Matt Stoller Explains Monopolies

27:08Maybe it makes sense just looking back, like hindsight's 20-20, but it just feels so illogical almost on the left. it um there's an elitism to it right so you had the this is the first generation like in this it's the 60s and 70s and now you have finally like tens of millions of people who are college educated right it's right after the the gi bill and this the world war ii and they're they're trying to understand the economy and the new deal the new deal exists right the new deal framework is there things are basically prosperous and they stop caring about questions of political economy and concentrations of power and inequality because there just isn't that much of it i mean yeah there's like there's some like rich people there are rich people but they're seen as kind of like boorish and tacky they're not like considered powerful wall street doesn't really matter um you know in the 70s it's just like a place with coupon clippings of like bonds it doesn't it's not a big deal.

28:09And that's kind of the vibe that most people have. In 1979, you could leave high school and you could just get a job making 50 bucks an hour in a factory. It was just a very different society. So there just wasn't the concern over being able to make it. And that$50 an hour job was not, I'm going to guess, from a megacorporation. or it was i mean but could be it could be but it like could be for ford or it could be for a supplier of ford or whatever but like it wasn't it you know there was a lot of light manufacturing by smaller companies but the the point is is that you had a lot there were a lot of options and it wasn't you know it wasn't considered weird or a bad thing and and inequality was fairly low and you could also start your own business it wasn't that hard to do that right but the political infrastructure for that had kind of fallen apart.

29:04And when inflation hit in the 1970s, and inflation hit for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with changes in banking, some oil shocks, those two movements spent a lot of time convincing people that the American economy was misshapen because there wasn't enough expertise running things. And so in the 1970s, when there was inflation, when there were financial shocks, the argument was, we got to get rid of these New Deal rules. Now, there were legitimate reasons to update those rules. The train system was a mess because you couldn't close down unprofitable routes. There was a lot of real problems with our transportation system.

29:56It was hard to update trucking rules. There were things that needed to be updated, but they just said, you know what, all of this stuff, just throw it out and give freedom to capital to unionize, to do whatever capital wants, because that's how to bring down costs. You got to make things more efficient and that will address pricing. So was it a succession of legislation or was it one big moment? It was a bunch of different, it was some legislation, a lot of it was through the courts. So it wasn't, you know, it's not like we ever repealed any of these antitrust laws. It's just that interpretations by enforcers and the courts changed.

30:30Yeah. And that's actually the Reagan administration, you know, there's this document that a colleague uncovered in 1980, the transition, a transition document from, from two important economists who, who said, we're not going to be able to convince Congress to get rid of antitrust laws. So we're just going to have to change it administratively by not enforcing the laws that we don't like. So that's what Reagan did with mergers. He said, we're no longer going to enforce anti-merger law. And so that's why you saw a huge consolidation wave in the 1980s. You know the movie Wall Street in 1987, Oliver Stone?

31:06Yeah. So that's about a merger, right? That is the moment. That's what happens is that change. You also saw in terms of legislation, yes, there was a tremendous amount of deregulation, of particularly of finance, but also of trade, also of shipping, also of, you know, railroads and trucking. And there were a lot of legislative changes that fostered the consolidation of economic power in the name of efficiency. So, you know, one of the first laws that changed was one that it was called the Consumer Pricing Goods Act of 1975. five, they said, we are going to allow discounters to basically charge much less than an item costs in order to kill their rivals.

31:54So, you know, that, that, the idea used to be that if I sold, if I was a producer and I, and I sold say Ingersoll watches or something, I could tell the retailer what price, minimum price they could set. Um, and that way that retailer couldn't price below cost to draw people in and kill their rivals. Let's say like, you know, they don't do that with Ingo Sold watches, but they do that with milk, right? You know, price below cost to kill your rivals. If you, if you can price below, this is what Amazon does, right? Like the reason Amazon was able to kill its rivals is because it could borrow from Wall Street for as long as it took, whereas its rivals couldn't.

32:32And that's called predatory pricing. Uber did something similar. That used to be illegal. And one of the laws that made it possible was the Consumer Pricing Goods Act of 1975 that was put in place by the Democrats who had just gotten elected reacting in a reaction to Nixon. And they didn't know what to do about inflation. So this is something that the Naderites told them to do. They did it. And Walmart exploded as a result. In 1970, Walmart had about, I don't know,$20,$30 million in sales. By 1980, it had a billion dollars in sales. By 1985, Sam Walton, richest guy in the country. So a bunch of stuff, like a bunch of legal changes happen, deregulation of finance, deregulation of, you know, all of these different areas.

33:14And now, so the relaxation, dramatic relaxation of antitrust laws. And so when you make, when you legalize monopoly, which is effectively what happened, um, then you get a bunch of monopolies. And this is to our earlier point, if you don't monopolize, then you get eaten, right? And you get destroyed, right? So you could say Mark Zuckerberg did what he did, and that's bad by rolling up the social media space. But if it hadn't been him, it would have been somebody else, right? And same thing with Google, same thing with all of these guys. Like it was gonna, when you create a legal environment like that, that's what happens.

33:49So these big companies, now they're big, now they're powerful and they use lobbying, they use infrastructure and they're governing. But it didn't start out that way. Now we have a political economy problem, but the ideas have changed. So the intellectual framework they were operating on of we're Google, we don't do evil, right? Which is fundamentally a statement about governing. I think there's like a general view that whatever you think about Google's business model, it is inappropriate for a private entity to be wielding sovereign power. That's not, it shouldn't be up to them. Right. So what does it actually mean that the government said they had a monopoly over search?

34:32What does that, what are actually the ramifications? So this is getting to the search trial. We can talk a little bit about that. But a monopoly means – so they were just deemed a monopolist by a judge, Judge Ahmed Meta in DC District Court. It's actually their second loss. They were also dubbed a monopolist in the Android App Store control over the app store. Yes, with the case with Epic. Yeah. So this is their second. And there's a third case that's starting where it's about their control of software that underpins online advertising markets. That starts in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Anyway, what Meta said is that Google is a monopolist because they control search, right?

35:18General search services, and then they control search advertising. And what they were doing that was illegal is they were preventing rivals from getting into the search market using contracts. And so it's not just that they were monopolizing, it's that they were thwarting rivals from challenging them. And then they were raising ad prices as a result of their control of this market. So that's like the, in antitrust law, it didn't always used to be this way, but we interpret it to really since the 60s to the 80s, depending on what case you look at. If you are a monopoly and then you do something to maintain that monopoly or to extend your monopoly, that's what makes it illegal.

36:08If I just create a new product category, some widget that no one's ever heard of before, and I start making it and it's popular, I'm by definition going to have 100 % of the market. That's not illegal. What would be illegal is if I had 100 % of the market and then I said to my distributors, hey, if you want my thing that everybody wants, you can't distribute my rival's thing. That's what makes it, that's what turns it into an illegal conspiracy. And that's effectively what the argument about what Google was doing with search. So how do you feel it's going to go? Well, I don't know. I mean, the, the, they're, they're starting.

36:50So the, the case started in 2020. It was originally brought by the Trump administration. The Biden administration has brought it forward. And it took until 2024 when it went to trial. And finally, the judge ruled that Google's a monopolist. Now is the second part of the trial, which is called the remedy phase, where the government comes and says, here's what we want to cure the monopoly. And Google will say, no, I don't think that's right. This is what you need to cure the monopoly. And there will be another effectively a trial. And then the judge will rule and make a decision. And then it will go on appeal, probably the Supreme Court, or depending on who wins in, you know, in this election, they could settle it as the Bush administration did with the Microsoft suit in 2001.

37:37So all of that being said, we don't even know what the Justice Department is going to ask for. So the Justice Department could ask for something very small, in which case that's the most you're going to get. Or they could ask - And that's the end of it. Right. Well, I mean, it's not the end. There's going to be, you know, yeah. that's the most you're going to get. Or they could ask for, you know, breaking up the company and, you know, opening up the data vaults to let anybody use the data that Google collected, or, you know, opening up their IP vaults and saying anybody gets to use that. Or, you know, there's a ton that the DOJ could ask for.

38:12We're going to sort of find out more about that in the next month or two. The Remedy Phase conference, they're just going to talk about the scheduling of the remedy phase in, I think, September 6th or 9th or something like that. So we're going to be covering, my organization will be covering that. You're going to hear about that if you want to see it. But it's very exciting. I mean, this is the first big tech company that's been deemed to be a monopolist. And a lot of antitrust law is just not so much what the law says, but whether you use the law. You know, the Department of Justice didn't bring a monopolization case pretty much for 20 years since Microsoft.

39:00Like the Google case was the first one, certainly first big one. FTC brought a few. There have been some private cases. But this is really the first big one since Microsoft. And what's going to happen and what is already happening is, you know every big company is we're you know every ceo in a company that has market power has to ask their general counsel are could this are we doing something that could get us into hot water they didn't have to ask that a few years ago because you could just the general counsel or the their antitrust council could say eh don't worry about it who gives a shit it won't do anything no one would ever bring a case right but now not only did the government bring a case but they won the case so it's like oh okay now we got to be careful and just so you when you say they won the case so it was the government versus google with a no this is very simple with the judge judge meta saying i agree with the government right yeah it was the government and then there were a bunch of states as well and the meta didn't he didn't agree with everything the government said so there were certain things with like google's advertising platform that He said, ah, that's not a monopoly.

40:13But on the big stuff, the search stuff, yeah, he agreed with the government. How do you break up a company like Google, though? Wall Street does it all the time. I mean, you just saw, I think DuPont just broke itself up into multiple divisions. You know, Google is not just one. It's not like one jumbled together thing. You know, Google has different divisions. And so, you know, and they buy companies and they sell companies. You could put an investment banker in there to sell parts of the company. It's not hard, right? It would be selling off bits of the company, though. Yeah. You could do it in lots of different ways, but this is something that Wall Street knows how to do.

40:54So you could just – it's not rocket science. Google has a bunch of people who work at YouTube, and they have someone who's a CEO of YouTube. you just say, okay, if you have a share of Google, you now have a share of Google and you have a share of YouTube. Of a separate institution. Yeah, separate companies, right? I mean, there are difficult things to break up. Like, let's say you wanted to have a different, a separate search engine, right? Right. Okay. There, do you clone it? Who gets the Google domain? Like who gets the brand? You know, there are also questions, all right, like, let's say you open up the data vault and you say other entities can come in and use the data.

41:32Those are technical questions. Basically, the way you would deal with that is you would have Google pay for a special master who would run a technical committee that would make a lot of decisions. That's what Microsoft had to do after they lost. There was a technical committee that came in and basically was a regulator for Microsoft's couple hundred people, 100 to 200 people who were just making sure that Microsoft's software was compatible with other entities' software. And they had certain legal authority over Microsoft. You do that for parts of Google where you can't actually do a breakup. And there you go.

42:16A remedy is not that hard, depending on what you want to do. But it almost feels like they kind of want us to think it's harder than it is because that benefits them. It makes, oh, it's impossible to do this. We couldn't possibly. But I imagine that that's the argument in the remedy's face. Well, I mean, I think that, yes, in the Epic, we've seen the remedy argument in the Epic of the Apple. And what Google has been saying is, oh, all of this stuff is so hard. It's so expensive. How can we do this? And also, it's not fair. And the judge is basically like, come on, you're Google. You've been saying how awesome you are for a long time.

42:50You can do this. This is not that hard. And it's not going to take you 10 years and a gazillion dollars.

43:16today and save every time you park. This week on a very special episode of Health Discovered, we're taking a closer look at a condition that affects hundreds of thousands of men each year, prostate cancer. I first found out about my cancer at the age of 45. Anything with cancer, you just think death sentence. In this episode, we'll explore the science behind detection, along with the practical steps men can take to protect their health. Listen to Health Discovered on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app, search Health Discovered, and start listening. A life that's carefree needs hair that's worry-free.

43:57Have both with Mori. Reduce shedding and thinning in as little as 12 weeks with clinically proven, all-natural Mori-nourishing hair care products. Others containing sulfates, parabens, and GMOs can actually weaken your hair over time. You can look great for holiday photos. Still not sure? We get it. So right now, purchase Mori at 50 % off while it lasts. And take a quiz for a custom hair care recommendation at moerie.com. Results can vary. Mori is not a substitute for medical advice. See website for more. The secret to steady business growth? Fast funding with Amerifactors. If you're a business owner in need of capital for payroll, inventory, or expansion, you need Amerifactors.

44:35Get the help you need even with less than perfect credit, including bankruptcies. AmeriFactors provides ready cash flow through accounts receivable management. Get tailored solutions. Call today for a free, no obligation, no impact to your credit score quote at 800-884-FUND. That's 800-884-3863. Or visit AmeriFactors.com. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Business software is expensive. And when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing, slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform.

45:14Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

46:06and you want a dot-com or you own a dot-com and you need to re-register you know you need to renew it you're going to pay a you know you're going to pay registration company and they're going to have to remit whatever whatever they charge i think they charge like nine dollars and fifty cents and it's here it's like 70 operating margins uh and because they manage the dot-com domain name because the government charters them told them you can you get to manage this they have a contract government that lets them do it. Just a very clear 100 % of the market for renewing.com domain names. And just everybody that owns a.com domain gives them$9.50 a year.

46:48They should give them probably $0.90 a year. Right. But are you suggesting there'd be other charters or charterers? Well, what they should do is either just put a price cap on it and say you get to charge two bucks and that's it like a utility or say every three years just bid it out and say okay whoever gives you know the best price gets to manage the you know the dot-com domains they've done that for other um you know for other domains and it tends to drop the price pretty dramatically this is a personal one i'm going to ask how do you feel about the madden franchise with electronic arts so the reason i ask this is because it sucks it's something that i you know people have been telling me about for a long time.

47:30So monopolies is not, it's not like always obvious. Um, the, the, the moral arguments aren't always obvious. Madden's a really good example where, and I don't know that much about this, but you used to have a lot of different NFL sort of football games. You had at least two. Yeah. And they were, and they were innovative. So you like, they had to innovate around like different features. I don't play video games. Um, I don't believe in fun. I don't like, um, you know, I don't think there should be any joy, But as long as you're not going outside, that's my main concern. Not a problem. Okay, good.

48:07So these long-term monopoly arrangements, I think there's something really problematic about it. But I don't exactly know what to do. But Madden has gotten – it's not that it's gotten worse. It just hasn't improved. right and and they're there there's also some of the other sports games they're like extracting more and more money but did you see this with fanatics too like yes oh god they've made the experience in sports worse yes what we need to look at is these kind of long-term exclusive contracts um and there are some there are some questions like should the nfl be able to leverage its brands to create you know obviously they have obviously they have a right to profit from their brand right and obviously the players and they all have a right to profit from their brand just as movie company you know they get a copyright of the movies they make but the question is should you able should you be allowed to take that brand And that is a government-granted monopoly, which is fair because you are generating, you know, you're making the product, right?

49:29But should you be able to turn that into another monopoly? Should you be able to leverage that, you know, or should you have to say, okay, well, we will, I'm going to profit from it. Anybody that uses the NFL in a game has to pay me, but I can't restrict who gets to use that in a game. Right. That, that, that was a little bit like, there have been antitrust cases on that. There was one in the forties that restructured Hollywood. So there were a bunch of movie studios and they, they owned or they controlled theater chains and they wouldn't let rival movies into the theaters. So it was, it'd be like, if you want to get, you know, like gone with the wind, which everyone wants to see, then you have to take our other movies and you have to keep rivals out of your theater and it was just a way of controlling the comms it was a way of tran of of turning their monopoly over legitimate copyright monopoly over gone with the wind which they had made into a monopoly over distribution of movies in general and this feels the madden thing feels a little bit like it's turning their brand into control over um over just like football related video games.

50:42And that doesn't feel, it's had the consequences that we don't like higher prices, worse quality. And you're right about Madden. I think it's a great example of a problem of this kind of long-term licensing agreement. Because it is, I would argue with people about whether it's good or bad. I think it's a certain kind of mediocre, but you're right. It keeps things kind of trapped in amber. It only gets as good as the monopolist decides. Yeah, that's right. And EA Sports will overpay, right? They will pay more just to be the monopolist, right? They're not paying for the license. They're paying for the license and to exclude someone else from getting into the space.

51:26Kind of like Apple with Google. Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's the thing is you don't want... So the original, the Sherman Antitrust Act bars monopolization and restraints of trade. So if you think about the term restraints of trade. It is about saying someone shouldn't be able to restrain trade. It's not a critique of big business. It's a critique of not allowing business to get big. And this is a case where they are preventing more business from being done by paying explicitly so others won't get that NFL licensing brand. It almost feels like monopolies are just like distinctly un-American well you know they they you know let me get this quote from Woodrow Wilson um because it's it's a really good quote I know he's you know he was virulently racist and everything but you know take the good with the bad um so America was created to break every kind of monopoly and to set men free upon a footing of equality upon a footing of opportunity to match their brains and their energies so he actually appointed um um Lewis Brandeis to the Supreme Court and um you know there is a you know thomas jefferson wanted to put an anti-monopoly plank in the constitution that was his one of his critiques you you know you you see like historically the anti-monopoly lens is kind of a critical way to understand american history um and you can see this like over and over and over there is this fear of monopoly power um and and it comes from the recognition that we do not want to be run by a king, right?

53:14So John Sherman, Sherman Antitrust Act said that, you know, if we wouldn't be, will not be ruled by a monarch, we should not be ruled by an autocrat of trade, right? Very explicit about the link between monarchy and authoritarianism and monopoly. And they were using the term monarchy because Because fascism hadn't happened yet. But monarchy did exist. In the 19th century, Americans were looking across the ocean and they were seeing a bunch of kingdoms. There was a little bit of democracy, but that's what they were really looking at. They were like, we don't want that. Today, we would just say fascism.

53:54Then we did analogize monopoly to fascism in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. But it has always been foundational in America that concentrations of power are what we escaped and they are not what we want here. There's always been this tension because you do need to consolidate capital and effort to do great public works and to do great works in general. You often do need to do that, but how do you control the power of that? How do you control the power of an industry? If you're going to put a billion dollars together to build a railroad across the country, that's awesome. Now you have a transcontinental railroad.

54:36But who runs that railroad and the prices they charge, the ability for them to charge different prices to different classes of people based on who they want to see succeed. Now, all of a sudden, you're talking about a political problem. Well, of course, you don't want to say you can't have a railroad, but you do have to deal with the political power that's concentrated. And it's true with telegraphs. It's true, you know, the internet going, all of these. So this has always been a problem, a political problem that we've tried to address. And I think what happened in the 70s and 80s, and this has happened for the last 40 years, is we just kind of forgot about it.

55:13And then all this consolidation happened. And now we're trying to get a handle on it again. And is this what you were referring to? You mentioned the previous quote of yours, authoritarianism is coming from the private sector. Is this what you mean? That's right. It's fascinating as well, because I've been running business 15 years and felt pretty well learned about this stuff, but never really thought about these companies as political entities, which leads me to a cloud compute question. So do oligopolies basically have the same problem? Because right now in tech, you have basically three or four, maybe five companies that control all cloud compute.

55:52Is that something we should let stand? Like, do we need to see signs of price fixing? What are the bad signs? So really good question. Every market is its own special snowflake, right? You can't make, you know, some markets, right, you can structure a market to have a lot of different entrants, like farming, right? You can have a lot of people growing corn, depending on how you split up the land. You can have a lot of banks, right? Not totally clear to me that you could have a lot of, say, auto producers. Right. Not going to have a family, you know, artisanal auto producer that makes a lot of cars.

56:38Right.

56:42So same with chemicals, same with lots of different, I mean, you can like, there's, there's just, there are some industries where you're going to have a small number of producers, semiconductors. There's, you know, they're not going to have like, so cloud computing, when I look at it, to me, it's just a cap, it's a capital story. Right. Who has the capital to build out the data centers to get the power that you need to design the compute that you need? And it might be the case that you really can only have three or four of them, maybe have some specialty cloud computing. I don't know. This isn't an area I've studied extensively.

57:22But typically when you do have entities where you have a huge capital investment and you have their natural limits on the number of competitors, you have some form of public utility regulation, which usually takes the form of saying you can't engage in price discrimination. You can raise your prices, but you can't charge more to that entity for the same service than you charge to this other entity. And you can't, say, engage in surveillance of your clients to give yourself an advantage. You can't pick winners and losers. You have to be a public utility. It's a little bit like a railroad or a granary or something which is clothed with public interest but is owned by a private entity.

58:22It gets a little tricky with companies that make open source tools on top of four cloud computing entities. Do those cloud computing entities just absorb those tools, make their own version of it? I don't have an answer to all of the questions about how to run a cloud computing infrastructure, but generally what you want to do is you want to say, all right, we're going to try to pull the power out of – we want the economies of scale, but we're going to try to pull the ability to be arbitrary and coercive out of the business model through antitrust law or regulation. or whatever we can do, or just, you know, transparency of pricing.

59:16You know, I know there's egress pricing. I mean, that's, you know, being able, allowing people to get out of the cloud computing, pull their data out if they want. So there are different techniques, but the basic idea is to recognize that there is a there is a public interest in this private infrastructure. And so the public has some right, not total right, but some right to control how these entities are operating. And that they must be free trade in the sense that someone can easily leave and go to a competitor within reason. Within reason, yeah, that's right. Another question. I think we can wrap up with this one.

1:00:00Is meta a monopoly? Because Meta is the only provider of advertising on Meta's products. And they have, there is no way that someone realistically compete with Facebook. It is too big at this point. The same with Instagram, kind of. Is it a monopoly? I'm trying to understand these concepts in real time. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there are different markets, right? So I think an easier way to conceptualize this would be to look at Apple. Apple and Google. And you would say, well, Apple's not a monopoly. I mean, I can buy an Android phone, right? I don't need to buy an iPhone, right? And that's true if you're looking at it from a perspective of somebody who's buying a phone.

1:00:41It's a duopoly. There's a lot of market power there, but it's not a monopoly. However, what if you've bought the phone? Now, all of a sudden, it's not easy to switch, right? So you're kind of locked in. Is Apple a monopoly? Kind of. kind of, okay, you can look at it from a different point of view, which is, what if you're an app developer, right? Now you have to get on the iPhone, because some of your customers are there, and you can't not be on the iPhone. So getting into the App Store for Apple, that's a monopoly question. And the same thing is true for getting. So it's a little bit like, you're, you know, sure, Or maybe there's a lot of railroad options, but there's only one railroad that goes from one town to another.

1:01:30So there might be a bunch of different railroads, but for what you need, there's only one option. So it's access to the customer. Well, right. Just there's lots of different markets. There's lots of ways to understand what market power means. So if you take that back to Facebook, which is really like a conglomerate of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, do they have market power and what do they have market power over? I think you'd look at the ability to buy certain kinds of advertising, right? If you're running advertising campaigns, do you need to buy on Facebook or can you just avoid Facebook entirely?

1:02:10this is this is one of the questions in the google case and this is the question in actually multiple google cases and it's been a question in a different case involving medical advertising which had a involved a company called iqvia and the court found that in fact yes if you are doing specifically pharmaceutical um marketing you iqvia is is there is market power involved in in those very narrow places where you have to buy. It's kind of like that smaller railroad, that one place you put at the one, the only one that goes to the place that you need to go, you could jack up prices and control who gets to use it.

1:02:49So the question I think the question I would ask is, if you're an advertiser, do you have to buy on Facebook's products? If you are, you know, a company, do you have to communicate through Facebook's tools, right? I know WhatsApp is really embedded in a lot of different business arrangements at this point. So that's kind of how I would look at it. And I think you could make a pretty good argument that Facebook has immense market power in social networking in general. The definition, there's different ways to test for monopoly. You could just say, well, can they raise prices without really losing very much?

1:03:31Which they have been. Which they have been, and I think it's pretty clear that they can. And if there were another option, they would see a loss of customers bleeding going to somewhere else, and they don't see that. Another way to understand it is, after some of the scandals that they've had, do they lose customers because of it? Do they lose users because of it? And the answer is no. right so there doesn't really seem to be an effect of the quality of the product it doesn't seem to affect whether people use it or not oh actually i i might push back at that a little bit and perhaps i'm misunderstanding your point but facebook's advertising product is decaying to the point that it's actually unreliable how much comes out of it and also they approve uh there's a big thing where they approve fake ads for fake com for other companies so it's it's interesting as well because it almost feels as if we need a full consumer awakening just to the concept of monopolies writ large so that people can start looking at these companies and acting and even just discussing them differently right so so to facebook the product quality is decaying the advertising quality is decaying are they losing business because of it as in they being meta or Will they be right?

1:04:53Because if they're not, then what that's proof of monopoly power, because what is going is the quality is declining, but they're not getting like if it were if there were a competitive market and the quality of a product went down, people would say, I'm not going to buy that product anymore. The shirts fall apart. I'll go buy somewhere else. But because but it's like if that's the only place where you can get the product, you can't you have no choice. You have to keep buying from them. Right. Right. That makes sense. So Matt, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today.

1:05:26Where can people find you? So I write a newsletter called thebignewsletter.com, which is about monopoly power and finance. And I also am the research director of a nonprofit called the American Economic Liberties Project. And then I rant on Twitter way too often. That's my Madden. posters mindset it's it's the greatest you've all been listening to better offline thank you for listening so much and of course the regular places to find me and the show follow after this

1:06:06thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at matt osowski.com M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07:11Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Are you a business owner or entrepreneur in need of a fast funding solution? Amerifactors provides fast capital. Call today for a free no-obligation quote at 800-884-FUND. Startups, rapid growth stage or struggling, even with less than perfect credit, including bankruptcies. In business for over 34 years, thousands of satisfied clients have transformed their cash flow with Amerifactors.

1:07:48Call Amerifactors today at 800-884-FUND. That's 800-884-3863. Or visit Amerifactors.com. Does Friendly have a taste? If it does, it's probably like Hello's peppermint-flavored anti-plaque and whitening toothpaste. Brush away plaque, show tartar who's boss, and remove surface stains to naturally whiten. Hello's thoughtful and flavor-forward products make brushing your teeth feel like a confetti-filled bathroom dance party. So say hello to Hello with the always cruelty-free, never-tested-on-animal toothpaste that's made to spread smiles. Visit helloproducts.com and let Hello add some everyday yay into your life.

1:08:28Can small acts make a real impact in the world? Sometimes a small thing has the power to become more, something big and meaningful. And when it comes to helping children, no act is too small. When you fill up at the Purple Giving Pump at Shell, a portion of your purchase will be donated to support charities in your community. The Giving Pump. Easy to stop, easy to donate. From 9-1-25 to 10-31-25, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the Giving Pump, or a minimum donation of$300. Ford was built on the belief that the world doesn't get to decide what you're capable of.

1:09:04You do. So ask yourself, can you or can't you? Can you load up a Ford F-150 and build your dream with sweat and steel? Can you chase thrills and conquer curbs in a Mustang? Can you take a Bronco to where the map ends and adventure begins? Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right. Ready, set, Ford. This is an iHeart Podcast.