EU vs. US or People vs. Billionaires?

The key is to reframe this fast-evolving story of economic conflict, not as a fight between “The United States” and “Europe”—or even between right and left. No, what is unfolding is a global conflict between ordinary people everywhere, standing shoulder to shoulder against the globalized billionaires and oligarchs.

Seen in this light, a world of rich possibilities for cooperation and new alliances opens up.

We can organize across borders and oceans in many ways. The first priority should be to confront rising corporate power—itself no respecter of borders or national sovereignty—and also directly target the main drivers of the “surveillance capitalism” that messes with our brains and our politics, manipulates us, and atomizes us into disorganized “filter bubbles” that undercut our democratic ability and collective will to take on the global oligarchy.

To understand how to influence the future, we must first understand history. And here lies a cautiously hopeful tale, of a decades-long tide of rising corporate power—and the early stirrings of a powerful reversal, just now getting underway.

The United States has a long, often grassroots-led anti-monopoly tradition that has ebbed and flowed since the Boston Tea Party 250 years ago. After the Second World War, strong antitrust protections ushered in a period of extremely high and broad-based economic growth, but these were disemboweled in the 1980s by a branch of the Chicago School revolution, known as Consumer Welfare, which told regulators to ignore things like concentrated power, workers’ rights or the public interest, and narrow their focus down to the interests of consumers and economic “efficiency” as measured by economists. Bigger companies were more efficient, this thinking went, and their “efficiencies” would trickle down to consumers.

As regulators, judges, academics and politicians drank this pro-monopoly Kool-Aid, an orgy of monopolizing mergers and acquisitions (M&As) followed. A cottage industry of economic consultants emerged, wielding dodgy economic models and manufactured evidence to “show” that these deals were efficient and helped lower prices for consumers, and to offer distractions from the increasingly obvious harms of monopoly power.

Europe held its nerve—for a while. The fundamental treaties of today’s European Union contained strong anti-monopoly elements, in clear recognition of the major role excessive corporate concentration had played in underpinning Hitler’s dictatorship and his war machine.

In 2001, US regulators were stunned when they approved a merger between two US firms, GE and Honeywell—but the European Commission blocked it, under the reasonable argument that the merged entity would have used its excessive monopolizing powers to exploit European citizens and businesses unfairly. The European move was de facto effective globally: the merger collapsed. This European move protected Americans, too.

The administration of George W. Bush was furious and mounted a ferocious lobbying campaign—not so much to reverse this merger, but to weaken Europe’s antitrust rules more broadly, so that US multinationals could exploit Europeans more easily. They pushed in a particular way: encouraging a “more economic” approach that would provide a gravy train for those dodgy economics consultancies “showing” that mergers and bigness were efficient and good.

A couple of statistics illustrate just how devastatingly effective this strategy was. Since new merger guidelines came in under this new approach in 2004, European regulators have blocked only 15 out of over 7,000 notified mergers: a rate of 0.2 percent. The European Commission has levied a total of around US $10 billion worth of fines in the past decade against Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, worth $1 billion or so a year. For the tech giants, fines on this scale are a rounding error, worth less than 0.1 percent of their roughly $1.6 trillion in combined annual sales.

One of the most dangerous acquisitions that Europe waved through under its newly lax 2004 merger guidelines was Google’s purchase in 2008 of DoubleClick, an advertising company that would come to form a key element in the “adtech stack” (the technical machinery that sits between advertisers and online publishers).

Google has monopolized all three key components of this stack: first, the “sell side” that nearly every major major website publisher uses to sell ads on their websites; second, the “buy side” where millions of large and small businesses buy advertising; and lastly, the advertising exchange in the middle (that’s where RTB comes in) that runs real-time auctions to match the buyers and sellers.

Google’s monopoly profits are all about massive—and profitable—conflicts of interest in this stack, where it leverages its dominance in one part to force users to use another part, then to operate like a tollkeeper at this massive, monopolized chokepoint between publishers and advertisers. Think of it as an hourglass, with advertisers at the top, publishers at the bottom, and Google astride a very narrow neck, controlling the passing flows of advertising money. As a Google executive put it: “[I]s there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.” Brokers on the NYSE typically charge 1–2 percent of the value of a trade, and larger institutions pay less: Google’s chokepoint power has allowed it to keep 35 percent, by its own estimates.

That control gives it power to loot advertising revenues from online publishers, including The Nation, undercutting responsible journalism. More insidiously, this surveillance-capitalist business model also manipulates users and changes our behavior, whether we are shopping or voting. New research shows that users of TikTok or X, for example, are significantly more likely to be skeptical of vaccines or climate change, and more favorable toward China or Russia.

As Trump fuses these private powers of surveillance and manipulation with state and executive power, this next phase of surveillance capitalism threatens millions of Americans—and Europeans, too.

These are dark clouds indeed. But now, for some better news.

A little over a decade ago, a new anti-monopoly movement began to gain traction in the United States. It showed monopolization everywhere, and it noted that many other battles—on the environment, on rights, on labor issues—were made more difficult because corporate power blocked change. “By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues,” as leading rights scholar Caroline Fredrickson put it, “liberals like me got defeated on both.” Happily, the new anti-monopolists noted, powerful old laws such as the Sherman Act were still on the books: they were just being ignored by judges in the name of economic “efficiency.”

The anti-monopoly renewal gained rapid media traction, then serious policy traction in 2021 when the Biden administration appointed some leading activists to top posts, notably Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission. She and others soon engaged in heavy warfare with Big Tech firms and many others: The US government now has more pending cases against monopolists than at any time in the last century. It has already won a slew of cases, and trillions of dollars’ worth of dangerous mergers have been stopped. There have been over 120 attack pieces against Khan in The Wall Street Journal—a good measure of her impact.

Perhaps surprisingly, while Khan herself is gone, a “Khanservative” streak remains in his administration—fans of the outgoing FTC chair who hate monopolists on traditional Republican principles: that they corrupt markets, throttle small businesses, kill innovation, reduce prosperity, and weaken national security. Trump’s new acting head of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, Omeed Assefi, has reportedly vowed to “continue with the aggressive stance going forward” (though we will see what Trump wants). And many antitrust lawsuits were brought by private litigants, or jointly by state attorneys general: These can’t just be stopped by edict.

More importantly, Americans are now hopping mad about monopolies ripping people off all across the economy, whether in healthcare, Big Tech surveillance capitalism, private equity, Ticketmaster, or agriculture. Anti-monopoly is now a rich American movement that transcends party lines, and will only grow as the oligarchs get richer. It has great potential not only to unite the left but also to divide the right, pitting traditional conservatives and populists who hate corrupt monopolies and unaccountable oligarchs against vested interests defending the status quo. (The recent fight between Steve Bannon and Elon Musk is a case in point.)

But there’s plenty of hope bubbling up in the rest of the world, too. Last August, a Brazilian judge blocked Brazilians’ access to X, over its promoting extremist content and disobeying the law. Musk went crazy, of course, issuing threats and insults, but the Brazilian judge won and X capitulated. As the Financial Times >reported it: “X huffed and puffed, but the only house that was blown down was its own.”

That’s Brazil. Europe has much more power to rein in American corporate power, as the GE-Honeywell case shows. What we Europeans need now, is political spine from our leaders. That is still lacking—but that too may be changing fast.

Our antitrust and competition regulators—the ones with the real power to confront Big Tech—are still in the thrall of a rather sleazy antitrust establishment; an elite priesthood of law firms, economic consultancies wielding weird “efficiency” models, lobbyists and highly paid “sponsored” academics, connected to our market regulators via many fast-revolving doors.

But beneath this glossy façade, big subterranean shifts are now underway. Last year, the European Commission launched a case against Google, raising the possibility of “structural remedies”—code for a breakup—something that would have been unthinkable just three or four years ago. It aligns closely with a case by the US Justice Department, also seeking “structural relief.” Both cases target those massive conflicts of interest at the heart of Google’s $250 billion advertising machine: each case could decimate Google’s economic and political power. Breakups always need to be accompanied by many other measures, such as tax, privacy regulation, or anti-discrimination rules, but if done well they are the most direct and powerful way measure to target these companies’ power, and thus open up political space for all these other things we want to do. (Next stops, I’d argue: X and Meta/Facebook.)

The powerful undercurrents beneath these stirrings of positive change will grow stronger, even in the face of the bullying by the Trump administration. First, European governments have rapidly been hardening a stance of “strategic autonomy” in a newly hostile world, with Big Tech firms potentially as their top target.

Second, the Trump administration’s new bullying stance towards the rest of the world is now super-charging European fears of becoming “Vassal States.” Our spines are stiffening fast, as the break-up-Google letter from the 18 former prime ministers and presidents show. China’s bullying “Wolf Warrior” stance towards other countries from 2017 to 2023 failed, and I expect the Trump administration’s variant to founder too: Discussions are already emerging for an international anti-Trump alliance.

Non-US countries are fast coming to understand that these private monopoly chokepoints can be geopolitical chokepoints too, raising tensions. If we broke up and dispersed X or TikTok, for example, by fully separating the algorithms from the hosting platform and ensuring plurality and a true choice of algorithms, then no single Musk-like actor could hold us all hostage with threats to weaponize our voters: We could shut down any element that became too toxic, and true choice would ensure that the resilient system would flow around it.

There is a third factor here, perhaps most optimistic of all. A big difference between Europe and the US is that the Biden administration’s antitrust revolution was built on a rich, grass-fed movement, whereas the early stirrings of positive change in Europe have been led, in good part, by events in the US: the movement’s ideas, and the regulatory shift.

We Europeans haven’t built much of a broad anti-monopoly movement yet. This is in large part because the European antitrust establishment has almost neutered antitrust or competition policy, turning it into a weak, often pro-monopoly toolkit; most people ignore it as ineffective, or even a neoliberal trick. (It’s quite a Trumpian feat, to portray the fight against corporate power as a right-wing agenda. As the journalist and author Cory Doctorow put it: “Don’t let the right trick you into thinking that they own antitrust.”) We must disrupt this vicious cycle and break open the corporate power establishment. It will take years, but I’m optimistic we will get there.

The first stirrings of a truly international anti-monopoly movement are now starting to emerge—not a moment too soon. For example, Oxfam’s influential report “Inequality Inc.”. at last year’s Davos meetings of world leaders and business titans was one of the first times a major global civil society actor had tackled antitrust and monopoly power so fulsomely and directly. I am working with a small but growing band of others to push this agenda forwards. Recently, for example, some of us co-authored a report showing how monopoly power is the secret sauce behind nearly all the world’s biggest fortunes, and how to change this picture.

There is everything to play for, and millions of potential allies in Europe, Brazil, India, South Africa, and beyond. On this journey, we will find strange fellow-travelers: populists across the political spectrum, national-security types worried about surveillance capitalism’s existential dangers, traditional conservatives worried about collapsing innovation or the crushing of smaller businesses—and millions of ordinary people everywhere seeking protection from private autocrats and unaccountable global forces. For those Americans despairing about events at home, a new international anti-monopoly movement against the oligarchs and Big Tech is within our grasp. Now that is something worth fighting for.