Top Hat & Thimble - November 2025
Welcome to NextGen Competition’s monthly recap, delivering insider insights on antitrust battles, industry shakeups, AI trends, and more.
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 7th 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! 🦃
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