The Ticketmaster Settlement and Why Trump's a Fake Populist ft. Matt Stoller

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0:37So we're going to take a little bit of a break from our coverage of the war, although we are going to get into the war, I imagine. But we're going to talk today about economics, about monopolies, antitrust, things of that nature. My guest today is Matt Stoller. Matt is a prolific writer on all things antitrust. He's the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Goliath, The Hundred-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. He's also the man behind one of my favorite sub-stacks, which is simply called Big. You can subscribe to that at thebignewsletter.com.

1:08Matt, thanks so much, man. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, obviously, here, but I want our listeners to sort of understand who you are if they're not familiar with you and to understand that you're not a partisan talking head. You're a liberal, but you have no compunction with calling out Democrats or praising certain Republicans. Politico, I believe, once called you Washington's angriest progressive, which I would take as a compliment. And so you're a populist, but you're also a Harvard grad and you've referred to yourself as a frustrated elite.

1:43But the crux of your work centers around what we were just talking about, monopolies and corporate power and antitrust. Is that sort of a relatively fair top line summary elevator pitch? Yeah, that's a great it's a great intro. OK, cool. So if our thesis today is sort of that, you know, corporate power is kind of the skeleton key for understanding this era of, you know, economic and political discontent that we're in. When did that era begin, really? Because monopolies have been around forever, obviously. yeah i mean there's no there's no real beginning to these broad political debates you know the the concept of of how how do you have a free society that question you could you could go back thousands of years to try to understand it because it's really a question of political philosophy the modern understanding of market power well man it depends on the day when i when I think about it.

2:40Maybe a better way to start would be to characterize the, if you look at the foundation of the American experiment in the 1770s and 1780s, the fear was concentrated political and economic power. There wasn't industrial power at the time, but they were afraid, look, if you consolidate too much power, then you will have some form of an authoritarian government, that concentration could happen in a whole bunch of different ways. Their fear was that it would happen through the government, largely, because that was the mechanism through which monopolies happened at the time. That would be the East India Company, those kinds of arrangements.

3:23But it was just kind of not particularly important to think about just purely commercial endeavors because everything was so small scale, local farms and mills and whatnot. Um, what, what happened, you know, they also didn't allow for corporate chartering except in extremely narrow cases of maybe a, um, a college or something like that. So, um, when you, when you roll that forward, like the, when you think about what they were really saying, they were saying, let's not have consolidated economic or political power because that is a threat to the liberty of a free people. So there was a Revolutionary War congressman named William Findlay, and he said, wealth in many hands is many checks, right?

4:06That was the idea. If you have a broad base of wealth, then people can check each other, and so there isn't going to be too much corruption. You roll that forward and you essentially have two ways to understand our political system. One is you want to have checks and balances in the political realm. You have different branches of government. You have subdivisions between federal and state and local authority. And so no, you know, you even split up, they split up the army and the Navy originally. You didn't want the capital, the financial capital, which was either Philadelphia or New York and the political capital, DC.

4:43You want to just kind of, I think Thomas Jefferson said there cannot be too many devices to subdivide property. But on the commercial side, you have that same aspect of dividing power, and that happens through competition. So competition and anti-monopoly rules, and you can go back to the early 1800s with bridges and ferries, or you could go into the Sherman Antitrust Act in the 1890s. You can talk about antitrust today. It's all essentially the same thing. It's saying, look, if you're in an industry and there's one guy in charge, that guy is the dictator of the industry. Right. It's a political structure.

5:23And if you have enough industries where you've got one guy in charge, then you've got a whole series of mini dictatorships or mini authoritarian regimes. But if that industry has a bunch of different entities competing, then, you know, it's a much freer industry. There are lots of options for who you want to work, you know, you could work for or who you could sell to or who you could buy from. And there would be, you could enter the industry as an independent firm if you wanted to. It's a much freer system if you have a competitive market structure. And there are laws that undergird either a monopolized or an open and competitive system.

5:58Anyway, that's the way to think about it politically. And then historically, you can go back and trace it all the way back to the 1600s or 1700s or 1800s. But I think the modern era of what I would consider a highly consolidated economy where you have just these giant obvious monopolies like Google or Amazon or various - Ticketmaster. That, Ticketmaster, right. The Ticketmaster era, call it that. I think that you would say that was probably, I would date that to 1982, which is when the Reagan administration essentially stopped enforcing anti-merger law, the Clayton Act. And that enabled the rollup of all sorts of industries from retail to the defense base, to banking, to software, et cetera, et cetera.

6:49And then in the 1990s, when you had this technological revolution, which was communications and personal computing combining, then we saw a whole bunch of new companies being created that were born in this era that was native, where the legal framework was native to monopoly because of the changes that the Reagan administration had put forward. And that led to the big tech problems that we have today. So that would be kind of a, not a quick, but a historical framework for how to understand where we are. That's very helpful for my thinking. I want to get back to Google and take a master in a minute, but I want to talk about Trump first.

7:23So I think you would probably consider yourself a populist from the left. And Trump is, or at least claims to be, I guess, a populist from the right. Though I think he probably, to the extent that he has any real beliefs, I guess that populism would be sort of his operating system. And there are people in this administration, right? I'm thinking about somebody like Gail Slater, who runs antitrust for the DOJ, who have been sort of more anti-monopoly, at least that one would expect from sort of like a typical GOP administration. But at the same time, Trump is also gutting these agencies, the police, a lot of this stuff.

7:59Do you think Trump is the administration writ large are for real in their sort of like populist anti-monopoly chops? I mean, the Ticketmaster settlement does not give me great hope. Right. So the way to understand, you know, that Trump, like any political leader, is cross pressured. He has different factions that that operate, you know, in his in his world. And I think the Republican Party historically has been the party of big business. And they are still, you know, it's not like, you know, this is the party of George W. Bush. They essentially tried to get rid of monopolization law, which isn't, you know, to praise Obama because he kind of continued what the Bush administration had done.

8:38But just historically, the Republican establishment is very pro-monopoly. That's who that's who funds them. That's that's their sort of their culture. And Trump was seen as a kind of it was a kind of question of whether this how much this guy was going to break from that. Because Trump had some kind of pro-labor elements to what he was saying. You know, if you prevent more immigration, you give native born Americans more bargaining power. He had some tariff aspects to what he was doing. But, you know, and he did criticize the AT &T Time Warner merger. His administration in 2020 brought the Google antitrust case on search and the Facebook antitrust cases.

9:14It's not, you know, it's not fake everything that kind of he was not all rhetoric. But I think in the kind of 2020s, right, early 2020s, there was this open question in the Republican Party. What do we do about these big tech platforms that got deplatformed Trump after January 6th? How do we address these financial institutions that they felt were not serving them because they felt it was for political reasons? Largely, they were trading crypto. And so they got debanked, that kind of thing. And there were some populists on the right, like Josh Hawley, who said, let's go after corporate power. OK, corporate power is the fundamental problem.

9:54We have to break that up. There were some libertarians who, after a while, and realized, okay, we can't just defend corporate America straight up. They started saying, all right, we don't love what corporate America has done, but that's only because it's run by leftists. Right. Okay? So we need to get rid of the leftists in Wall Street and corporate America. And I think that was the debate within the Republican Party. And Trump essentially adopted the view that the problem with corporate America was that it was not conservative enough. Not that it was too big and powerful. That was kind of the critique from our side, which is corporate America is too powerful.

10:35The critique, I think, from Trump is corporate America is too leftist. And so their idea is let's get rid of the leftists in corporate America and get them back on side. And I think that's really what they've executed in terms of their broad policy in the second Trump term. So you mentioned the Ticketmaster thing like they had this case. The Biden administration filed the case against monopolies monopolization by Ticketmaster. This is something that was you know, there were Texas and Tennessee Republican states that were involved. They still are involved. Kid Rock, very strong Trump supporter.

11:05He hates Ticketmaster. Probably the most outspoken artist on that. But then last week, the Trump administration settles it because Ticketmaster hires some MAGA-connected lobbyists, Spike Davis, a couple of others, and says, like, let's just get rid of this. Put it to bed before it goes to trial, right. Put it to bed before. And this, I think, is where you see, but you've seen this with other cases, like the Hewlett Packard bought a company called Juniper Networks for$14 billion to monopolize or dominate this segment, this line of business of selling basically large Wi-Fi systems for hospitals and educational institutions, corporations.

11:48So they bought, there was another one, which is Compass Anywhere, which is one of the two of the biggest real estate brokerages in the country that got moved through Capital & Discovery. There's a whole bunch of mergers that were on deck to be challenged. And there are monopolization cases that were on deck to be addressed, like RealPage, which is a software and data analytics company that was coordinating the largest landlords in the country for rent, corporate landlords for rent. they were giving them like they were basically a rent fixer, allegedly. And the Trump administration settled that.

12:23And so there's a there's a number of these cases where I think the Trump administration has not on everything, but they have gone soft on a lot. And, you know, you mentioned Gail Slater, who was a J.D. Vance staffer. She was put as the head of the antitrust division. She was fairly she wasn't she was kind of weak, but she wasn't corrupt. And she kind of did buy into some of the populist arguments. She got fired because of these corporate lobbyists. So there is this like, I think the Trump administration, and also Trump, I think, really bought into AI as the central strategy for what the American sort of economy is going to look like.

12:59We're going to go all in on AI. We're going to go all in on big tech. So I think he's really moved away from the populism of antitrust. I think the other aspect of it, aside from going soft on antitrust, because the GOP coalition doesn't like it. It's also that the traditional one, there are newer people that do, but the ones who are in power. The other aspect is Trump has really bought into AI as the central model for his economic strategy this time. So it's all about data centers, all about getting more investment from the big guys. And so that's become, I think it's really hard to say, we're going to take apart Google's monopoly, but also it really encouraged them to put tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars into new data centers.

13:41He just decided, I don't really care that much about the monopoly thing. I'm going to move into data centers. Oh, I didn't really think of it that way. That's interesting. I want to, okay, let's, one last thing on Ticketmaster, because the thing that I don't understand as just sort of like a civilian, this seems like such an, it seems like such an obvious win for Trump. Like, I mean, you mentioned Kid Rock, right? Ticketmaster is a live nation, which I guess actually is the parent company of Ticketmaster, but everyone knows it as Ticketmaster. This is like probably the most widely loathed company in America, or at least up there.

14:11So why not force a trial? Why not try and break this company up? You wrote in your newsletter today that this is a, quote, a case that may help erode the Trump presidency. And the explanation for that is very long and complicated. But can you just sort of explain the sort of like contours of what you mean there? Yeah. So, okay, there's the case itself, which we can go into. But the reason I said it could really erode the Trump presidency. I was making an analogy to the Watergate scandals, which is one of the things that happened during Watergate, and we know it as a break in spying on the Democrats and doing various illegal behavior, but it was really a campaign finance scandal.

14:49And one of the things that happened is there was a company called ITT that was under antitrust investigation, and they gave$400 ,000 to the Republican National Committee in the 1970s. That's when$400 ,000 in politics was a lot of money. And Nixon told the antitrust division to drop the case or they would get fired. And that became part of the Watergate scandal. And then eventually Congress passed a law called the Tunney Act to say that antitrust settlements have to be overseen by a judge. Anyway, there are echoes of the ITT scandal with Ticketmaster. There are echoes with the ITT scandal with other such settlements.

15:25And there are real investigations going on by essentially through a mix of judges and state level enforcers about why these settlements happened. And it's showing some pretty ugly stuff. So that's kind of where the political danger for Trump comes in is it's like you can you can show deep corruption here. You can show that a presidency might be in trouble. The actual case against Ticketmaster is that they have basically three monopolies that are linked to one another. One of them is they own or control a lot of venues. So if you want to perform in a city, it's very hard to find a venue that isn't owned or controlled by Live Nation.

16:08They also have, obviously, a ticketing platform, which everybody uses. And there's a whole bunch of tactics they use to make sure that people use that ticketing platform. And it's a pretty, you know, it's not a particularly good platform, but if you don't use it, then you may not get access to venues or um well the venues are the ones actually who buy that who have to get the ticketing software but if if they don't use it then then they might encounter the third line of business where live nation has a lot of power which is in artist management and promotions right so they'll say to uh and this has been on you know some of the um ceos who've been on the stand in the trial have said this they said look if we didn't want to use ticket Mastery, we went to SeatGeek or we went to a different platform.

16:57And then the Live Nation said, oh, sorry, you know, we've got Billie Eilish coming to town and we're just not going to, we're going to, we're going to send them to a different venue. So they're, they, what they do is they use their different lines of business to fortify each other and extend their, their market power. And then they do, they have all sorts of like financial kickbacks to hide money from, you know, with from partners. And I mean, these are a bunch of the allegations. Yeah. And the idea is, look, if you if you have a ticketing platform, you shouldn't also be managing these venues and you also shouldn't be doing artist promotion.

17:34Like these are there are just inherent conflicts of interest baked in here that don't allow for competition. So that's the case. And it was Obama that let Live Nation merge with Ticketmaster, right? Those people don't know that. Yeah, it's in 2010. The Live Nation. So Ticketmaster was a ticketing platform that it was still a monopoly then. Right. Eddie Vedder was talking about this 30 years ago. In the 90s. And what's interesting is they tried to avoid Ticketmaster and they just couldn't do a tour. I mean, it was that. It was Pearl Jam. Yeah, right. In the 90s, right? Right. And so so in in 2010, Live Nation, which was a a series of acquisitions of of promoters.

18:19Right. So it was a big artist promoter. They said, you know what? And I think they had a lot of power in venues as well. But they said, look, you know, we don't want to use Ticketmaster's software. We'll build our own. And so at the time, Ticketmaster was thinking, oh, my gosh, you know, we actually might have a real competition here. And Live Nation, you know, the question was, well, should we actually compete? Because that could actually lead to lower margins and lower ticket prices across the board for everyone, right, if there's real competition among these two giants. They said, you know what, let's keep prices high and merge.

18:57And so that's what they did. And the Obama administration, for a variety of reasons, and this is not the only bad decision they made around competition and monopoly, they allowed that monopoly to happen, even though the industry was very opposed. And they allowed it to happen for a lot of reasons. But obviously, it's been, I think, it was a pretty bad decision. They signed a consent decree making certain promises about what they would do. They wouldn't retaliate it against anyone. They would allow for software spinoffs. They would try to promote new ticketing companies. And none of it worked. There was retaliation.

19:35I think they had to redo the consent decree, but it didn't matter. And so this antitrust case in 2024 is essentially trying to undo that merger. Okay, so that was Ticketmaster. That was Ticketmaster in brief. The other big one, you know, again, if you're just sort of not, if you don't pay a lot of attention to this stuff, the other antitrust case that you're probably at least borderline familiar with is the Google ruling, right? So this was in 2024, or I guess maybe it was early 2025. But the, you know, Google monopolized search. It was a landmark ruling, something you were publicly pushing for, big win for the government.

20:09although the courts have since resisted actually breaking this company up. I think it's been a bunch of, I don't know if it was a consensus decree, but a bunch of like stupid basically, right? Like they're not actually. Yeah. That's right. So I guess, I mean, you sort of answer those. The term of stupid is there. Okay. What should the remedy be for something like this? I mean, Google is such an obvious monopoly in so many different ways. Because you've mentioned about how Trump is not really interested in doing anything with this. Are there Democrats out there who would actually come to office, do you think, and push to break this company up?

20:45There are. I think most – I mean it's a fight within both parties. You know, the Trump administration appealed the ruling. So I'll just tell you quickly. So what happened was there have been a number of cases against Google. They have been found liable for monopolization three different times. And one of them was on search. another one was on ad tech um which is the software that advertisers use right double exactly and uh so that one we're still waiting for the remedy so the search one it was i think it was found liable in 2024 and what the the argument there was look google search pays they pay apple they pay mozilla they pay anybody that can essentially have search as the search as the But the shelf space of search is a browser or a phone, right?

21:31The default is the shelf. So they bought up all the shelf space and they pay these entities to not have rival search engines. And what that means is because search gets better when you use it and gets better the more data that it has, no one was ever able to build a search engine that had the quality that Google had because nobody could get the scale that Google had because Google was paying everybody not to allow anybody into the market, right? So they were buying up all the shelf space. And so what ended up happening is that the government said, you know, the judge, Judge Emmett Mehta said, oh, yeah, this is totally illegal.

22:05This$20 billion payment to Apple, for example, was the big one. And then a year later, he said, OK, for the remedy, I'm not going to force them to do anything. I'm going to force them to share a little bit of information. I'm not even going to stop Google from paying Apple. And he said, look, I know this is illegal, what they're doing. But, you know, it's too important to Apple to get this$20 billion. So even though I know it's a monopolization scheme, the patronage network, I'm not going to stop it, which was insane and really bad. And the consequence is that what, you know, when this case happened at a really important time, because we're seeing this technological inflection point from, you know, the traditional web to generative AI.

22:50And if he had broken apart Google and said, we're going to spin off Chrome, we're going to break this deal with Apple, we're going to do a number of other things, get rid of, you know, say spin off Android, all of these other companies would have looked and said, I don't want what happened to Google to happen to me. But because he said, look, these pay-trotage networks are effectively fine, then what you've seen is that Google has reproduced these across the AI stack. So they've done it. Now they're going to provide AI for Apple again, which is the same thing that they did with Google Search for Safari.

23:25They're providing Gemini kind of across the board, lots of retailers, lots of Samsung for consumer electronics. They're embedding it in all of their products. And they might even help. They might even provide it for meta. So what's effectively happening is that they have reproduced their search monopolization strategy, but for generative AI everywhere. And that is a function of the bad decision of the judge to allow them to do that. So this is the perfect segue for a question that I wanted to ask you, just because it's kind of a passion of mine working in the media business, which is in the midst of being collapsed by Google.

24:08AI summaries in particular, right? So that's when you Google something and rather than just get the blue links, you get the little AI generated thing. So this is according to a study that Bain did. About 80 % of search users rely on AI summaries at least 40 % of the time. 60 % of those searches result in zero clicks, right? So zero clicks means zero clicks to Newsweek. That means, you know, my job becomes more difficult. I guess I'm not articulating myself well, but what I'm trying to say is, aren't these AI summaries a cut and dry antitrust case? I mean, you mentioned the Sherman Act before, right?

24:42So that's the 1890 landmark antitrust ruling that I believe requires proof of these two elements that I wrote down. One is the defendant must possess monopoly power in the relevant market. Obviously, Google does that. And two, there must be willful acquisition or maintenance of monopoly power through exclusionary conduct. Doesn't Google's use of AI overviews in which it scrapes our content, right, things that journalists and other content creators are making, isn't that by definition meet both of those standards? I mean, I think you could definitely read it that way. You could also read it as, copyright violations or there's other unfair method of competition.

25:22There's definitely ways you could read it. I think one of the things you could certainly read is a tying problem, because what Google is doing, the reason that you have your material, you don't tell Google to go screw and say, don't put me in your AI summaries, is because Google has said, if you don't let us use your information to train our AI on, then we're not going to put you in Google search, which would destroy your traffic. Like the mafia. It's the mafia. It's a tie. So in antitrust law, it's called tying. And so they tie that. And that's, I think, definitely an antitrust violation. and like look I mean it's it's this is just this the level of just craziness and lawlessness about what these guys are doing it's it's just off the charts I mean there was a the newspapers did actually ask in the trial as part of the search remedy don't let them take our stuff you know you're a search monopoly right you're leveraging your search monopoly to to give you data that no one else could get right every newspaper has to allow Google to train on their information.