October 12, 2020, New York, NY – With the recent House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee report on Big Tech, Congress is sending a strong signal about its willingness to step into its oversight role to ensure that antitrust enforcement and anti-monopoly regulations rein in corporate power — both in the tech sector and beyond. The report lays out what many in our Anti-Monopoly Fund network of grassroots activists, worker organizers, researchers, scholars and policy advocates have long known and actively fought against, and offers a roadmap for new remedies and legislative proposals to tackle concentrated power at its roots.

AMF applauds the Subcommittee’s recommendations to look to anti-monopoly tools, such as structural separation, non-discrimination rules and data portability and interoperability, alongside strengthening antitrust enforcement. Contemporary antitrust enforcement has long been hampered by poor precedent and insufficient resources, and the report’s recommendations to reduce market power by making it harder for dominant firms to pursue more mergers, override bad case law impeding vigorous enforcement and empower the agencies with more authority and resources to do their work are a step in the right direction. 

Many of the grantees and partners in ESP’s network were invited to testify before the Subcommittee as part of its 16-month investigation, including Stacy Mitchell from Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Sabeel Rahman from the Law and Political Economy Project, Sally Hubbard from Open Markets Institute, Gene Kimmelman from Public Knowledge, Michael Kades from Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Fiona Scott Morton from Yale Thurman Arnold Project, Tim Wu from Columbia Law School and Zephyr Teachout from Fordham Law.

Among our grantees and partners working on aspects related to the report’s recommendations are American Economic Liberties Project, The Athena Coalition, Color of Change, Demand Progress, Freedom from Facebook and Google, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Open Markets Institute, Public Knowledge, The Revolving Door Project, Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Yale Thurman Arnold Project.