Pluralistic: Millionaire on billionaire violence (10 Aug 2025)


Today's links


A Roman ruin. In the foreground are two figures: a guerrilla fighter with a rifle and crossed bandoliers and a boxer in trunks and sash, fists raised. Both figures' heads have been replaced with tophatted caricatures of millionaires from Gilded Age editorial cartoons.

Millionaire on billionaire violence (permalink)

For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

Political scientists will tell you that policies that billionaires hate will not ever be enacted by politicians, no matter how popular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

And yet, all around the world – the US (under Trump I, Biden and Trump II), Canada, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even China – governments have done more on antitrust over the past couple years than over the past four decades. Where is this coming from?

My working theory basically boiled down to "enough is enough" – AKA Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." As in: people are just so pissed off with corporate power that politicians are finally acting to curb it.

But I was never very satisfied with this. There's lots of stuff that the public is furious about, which politicians aren't acting on, from climate change to taxing billionaires. Why antitrust and not all that stuff?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

I've been mulling this over, and I got to thinking about a low-key disagreement I used to have with comrades in the digital human rights world, just before all the antitrust stuff really kicked off:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04/why-is-there-so-much-antitrust-energy-for-big-tech-but-not-for-big-telco/

Back then, people on the same side as the barricades as me were deeply suspicious of antitrust. They thought that the bubbling policy revival for antitrust was a way for phone and cable companies to enlist the government to go after their adversaries in the tech world, against whom they were (badly) losing the Net Neutrality fight:

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/04/if-big-tech-is-huge-antitrust-problem-why-are-we-ignoring-telecom/

Back then, my thesis was, Sure, maybe Big Telco is pushing for antitrust to target Big Tech, but once antitrust arises from its long slumber, it will turn on telcos – and every other concentrated industry.

Tldr: I'm pretty sure that's what's happening.

You see, one part of the antitrust battle boils down to a fight between rentiers and capitalists. The largest tech (and other) companies are primarily rentiers – entities that make money by owning things, rather than doing things. They make rents, at the expense of other companies' profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Companies like Epic (makers of Fortnite) want to sell your kids skins and mods for their in-game avatars without giving Apple and Google 30% of every dollar that brings in, and they've got a lot of money to make that desire real:

https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/07/31/24-6256.pdf

This is millionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's gigantic corporations going to war against galactic-scale corporations. These pro-antitrust companies are the inheritors of the telcos' mantle, powerful belligerents in an Extremely Large Tech war on Big Tech. There are a lot of these large companies and they're sick of being subjected to a 30% economy-wide App Tax on all the payments they receive in-app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Let me be clear: I'm not saying that the only reason we're getting muscular, global anti-monopoly action is that slightly smaller corporations (who universally aspire to acquiring monopolies of their own) are fighting for their own self-interest.

What I'm saying is that the coalition of everyday people who've had their lives ruined by monopolists and corporations that are stuck paying the app tax (and the 51% tax that Google/Meta take out of every ad-tech dollar, the 45-51% Amazon takes out of every e-commerce dollar, and the sums that Tiktok, Twitter and Meta extort from business customers to "boost" in order to reach their own followers) is, in combination, sufficient to awaken the antitrust giant.

Members of the public are critical to this fight – we're the ones who tip the scales from one side to the other. That's why rentiers go to such great lengths to convince policymakers that they have the public on their side, whether that's Amazon trotting out "small businesses" that depend on (and get viciously fucked by) Amazon's ecommerce platform:

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4760357-amazon-basics-antitrust/

Or leaders of groups like the NAACP who've been bribed to front for the phone companies and cable operators in the fight against Net Neutrality:

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/12/19/naacp-fought-net-neutrality-until-last-week-now-suddenly-supports-idea/

All other things being equal, policymakers will simply side with the deepest-pocketed, most unified corporate lobby in any fight (which is how the media companies won the Napster Wars). But when the public and one side of the corporate world is on one side of an issue, policymakers understand that siding with them will get them votes and money, which is much better than just getting money (which is how we won the SOPA/PIPA fight):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/everyone-made-themselves-hero-remembering-aaron-swartz

We can really see this in the EU, where the new Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are going after Big Tech with both barrels, with the enthusiastic support of the EU's tech industry. That's because the EU's tech industry barely registers when placed alongside of US Big Tech, which has sucked up nearly 100% of the market oxygen by cheating (on privacy, taxes, wages, etc). Despite the farcical efforts of US tech shills like Nick Clegg (former UK Deputy Prime Minister turned Meta shill, who insisted that Facebook was "defending European cyberspace from Chinese communism"), everyone knew that US tech companies were extracting billions of euros (and the personal information of 500m Europeans) from the bloc and siphoning it off to America, after first cleansing it of any tax obligations by laundering it through Ireland and the Netherlands.

If Europe still had thriving tech "national champions" – Olivetti, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, etc – these companies might plausibly mount an opposition to muscular tech regulation in the EU. But these companies were crippled by predatory capital and then mostly absorbed into US Big Tech (or ground into dust).

Back when I was having a friendly blog-argument with my comrades about whether tech antitrust was a Big Telco plot, I averred that it didn't really matter, because Big Tech really was terrible, and because once we'd roused antitrust enforcement from its 40-year slumber, we could wrest control of it from the telecoms monopolists who'd helped us dig it up and reanimate it.

In other words: the war against the corruption brought about by corporate concentration is hard to kindle, but it's even harder to extinguish. The corporations that are fanning the flames are focused – as corporations inevitably are, to the detriment of our planet and politics – on the short term gains they stand to reap from their actions. But we can – we must – take the long view. Smashing corporate power is the key to destroying fascism and ensuring our species' survival, so our focus needs to be on building the blaze, and if some of those adding fuel to the fire happen to aspire to building monopolies of their own, then our job is to give 'em a nasty surprise when that day comes.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago The Last Musketeer: whimsical, dreamlike, delightful comic https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/08/the-last-musketeer-whimsical-dreamlike-delightful-comic/

#15yrsago Resistance: YA comic about the kids who served in the French resistance https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/09/resistance-ya-comic-about-the-kids-who-served-in-the-french-resistance/

#5yrsago Test-proctoring software worsens systemic bias https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#algorithmic-bias

#5yrsago Commercial real-estate's looming collapse https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/09/just-dont-have-a-face/#systemic-risk

#1yrago "Carbon neutral" Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn't actually carbon neutral https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook

#1yrago Private equity rips off its investors, too https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • 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

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1031 words yesterday, 25719 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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