, for a modest $3 billion, and io, the startup founded by CEO Sam Altman and Apple designer Jony Ive, for $6.5 billion.

• Even with the nonprofit board retaining control, the question remains: will OpenAI truly succeed in breaking free of its dependence on Big Tech and be true to its purported “mission” to be a social benefit company and operate open interoperable ecosystems? 🤔

A Profile in MAGA Antitrust: In a wide-ranging piece, Politico’s Nancy Scola sat down with Antitrust AAG Gail Slater, outlining her time at the FTC to her current role leading the DOJ’s high-stakes antitrust case against Google. That case, which began under Trump and continued under Biden, could define her tenure. But as Scola notes, Slater’s most significant hurdle may be the President himself:

Slater’s biggest challenge could be her boss, who has a seemingly reflexive desire to offer running commentary on legal matters facing his presidency, even if it ends up harming his own policy goals.

Local News Bites Back: State lawmakers across the country are fighting back against Big Tech’s habit of monetizing local journalism without compensation. From California to Oregon, new bills are emerging to require tech platforms to pay for reprinting local news, aiming to restore financial stability to small-town and regional outlets.

• One tech entrepreneur, Jeremy Gulban, is leading the charge through his company CherryRoad Media. Gulban is betting on the ability of small-town newspapers to push back against Big Tech’s media grip, saying, “They’re relying on our content without paying us for it.”

Congress Steps Up: Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO) are aiming to loosen Big Tech’s grip on AI and cloud computing, especially where it intersects with the defense industry.

• We’ve long argued that Congress needs to get on the field. Looks like it might finally be game time.

Can Europe Go Its Own Way? As Brookings’ Tom Wheeler reports, Big Tech flattery hasn’t saved it from sweeping DOJ and FTC investigations. Worse for the tech giants, it may have triggered a global shift. From billion-dollar EU fines on Apple and Meta, to major investments in cloud, software, and satellite infrastructure, Europe is accelerating efforts to reduce its reliance on U.S. tech.

• What may have begun as a regulatory dispute is quickly becoming a strategic realignment that could undercut Big Tech’s global dominance:

  Whether Europe succeeds in building a credible alternative to the American tech stack remains to be seen. But it is already clear that the United States is no longer viewed as a neutral steward of digital tools. In betting on Donald Trump, Big Tech may have provoked the very digital decoupling it hoped to avoid—and in doing so, may have helped to make European tech great again.

Hide and Seek: In a sharp piece for The Wall Street Journal, Tim Higgins skewers Big Tech for its reflexive secrecy. Concealment and misdirection not only erodes public trust, but it also gives regulators and rivals new ammunition. If these companies can’t act transparently in court, why should we trust them with our data?

Such skulduggery gives new credence to complaints by rivals and regulators that these companies are often leaning into obfuscation as one of the tactics used to protect their kingdoms. In addition, their actions in court seemingly confirm what their many critics contend: that Big Tech needs to be reined in.

Big Tech Mythbuster: In an article for Tech Policy Press, Professor John M. Newman lays out five of the most common myths about the Big Tech antitrust trials—and debunks them with clarity and precision. With experience at both DOJ and the FTC, Newman is uniquely qualified to address these misconceptions head on. From “government overreach” to “no consumer harm,” Newman dismantles the excuses Silicon Valley hopes you’ll believe.

Podcast Recommendation of the Month: On Slate’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick and Kara Swisher delve into Big Tech vs. the government, and how “tech bros [are] bulldozing the constitution.” 🎙️

But antitrust reform is something that’s critical given the changing nature of our industry. And so we don’t really have clear and fair antitrust laws anymore that speak to the moment, I mean, because these companies don’t charge anything. But what is their harm? What is their price? And they would say none. And I would say quite a bit, because we end up cleaning up their messes almost continually…”

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust. ⚖️

Even among the largest technology firms, Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) stands out as an egregious example of concentrated power and the harms it has caused to individuals.

Meta is controlled by one person—Mark Zuckerberg. Meta’s dual stock ownership structure means that while Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta’s stock, he controls 61.1% of the voting power. There is no mechanism for shareholders or any external party to demand changes like increased transparency. And without it, Meta can continue to target children and teens without regard to their safety, even after being presented evidence of the abuse caused by its policies. These harms are well-documented, as Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Anxious Generation.

Moreover Meta’s monopoly in personal social networks is illegally maintained as alleged by the FTC in the ongoing antitrust trial. This monopoly means that there are no checks and balances on Meta’s market power. It can ignore legally binding agreements to protect user privacy and suffer little to no consequences in terms of its profitability or market share.

For example, Meta suffered no meaningful market backlash after the $5 billion fine imposed by the FTC in 2019 for deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information or for misleading the European Commission on its ability to combine WhatsApp and Facebook user data. This cavalier attitude continues as Meta introduces new technologies like Digital Companions which can broach inappropriate topics, and engage in sexual conversations with users, including children.

If the FTC succeeds in its ongoing antitrust trial at the D.C. District Court, Meta could be required to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. This would be a welcome first step in checking the inordinate amount of control that Mark Zuckerberg has over our information ecosystem.

But will the FTC and the Courts be allowed to do their jobs without interference? The firing of two Democratic FTC Commissioners and the arrest of a Wisconsin Judge by the current administration are worrying signs. Some Congressional Republicans are also working to kneecap the FTC and take away its competition powers as it takes on not just Meta, but also Amazon.

And of course, Mark Zuckerberg has been lobbying to get a sweetheart deal. Meta changed its content moderation policies to suit the current administration, donated a million dollars to President Trump’s inauguration fund, and Zuckerberg has met with President Trump at least three times this year in an attempt to quash Meta’s antitrust trial.

The collusion between a powerful tech mogul who controls our information ecosystem and an Executive unchecked by Congress is a truly dystopian proposition. We will remain vigilant.

Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Zuckerberg’s Control of Meta Even Leaves Musk Envious

Mark Zuckerberg is untouchable—and that’s a problem. Multiple efforts over the years have tried to challenge his control, but his enormous voting power means he is not going anywhere. Even Elon Musk has appeared envious of Zuckerberg’s total and absolute control over Meta.

Meta is unique among Big Tech companies because it has zero checks on its CEO. In 2019, 68% of Facebook’s outside shareholders voted to strip Zuckerberg of his role as chair, but his super-majority voting rights overruled them. That same year, 83% of shareholders tried to end the dual-class system. Again, Zuckerberg overruled them.

Today, the Federal Trade Commission is the last line of defense against a company that is accountable to no one but its founder. This unprecedented level of control means Zuckerberg can:

• Unilaterally block mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures without shareholder approval.

• Resist regulatory pressure even when the FTC seeks remedies like breaking up the company.

• Entrench monopolistic behavior without fear of internal checks, shareholder activism, or meaningful corporate governance.

If regulators fail to act, Meta will continue operating as a sovereign power, unchecked and unaccountable, posing an increasing threat to competition and consumers.

One Unchecked Executive Meets Another

Both Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg embody the idea of a unitary executive. They are both individuals who hold near-total control within their respective domains, unchecked by meaningful oversight. In government, this centralization of power threatens the separation of powers. In business, it creates monopolistic structures resistant to accountability.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in a desperate attempt to dodge Meta’s antitrust reckoning, Zuckerberg personally offered a paltry $450 million settlement—a fraction of what the FTC demanded—and spent months cozying up to Trump, donating to his inauguration, settling a frivolous lawsuit, softening content moderation, and even making personal visits to Mar-a-Lago. The goal was simple: buy protection from accountability.

This is what happens when you allow one man to amass unchecked control over a monopoly. Zuckerberg does not answer to shareholders. He does not answer to the public. And if he had his way, he would not answer to regulators either.

Luckily, relentless flattery was not enough to completely derail the rule of law. Thanks to pressure from within the administration and leadership at the FTC, Meta’s day in court has come. But how the administration handles potential penalties remains uncertain.

Lastly, Let’s Talk About Google

This month, a federal judge ruled that Google “willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts” to dominate the digital advertising market. This is a major victory for consumers, publishers, and advertisers harmed by Google's unchecked power.

NextGen Competition Executive Director Sumit Sharma responded, calling the decision “a vindication” and a “much-needed” step toward restoring real competition in digital markets.

Read our full statement here.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Everything’s Coming Up Sam Altman: OpenAI had a big month: from being valued at $300 billion to several potential new acquisitions like Windsurf and an AI-powered personal device startup, to…building a social network? 😵‍💫 All signs are pointing to the artificial intelligence behemoth officially taking its place among its Big Tech peers. Its nonprofit roots, and stated mission to put humanity over profits, are clearly a thing of the past.

Speaking of the power of AI, Faisal Rasool certainly isn’t feeling it. In his How-To-Geek opinion piece, he laments the recent tendency for tech giants to “shove” AI into consumers’ products while neglecting to fix bugs in core services, stating:

If you ask these tech giants, they'll tell you AI will make your OS smarter. When your OS can anticipate your needs, it’ll help you get your work done better. Except, most people need an operating system that stays out of their way and lets them get their stuff done. They don’t need a glorified digital assistant to anticipate their every search, mislabel their files, or constantly surveil them. What they need is for Microsoft to fix the million bugs in Windows 11, improve updates, and extend support for older versions that work better.

Did the Big Tech flattery pay off? 🤔 It remains to be seen. But Cecilia Kang of the New York Times indicates the administration’s aggression with tariff threats, funding cuts, immigration crackdowns, and continuing the FTC trial with Meta is all indicative of “an aggressive regulatory stance.”

• In an exclusive, The Wall Street Journal has the inside scoop on Mark Zuckerberg’s futile attempt at quashing the FTC’s case. Reportedly, “[he] sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC” even though he offered way less than the FTC demanded to settle the case.

• Despite the lack of payoff, the flattery continues: at the White House Easter Egg Roll, Big Tech logos were on full display. 🐣

Europe vs. Big Tech: The battle between tech giants and the EU continues to heat up, we enjoyed Richard Wennberg’s summary of the growing rift here, where he writes:

Both parties have made their positions clear: Washington has signaled that it will scrutinize regulations it believes disproportionately target US companies or infringe upon free speech, while officials in Brussels have emphasized that although Europe must engage with the White House and take its trade concerns seriously, it should not be pressured into revising laws already adopted by EU lawmakers. Without a balanced and constructive approach to these tensions, the fallout could extend well beyond the tech sector—not only affecting trade, as suggested by the recent tariffs, but also spilling over into other key areas of transatlantic cooperation.

• The European Commission fined Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million on April 22, 2025—Apple for not allowing app developers to steer consumers to cheaper offers outside Apple’s app store, and Meta for not transparently offering its users the option to refuse to combine their personal data across Facebook and Instagram.

• Other countries outside the EU, such as Japan, have issued their own cease-and-desists targeting Google.

• This battle is far from over, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is holding firm, recently stating, “We apply the rules fairly, proportionally, and without bias. We don't care where a company's from and who's running it. We care about protecting people.” Well said. 👏

Biden Antitrust Warriors Keep Legacy Alive: Both Former FTC Chair Lina Khan and Former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan S. Kanter have been making the rounds on CNBC, with Khan addressing the ongoing FTC-Meta trial, calling the tech giant’s tactics a “buy-or-bury scheme,” and Kanter discussing the Google antitrust verdict’s effect on the ad tech world. Both are worth the watch. 🖥️

• Bonus read: This short profile on Kanter that his law school alma mater, Washington University, published. In it, he reflects on his DOJ career, giving us this quote: “Competition and freedom go hand in hand.” 🔥

Big Tech, Big Impact: We’ve talked previously about the ill-effects of the recent insatiable demand for energy from tech giants. Well, those data centers could be siphoning water from some of the driest parts of the world, according to a wide-ranging article from The Guardian and an analysis from the nonprofit organization SourceMaterial.

• Aurora Gómez, whose effort “Tu Nube Seca Mi Río” (“Your cloud is drying my river”), said it best in the piece: “Neither people nor data can live without water,” said Gómez. “But human life is essential and data isn’t.”

• Maybe Big Tech should look to their own past environmental commitments for guidance on how to develop AI responsibly, but we’re not holding our breath.

Local News Lifeline: Oregon is considering making Big Tech front the cost to local journalists and news organizations, with advocates saying the effort “would be a financial lifeline for newsrooms across the state while requiring tech companies to compensate publishers for profiting off of their locally generated content.”

• It’s a fraught move – Canada attempted something similar in 2023, and Meta retaliated by blocking news from its platform altogether and allowing the proliferation of partisan pages, cryptocurrency scams, and ads on Facebook and Instagram that mimic legitimate news sources. The New York Times also reports that research shows that only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram feeds.

• Big Tech has shown that it’s willing to play hard ball in the face of any efforts to change its behavior.

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust. ⚖️

It’s an honor to step into the role of leading NextGen Competition and to build on the impactful work George and the organization have championed: challenging the outsized power of Big Tech. This mission is essential to ensuring citizens have greater control of our economy’s productive capacity and the flow of information that shapes their decision-making.

By attempting to remove Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), President Trump is moving in the opposite direction. As the American Antitrust Institute explains in its statement on the removal, these firings are illegal and the President knows this. And as Commissioners Bedoya and Slaughter underscored, this decision not only undermines the ability of all commissioners, including Republican commissioners, to enforce antitrust laws without fear or favor, but it will also make it easier for the largest tech companies to receive favorable treatment.

It is also an own goal as it undermines one of the areas where there is bipartisan support for action – ensuring that our anti-monopoly laws are effectively enforced so that the largest technology firms are held accountable. Gail Slater was confirmed to head the DOJ’s antitrust division by a 78-vote majority in the Senate. With this decision, it is unlikely Mark Meador’s confirmation as FTC commissioner will be as smooth or bipartisan.

Finally, the flip-flopping and uncertainty that has been an all-too-common characteristic of the Trump Presidency now also affects business planning and consumer protection. An FTC beholden to the President and whose enforcement is influenced by which way the political wind blows cannot provide the policy certainty that we all require to plan our lives and that businesses need to plan their investments. There is value in policy stability, as both Chair Ferguson and AAG Gail Slater have stated with regard to maintaining the 2023 Merger Guidelines.

Clearly, we have work to do. Thank you for reading and your support.

With regards,

Sumit Sharma
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

NextGen Competition Welcomes New Executive Director

We’re thrilled to announce Sumit Sharma as NextGen Competition’s new Executive Director. A seasoned economist and policy expert, Sumit brings deep experience in competition policy, regulatory affairs, and consumer advocacy. He has previously advised tech companies, regulators, and governments, and led antitrust efforts at Consumer Reports.

Sumit succeeds George Rakis, who will remain on our Board of Directors as Executive Director Emeritus. George served as Executive Director for two years and remains committed to our shared mission.

“I’m deeply grateful for the collaboration, insights, and shared victories we’ve achieved together. While I’m stepping down as Executive Director, I remain committed to this movement and look forward to supporting NextGen’s efforts in new ways. Our work is far from over.” - George Rakis

Bedoya and Slaughter: Antitrust Heroes Who Don’t Back Down

We strongly oppose the President’s decision to remove two sitting members of the FTC and support the commissioners’ fight to defend the independence of the FTC and the FTC’s ultimate accountability to Congress.

Speaking before a crowd of 30,000 at Denver’s Civic Center Park, Bedoya decried the President’s illegal attempt to fire him from the Commission. He drew roaring applause when he declared, “We are taking the President to court.” Bedoya also spoke to NPR Morning Edition's Leila Fadel calling the president's action "a naked power grab."

In her testimony to the House Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee yesterday on consumer protection, recently-fired FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter slammed the President’s decision to remove her and her fellow commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, stating:

“The illegal firings sent a clear message to the FTCs majority commissioners: You now work under the shadow of arbitrary removal by the President. Today's oligarchs have surely noticed that it is not the independent experts at the FTC or the courts who will decide their fate, but the President himself and I fear what corporate law breakers will get away with.”

We especially enjoyed Jericho Casper’s recap, with this amazing headline

Trump FTC Moves Forward with Microsoft Antitrust Probe

This month, news broke that FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson is moving forward with a sprawling antitrust investigation into Microsoft. The agency previously sent a civil investigative demand to Microsoft requesting data on its AI operations, including the cost of training models and obtaining data, as well as information on the company’s decision to cut funding for its own AI projects after striking a deal with OpenAI.

According to Bloomberg, the FTC is looking at Microsoft’s software licensing practices—which we’ve long argued are anticompetitive—and whether Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI hurt competition in AI.

NextGen applauded the move, stating that “by staying the course, the FTC reaffirms its mission to promote fair competition and hold dominant firms accountable.”

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Power Down: Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative is out with a new report on Big Tech’s secret deals to make consumers pay for their insatiable energy demand driven by AI.

• While data centers typically use around 4% of electricity, the influx is “forecast to account for up to 12% of all U.S. electricity demand by 2028.”

• Ari Peskoe, report author and director of the initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, remarked, “We’re all paying for the energy costs of the world’s wealthiest corporations.”

Is writing a 100-word email using ChatGPT really worth a bottle of water? We think not but decisions driven purely by profit and the race to commercialize generative AI among the largest technology firms is unlikely to align with the public interest.

Reframing AGI: In a Bloomberg opinion piece, Parmy Olson calls out Big Tech for abandoning their once altruistic goals for artificial general intelligence (AGI) in favor of pursuing profit at all costs. AGI is the holy grail of AI: a hypothetical machine that can do anything a human can do intellectually.

AGI controlled by Big Tech could turn vision into nightmare, especially with a system smart enough to master every skill, outthink us, or even reshape civilization itself.

“Altman still talks about benefiting humanity, but he’s no longer a non-profit ‘free from financial obligations’ per his 2015 founding statement, and more of a product arm of Microsoft Corp., which has since sunk roughly $13 billion into his company.”

“The obsession with ‘bigger is better’ has gone on long enough in Silicon Valley, as has the jostling between people such as Musk and Altman to have the biggest AI model or the biggest cluster of Nvidia Corp’s AI chips.”

Warren’s Inquiry: Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent letters to Big Tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai, probing their cozying up to the current administration and lobbying to benefit their companies.

“And this $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families…American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts…and they deserve answers about your efforts to secure massive tax breaks for billionaire corporations.”

Jessica Corbett of Common Dreams has the full scoop, including the questions Warren posed to the five tech leaders. Will we get answers? 🤔

Google’s Search Monopoly: While it’s unclear where the FTC’s cases will go amidst the recent commissioner upheaval, the DOJ is pressing ahead with its Google break-up request. We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for next month’s hearing. 👀

“‘Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that — no matter what occurs — Google always wins,’ the government said in its Friday filing. ‘The American people thus are forced to accept the unbridled demands and shifting, ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the public may enjoy.’”

And in other Google news, Google isn’t helping fix its monopolistic image as the tech giant is acquiring cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion. 😳

As Nico Grant of the New York Times writes, “The deal will test the company’s ability to conduct major acquisitions during protracted antitrust battles with the U.S. government.”

CNBC took it further, calling the acquisition a “litmus test” for the current administration.

Slater at the Helm: The Senate confirmed Gail Slater to serve as United States Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Antitrust Division this month.

• We enjoyed this Financial Times profile, which highlights her appeal on both sides due to her "skeptical view of big business.”

• Even her predecessor, Jonathan Kanter, said she’s “a talented antitrust lawyer with top-notch qualifications.”

• We remain cautiously optimistic that Gail Slater will be a force for good at the DOJ but we are troubled by the implications of the attempt to remove the FTC Commissioners. Will Gail Slater be able to enforce antitrust laws without fear or favor? ⚖️

Britain and Europe Keep Calm and Carry On: Across the pond, Britain and the EU remain steadfast in their commitment to antitrust enforcement, zeroing in on Google and Apple’s business practices.

• Teresa Ribera, the EU’s antitrust-enforcer, remarked, “Companies operating in the E.U., irrespective of their place of incorporation, must comply with E.U. rules, including the Digital Markets Act. With these decisions, we are simply implementing the law.”

• Speaking of, it looks like Apple may already be flouting the DMA.

• The UK’s Competition Markets Authority has opened investigations into Google and Apple’s mobile ecosystems, and into Google’s general search and search advertising services.

• We could be learning from these efforts to inform the development of US policy solutions. Instead, multi-trillion-dollar technology companies seem to have convinced the Administration that they need protection. President Trump issued a memo last month threatening retaliation to prevent the “unfair exploitation” of American Big Tech. What we need instead is for these companies to face more competition so we have more innovation. As the MIT Technology Review points out:

“Of course, it’s clear that Google and its parent company Alphabet can innovate in many areas—see Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics announcement this week, for example. Or ride in a Waymo! But can it do so around its core products and business? It’s not the only big legacy tech company with this problem. Microsoft’s AI strategy to date has largely been reliant on its partnership with OpenAI. And Apple, meanwhile, seems completely lost in the wilderness[.]”

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

Amid the chaos and rancor of the first few weeks of President Trump’s second term, one signal is clear: the unchecked monopoly power of Big Tech will continue to face serious scrutiny.

Despite Big Tech oligarchs paying fealty at January’s inaugural events, the administration has made a series of notable antitrust appointments. President Trump named Andrew Ferguson as Chair of the FTC, nominated Mark Meador as an FTC Commissioner, and tapped Gail Slater to lead the Antitrust Division at the DOJ—an antitrust trifecta, if they are allowed to do their jobs.

While Ferguson is unlikely to follow Lina Khan’s exact approach, his stance is clear: he has pledged to “end Big Tech’s vendetta against competition”—his words, not ours. Meador’s public comments suggest he was nominated with a similar mission in mind, and Slater, a veteran in antitrust law, is expected to maintain the DOJ’s aggressive enforcement against tech monopolies.

Together, this trio will shape the next phase of antitrust enforcement—scrutinizing mergers more closely, challenging anticompetitive conduct, and possibly reviving structural breakups as a serious policy option. Their effectiveness will depend on whether they can withstand industry pressure, political headwinds and a President known for changing his mind and willingness to sell us all short just to make a deal. While Big Tech firms are already mobilizing lobbyists to weaken enforcement efforts, the administration appears to be putting together a strong team to fight the status quo in the tech industry.

Speaking of the status quo—stay tuned for a leadership transition at NextGen Competition. After more than two years at the helm, I will be stepping down as Executive Director. However, I’m not going far—I’ll be joining the Board of Directors and continuing the fight for fair and open markets.

More updates soon. Stay engaged, and as always, thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

George Rakis
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

DeepSeek’s Rise Blows Up Big Tech’s Monopoly Myth

Big Tech has spent years pushing the false narrative that antitrust enforcement would give China an edge. But DeepSeek’s rapid ascent shows that China’s AI advancements are happening regardless. Perhaps if Big Tech hadn’t spent so much time in Washington protecting its monopoly status, it would have noticed that China was fast on its heels.

NextGen Competition’s latest research note focuses on the news that blows a gigantic hole through a Big Tech myth that Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have been pushing in policy circles for years. DeepSeek’s meteoric rise shatters Big Tech's entire justification for its antitrust arguments.

So what’s the answer? We can’t back down from strong antitrust safeguards. We need competition and we need to ensure startups have a chance to compete with Big Tech. Otherwise, we’ll be left in the dust as China races to the finish line.

Cautiously Optimistic About Mark Meador

This week, the FTC nominee technically set to replace Lina Khan had his first confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill. While he said many of the right things, there’s another reason to have hope that Khan’s tenure will have lasting influence.

Khan and Jonathan Kanter’s legacy of antitrust enforcement has staying power because of the courts and the 2023 Merger Guidelines. This month, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson announced he would keep Khan and Kanter’s signature merger guidelines. That’s big.

Plus, as The American Prospect’s executive editor argued in December, “the fact that judges have moved in Khan and Kanter’s direction suggests a revival of long-dormant laws restraining the power of corporations to dominate American life.” One doesn’t have to look much further than the $25 billion merger between Kroger and Albertsons, which a U.S. district court judge in Oregon ruled should be blocked.

If we take Meador at his word, he seems poised to be a stronger voice on antitrust than his fellow commissioners, Ferguson and Melissa Holyoak. But unlike the Biden administration, which largely entrusted management of these agencies to its appointees, Trump is expected to have a far heavier hand. In fact, Trump and Ferguson already agree that the FTC shouldn’t be independent… 😵‍💫

Will the FTC be weaponized against Trump’s enemies in the same way the Federal Communications Commission has been? Only time will tell. Until then, we remain hopeful that competition can remain a bipartisan issue.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

Lina Gets the Last Word: Not long after her departure as FTC Chair, Lina Khan penned an important New York Times op-ed, appropriately titled, “Stop Worshipping the American Tech Giants.” In Lina style, she makes a seamless argument against backing off Big Tech, highlighting why antitrust actions are crucial in reining in monopolies and allowing smaller companies to thrive.

We especially enjoyed this part:

While monopolies may offer periodic advances, breakthrough innovations have historically come from disruptive outsiders, in part because huge behemoths rarely want to advance technologies that could displace or cannibalize their own businesses. Mired in red tape and bureaucratic inertia, those companies usually aren’t set up to deliver the seismic efficiencies that hungry start-ups can generate.

In Common Dreams, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky praised the FTC under Lina Khan’s leadership, highlighting the agency’s “commitment to battling corporate greed and protecting consumers,” emphasizing that their work “should serve as an inspiring example to the new administration.”

Lastly on the Lina front, in an appearance on MSNBC last week, she talked monopolists, antitrust laws, and this amazing line, which really boils it down: “If you allow unchecked concentrations of economic power, that undermines people’s liberties in a really fundamental way.” 🔥

A stark warning: Much has been written over the last six weeks on the intimacy between Big Tech CEOs and the current administration, and everyone should be concerned when corporate and government power are too cozy. Take it from those who have lived through close ties between tech companies and dictatorships: the result isn’t pretty. In a Washington Post op-ed, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Yulia Navalnaya, and Ilya Yashin highlight the concessions tech companies are willing to make to curry favor with dictatorships:

Block access to foreign media? Done. Restrict tools that bypass censorship? No problem. Deny citizens tools to encrypt their messages to avoid repression? Even to that, Big Tech says “yes.”

Sound familiar? 🤔 Their op-ed outlines principles companies can pursue that prioritize human rights, assess the actual impact of local laws, and facilitate dialogue among consumers.

Big Tech’s trickle-down effects: From mass layoffs to immigration to the impact of data centers on farmers, Big Tech’s monopolist, profit-first policies are having a devastating toll on the daily lives of everyday Americans. Mya Frazier, an investigative journalist in Ohio, remarked about the data centers:

Well, we’ve seen a massive increase in the price of farmland, which has made farming unsustainable for families who have farmed for generations around this area. We’ve also seen very little public benefit to the development of these data centers in the area. The deals that have been made have all been negotiated by Jobs Ohio, which is the privatized arm of economic development in Ohio, and I think that’s left a lot of local people feeling like they are powerless before this massive expansion of big tech infrastructure in Middle America.

Losing faith: A recently released study from Common Sense Media surveyed over 1,000 American teens, finding a staggering loss of trust in Big Tech, with TechCrunch reporting that “64% of surveyed U.S. teens don’t trust Big Tech companies to care about their mental health and well-being and 62% don’t think the companies will protect their safety if it hurts profits.” Ouch. 🤕

To add to that, The Hill reports that the Edelman Trust Barometer recently found that only 32% of U.S. adults trust AI, with trust in Big Tech “to do what is right” falling 10 points over the last ten years from 73% to 63%. 😳

To make matters worse, federal employees have entered, or more accurately, left the chat, with The Verge reporting that Big Tech flattery has led to a mass migration of federal workers from apps like Facebook to more secure communication mediums like Signal: “what was once skepticism has grown into deep distrust — not just of their boss’s boss’s boss, but of the very services they use to communicate with one another, worried that their messages will be leaked to the government.” If these reports are any indication, Big Tech has some serious work to do regarding reputation management.

Slater the Scalpel: Gail Slater, the President’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, was on the Hill this month, leaving Big Tech critics cautiously optimistic she’ll be a force for good in reining in Big Tech.

One thing’s for sure: her approach will differ from her predecessor’s. In her hearing, she argued for a “scalpel” rather than a “sledgehammer” method for taking on tech giants, more of a precision-focused, rather than a panoramic-centric approach to antitrust legislation.

One question we also were curious about was brought up during the hearing. Would she continue the pending cases against tech giants like Google and Apple?

“Resources are, of course, a very important consideration in antitrust litigation, in taking cases further. It's very complex civil litigation, as you know, and costly,” she said. “So that will be an absolute intention to, once I get there, reading to all of the open litigations that are in the docket.”

Hm, color us still skeptical. 🤨

Over in Europe, the fight over tech regulations is heating up. 🔥 Omer Kabir of CTech reports:

In recent weeks, tech giants have launched a lobbying campaign against the European Union's technology regulations in an attempt to dilute them and make implementation easier. The trigger for this effort is the stance taken by President Donald Trump's administration against the EU's strict regulation of American technology companies, as well as the companies’ hope of gaining support from the White House. The move is likely to lead to a clash between the U.S. and the EU, in what could be described as a regulatory war.

This comes on the heels of Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris, which the Financial Times called a “lash out at the EU’s legislation on tech by denouncing the bloc’s “onerous international” rules.”

Europe isn’t daunted, though. Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s tech leader, said Europe was “fully committed to enforce our rules”, despite US pressure. Likewise, Teresa Ribera, the EU’s antitrust leader, confirmed that decisions on the ongoing cases against Meta and Apple would be released next month as planned.

FYI, if you’re interested in statements made on the EU’s tech regulations, Tech Policy Press is tracking them here. 📋

Lastly, much has been written about Big Tech’s rightward shift (including our own blog last month), but Vox is out with an interesting piece that breaks down this shift, highlighting reasons such as changing economic conditions, policies of the Biden administration, and a shift in how Democrats perceived Big Tech. It’s worth a read.

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.

Last February, NextGen Competition led a coalition letter supporting the Federal Trade Commission’s 6(b) inquiry into Big Tech’s growing influence over the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI. We worried that the concentration of AI development within a small group of powerful corporations posed significant risks to consumer rights, data privacy, and the ethical development of AI.

Companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft were attempting to monopolize AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic through pseudo-mergers, talent poaching, and cloud partnerships. So on January 17, when the FTC finally issued its findings, we were ecstatic. The 11th-hour report released under Chair Khan’s leadership highlights critical concerns, including the role of concentrated control over essential computing resources—such as cloud infrastructure—and how this dominance impacts competition in the AI market.

It also calls attention to the risks posed by dominant firms’ exclusive access to these startups’ engineering talent and proprietary data, which create high barriers to entry for new competitors. Additionally, the report warns that these companies’ strategic partnerships with AI developers may distort innovation by prioritizing proprietary ecosystems over open, competitive markets. We commend Chair Khan and the FTC Staff for their work getting this report published before the new administration gives Big Tech the keys to the agency.

In recent months, the fealty shown by tech CEOs to President Trump—evident in their prominent seating in the “oligarchs only” section of the U.S. Capitol rotunda during the inaugural festivities—leads us to believe that the new administration is unlikely to scrutinize Big Tech’s practices.

But we will.

The FTC’s findings reinforce the urgency of our work and the importance of maintaining vigilance in holding these corporations accountable. We hope you’ll join us in the coming months as we continue to push for accountability and fair competition in this critical space.

Together, we can ensure the next four years are not defined by unchecked corporate dominance.

Sincerely,

George Rakis
Executive Director
NextGen Competition

Big Tech's Generative AI Takeover Playbook Explained

Looking for a quick refresher on how Big Tech has been covertly (and overtly) taking over generative AI forms? We have you covered. First, a white paper by Open Markets titled, “AI in the Public Interest: Confronting the Monopoly Threat.” It examines how Big Tech has used its size and power to co-opt generative AI innovation.

For a case study of what this looks like in practice, we published a blog last year examining Microsoft’s slow and covert takeover of OpenAI, exposing Big Tech’s playbook. We’re talking billions in investments, a 49% ownership stake, poaching key executives, and using Azure’s cloud computing credits to hold the startup’s board hostage.

Will a new administration take up the FTC’s staff report findings and explore the many questions that remain? We hope so, and we continue to advocate for Chair Andrew Ferguson to fulfill the FTC’s prior commitment to “use all of its tools, authorities, and laws on the books to address AI market dynamics that may pose risk to consumers and competition.”

Lina Khan’s Long Goodbye

Like many of you, we were excited about Lina Khan’s decision to remain serving as a Commissioner. In December, NextGen Competition’s Executive Director made the case for why Khan should stay in a Common Dreams op-ed. At the time, George said:

“By staying, she could prevent Republicans from gaining a majority for months and help ensure she remains a bulwark against any rollbacks to the FTC’s tough-on Big Tech approach. And if you listen to the rhetoric from Republicans and the president-elect himself, they would be lucky to have her.”

Khan’s final weeks as Chair were marked by a never ending flurry of pro-consumer announcements. The breakneck speed of her final days in leadership was a fitting end to one of the most successful FTC tenures in the history of the Commission. For a list of Lina Khan’s key accomplishments, take a look at this blog.

Lina Khan announced that she’d formally resign on January 31st. Given the Hill’s generally okay with her decision to stay, we hope she reconsiders. We need her at the FTC as long as possible to help protect against the backsliding of its current leadership. Andrew Ferguson is already using his position to quietly remove FIVE requests for public comment, including on retailers’ surveillance pricing.

The “Oligarchs Only” Section at Trump’s Inauguration

How Far Will the Flattery Go? When Trump took the oath of office, he did so in the shadow of Big Tech. He was flanked in the Capitol rotunda by billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Tim Cook. We call it the “oligarchs only” section after each donated $1 million to the President’s inaugural fund with some even hosting lavish celebrations with high-profile Republican donors.

Why are they doing this? As we explored in our blog, it’s because they’re shrewd monopolists and know exactly how to curry favor with this administration in hopes of preserving their monopolies, limiting the consequences in ongoing cases, and having investigations quietly dismissed with no more than a slap on the wrist!

Despite earlier promises by the president to keep up the heat on Big Tech, we’re extremely concerned by how fast and how hard tech leaders’ influences have penetrated the administration. No other incoming administration has been so openly transactional. We’re not the only ones concerned. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) sent a letter to the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber, pressing them for clarity on their extravagant inaugural fund donations.

Presidential administrations serve the public, not Big Tech. We’ll be watching to see if this flattery influences the incoming administration to ease up on Big Tech, and we’ll continue to push for action to fulfill promises of holding them to account.

Other Competition News

Headlines from the past month you might have missed:

2025 is shaping up to be monumental for Big Tech, and predictions abound over what kind of battles the industry will face. The first test for gauging the Trump administration’s attitude toward reining in Big Tech? DOJ’s Google case, argues Rob Larson in Jacobin writing, “the case will test the sincerity of the Trump administration’s anti–Big Tech rhetoric.”

One thing that’s for certain though is that Big Tech is sparing no expense when it comes to lobbying Members of Congress. Axios reports that in 2024, tech spending on lobbying catapulted to roughly $86 million, an $18 million jump from 2023.

One item on Big Tech’s 2025 to-do list? Data centers, and lots of them. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that Microsoft will spend $80 billion on AI data centers in FY’25.

This comes on the heels of President Trump’s announcement last week of a joint venture, Stargate, between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to create at least $100 billion in computing infrastructure to power artificial intelligence.

• Environmental activists have been quick to call foul on these data centers, which they argue hurt the environment and prevent mitigation efforts toward climate change.

• The Guardian reported that between 2020 and 2022 “the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are probably about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.” 😳

Now if you’re thinking to yourself: where are all those tech executives who cried foul the last time President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement? Apparently somewhere being silent this time around, reports Politico’s Corbin Hiar and Sara Schonhardt:

“Eight years ago many tech leaders rightly condemned Trump’s withdrawal from Paris,” said Bill Weihl, Facebook’s former director of sustainability who later founded the environmental advocacy group ClimateVoice. “Their silence now is cowardly, complicit in reinforcing the status quo fossil fuel economy, and shows that they care more about their own profits than the American people.”

Don’t worry though, to offset the massive emissions these data centers will emit, Microsoft will use recycled water in their data centers next year. 🙄

Saying goodbye is never an easy thing. As we mentioned above, former FTC Chair and antitrust crusader Lina Khan will depart the agency after a whirlwind term taking on Big Tech and other major corporations.

• In a Washington Post exit interview, she remarked, “You have big bipartisan coalitions with major actions against companies like Google, and so I fully expect that that scrutiny will remain.” We hope she’s right!

• Additionally, The Wall Street Journal conducted their own exit interview with Khan, streaming here.

Likewise, DOJ’s outgoing Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter spoke to The American Prospect, where he discussed the ramifications of DOJ’s Google search monopolization case:

“For better or for worse, the case became a symbol of the applicability of antitrust law to protect modern economies. In many ways it was a test of whether antitrust enforcement works in the modern era. We succeeded and demonstrated that antitrust laws do apply and can work against modern tech companies.”

We’ve said this time and time again, but we can’t emphasize enough how integral both of these officials were in reining in Big Tech over the last few years. ⚖️

As major officials depart from the previous administration, the question remains: will Congress take a more active role now that Big Tech flattery is in full force with the current administration?

Ahead of the inauguration, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) sent a letter to the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber, pressing them for clarity on their extravagant inaugural fund donations.

“We are concerned that your company and other Big Tech donors are using your massive contributions to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor,” they wrote.

This comes on the heels of a joint bipartisan effort led by Sen. Warren and Senator Michael Schmitt (R-MO) last month mandating a “competitive award process” for DOD contracts awarded re: cloud computing and AI.

In lieu of more congressional involvement, Laura Manley, Executive Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, recommended the creation of a “FOIA-like system for Big Tech.” We especially love this passage from her op-ed:

“Today, tech giants have supplanted governments as the primary custodians of critical data, both in the United States and around the world. They wield unprecedented influence over society through the massive troves of information they collect, analyze and monetize. Unlike democratic governments, they are not elected, nor do they operate under principles of civic responsibility, transparency or accountability. Their power is driven by profit motives, not public service.”

Hello AI, Goodbye DEI? The new administration is wasting no time building out massive AI capacity, with the recent announcement of a “joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to create at least $100 billion in computing infrastructure to power artificial intelligence.”

• In the same breath, Big Tech seems to be taking cues from the administration’s push to end DEI initiatives with Meta announcing that it had “disbanded and reassigned its entire DEI team and was sunsetting its hiring policy that focused on diversity.”

• Similarly, Amazon “retired diversity programs and dialed down its DEI rhetoric as part of a review of hundreds of initiatives.” Notably, Apple and Microsoft rebuffed calls to do the same. More on specific Big Tech DEI cuts in Pavithra Mohan’s Fast Company piece.

• It remains to be seen whether Big Tech’s attempts to ingratiate themselves with Trump will help with the companies’ antitrust problems.

Efforts abroad. While Big Tech may be worshipping at the altar of the current administration here in the United States, their relationship with government officials across the pond isn’t as rosy.

• Last week, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority signaled they will investigate Apple and Google with regard to whether they have “strategic market status.”

• This is on top of the European Union (EU)’s efforts to pursue cases against Apple, Google, and Meta under the Digital Markets Act, which Teresa Ribera, the EU’s new Competition Commissioner says there will be “no freezing” and “reassessments” in light of Trump’s rise. We love to see it. 😎

And in case Europe needs a kick in the pants to stand up to the Trump/Big Tech alliance, Parmy Olson has penned a column for Bloomberg asking for just that:

“The EU has already shown it can yield real behavioral change, as seen with Meta’s concessions on ad-free access. With new leadership taking the helm in Brussels, backing down would signal that political pressure can impede its role of fostering market competition and protecting European citizens. That’s a message the bloc can’t afford to send.”

Until next month! In the meantime, follow us on X and BlueSky for the latest on Big Tech, AI, and antitrust.