The Anti-Monopoly Fund, founded last year by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, says it's giving $1.6M to 14 organizations that examine concentrated market power
Naomi Nix / Bloomberg : Tweets: @pixelatedboat and @brucebartlett Tweets: @pixelatedboat : Seems inefficient to split the money between all these groups. Instead they should've given $22 million to the biggest anti-monopoly group, enabling it to drive its competitors out of the anti-monopoly market https://twitter.com/... Bruce Bartlett / @brucebartlett : From what I know about Chris Hughes, he will withdraw funding once his groups starts to have some impact. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Chris Hughes has been building toward this for a year: after joining antitrust academics in meetings with the FTC, the DOJ, and state AGs about a potential Facebook case, he launched a $10M anti-monopoly fund in October 2019 to back research and advocacy across industries. Today's $1.6M disbursement to 14 organizations is the fund's first concrete move from pledge to grant-making, and it lands while Facebook's own position is contested — the company has argued it isn't a monopoly in advertising, so breaking it up would be illogical and ineffective.
The grant-making also enters a field where corporate money already shapes advocacy: Bloomberg Law reported Facebook and Google gave $960K+ to the Center for Democracy and Technology alone in 2018 to fund nonprofits shaping the privacy debate, and Meta later founded the American Edge group to manufacture grassroots-looking opposition to antitrust reform. Hughes' fund is a counterweight play in that same arena — funded by a Facebook founder rather than Facebook.
First-order effects
- The 14 recipient organizations get immediate funding to research and advocate on concentrated market power, giving the antitrust movement a dedicated grant-maker at a moment when Facebook faces regulatory scrutiny Hughes himself helped frame.
Second-order effects
- Meta's advocacy apparatus, including American Edge, now faces opposition that can't be dismissed as rival-industry lobbying, since the fund's founder is a Facebook co-founder — raising the cost of the astroturf-style defense the company has run elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- The pattern echoes Facebook and Google's funding of privacy nonprofits: platform money increasingly bankrolls both sides of the policy debate about platforms, pushing antitrust and privacy advocacy toward a structural dependency on the very companies under scrutiny — unless independent funders like Hughes sustain an alternative.
The trend: Big Tech antitrust advocacy is professionalizing into a funded ecosystem, with ex-founders bankrolling the opposition while the platforms bankroll their own defense.