loading . . . Pluralistic: Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (28 Jun 2025)
# Today's links
* Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity: Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2020, 2024
* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
* Recent appearances: Where I've been.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
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# Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (permalink)
In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in _Perspectives on Politics_ :
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?
It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it. As Gilens and Page put it:
> economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have _no_ voice in policy outcomes. Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations – millions of people in the streets – only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.
This just _shattered_ me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opionion-influencing. I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation _now_ , that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was _sure_ wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.
Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet. The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God _enforced_ them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states – France, Germany, Spain – have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA. Even Ireland – a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech – is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html
Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:
https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7
Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers _went to town_ on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-sues-pepsico-rigging-soft-drink-competition
Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:
https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725
Trump killing antitrust law is _normal_. That's what politics have been like for this whole century, and it's what politics are like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/27/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-married-wedding-venice/84349820007/
But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies. In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history – and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists. The antitrust enforcement – in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain – are totally _aberrant_. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea, and _China_ has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing
This is fucking _wild_.
This is _water flowing uphill_.
This is pigs flying.
This is hell freezing over.
There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires.
This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are _losing_.
How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly. I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.
The system is _so_ broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People _know_ that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They _hate_ the fucking system.
Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements.
Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change. The _only_ team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden).
I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking _pores_ and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.
The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are _not popular_. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unopopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.
Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority.
But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running:
https://backzack.com/
Labour has walked away from voters. The Tories are in chaos. The Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs. I
I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race:
https://join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us/
(_Image:Frank Vincentz, Petri Krohn, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified_)
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# Hey look at this (permalink)
* What is a democratic socialist? https://coreyrobin.com/2025/06/26/what-is-a-democratic-socialist/
* Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502053122
* Decon: Dual system offering an emergency decontamination tool for Chemical Crowd Control Agent (CCCA) exposure and app for protestor mobilization https://nedc.mesausa.org/team/california-2025/
* Promises The ‘Trump Phone’ Would Be ‘Made In USA’ Lasted 1/100th Of A Scaramucci https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/promises-the-trump-phone-would-be-made-in-usa-lasted-1-100th-of-a-scaramucci/
* Digital Services Tax to stay in place despite G7 deal https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7
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# Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Secret Congressional policy reports published https://web.archive.org/web/20050629020405/http://www.opencrs.com/
#20yrsago Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent https://web.archive.org/web/20190918065156/https://www.ft.com/content/816699fe-e50a-11d9-95f3-00000e2511c8
#20yrsago Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn’t bring market control https://web.archive.org/web/20050629010724/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/hilary-rosen/the-wisdom-of-the-court-_3259.html
#15yrsago Canadian cops’ history of agents provocateurs and the G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/27/canadian-cops-history-of-agents-provocateurs-and-the-g20/
#15yrsago Stiglitz: spending cuts won’t cure recession https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-s-first-budget-it-s-wrong-wrong-wrong-2011501.html
#5yrsago Snowden on tech's Oppenheimers https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers
#5yrsago Santa Cruz bans predictive policing https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#banana-slugs
#1yrago Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never
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# Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/
* Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059
* Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
* Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/
* DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
* New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
* San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
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# Recent appearances (permalink)
* If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
* Forward Kentucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs
* Democrats Abroad
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i
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# Latest books (permalink)
* * Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
* The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The _Washington Post_ called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.
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# Upcoming books (permalink)
* Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
* Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
* Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
* The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
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# Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
**Currently writing:**
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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