Deep dive on Biden's EO, which directed all of the US government to take on big businesses, like tech giants, in concentrated markets, and whether it will work
“In the late 1930s, FDR's Administration supercharged antitrust enforcement, increasing more than eightfold the number of cases brought in just two years.”
BIGMatt Stoller
Context & Ripple Effects
The deep dive lands at the end of a two-year runway: the House's sweeping investigation of Facebook, Google and peers began in mid-2019, the DOJ opened its own review of search, social and retail platforms weeks later, and by October 2020 both parties had produced reports framing possible Big Tech action. What changed with the signing of the executive order is scope — competition stopped being a case file at two agencies and became a directive to the entire federal government, explicitly benchmarked against FDR's late-1930s surge that multiplied antitrust filings more than eightfold in two years.
The FDR comparison is the analytical spine of the piece: it asks whether an executive memo can reproduce what took a sustained prosecutorial ramp-up, and it matters because the named targets — tech giants in concentrated markets — had already absorbed two years of investigative heat without structural consequences.
First-order effects
Regulators across agencies are now instructed to tighten merger scrutiny, with 'killer acquisitions' flagged for special attention — immediately raising the bar on every deal in the tech giants' acquisition pipelines, not just the marquee cases already under review.
FTC, DOJ and line agencies inherit competition mandates simultaneously, stretching enforcement capacity thin even as the order raises expectations for output.
Second-order effects
If scrutiny chills acquisitions, startup exit economics shift toward independent growth or IPO paths, altering the venture funding cycle that currently prices companies against buyout by the incumbents under review.
Enforcement pressure compounds along other vectors: the later [[a:982835|CFIUS order tightening review of deals giving China access to critical tech and personal data]] shows the same administration extending deal scrutiny to national-security grounds, narrowing acquirers' room from both antitrust and foreign-investment sides.
Third-order effects
Whether the pattern holds turns on the FDR test embedded in the analysis: an eightfold case increase required sustained institutional commitment, so the open question is whether executive direction survives personnel changes and court pushback to become a permanent whole-of-government posture rather than a one-administration experiment.
The trend: US antitrust is shifting from agency-by-agency litigation against individual firms to coordinated executive-branch competition policy aimed at market structure itself.
9. The executive order has mandates across a host of concentrated industry. It orders the Surface Transportation Board to crack down on railroad monopolies. Their stocks weren't happy when this news came out. https://twitter.com/...
11. The list of items is too long to mention. There are right-to-repair rules for electronics, farm equipment, and military systems. Hospital price transparency. Beer/liquor consolidation, seed, and supermarket studies. Crackdowns on pharma. Etc.
1. Ok, so last week Joe Biden made a speech that is potentially as significant as Reagan's comment that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” He said the era of corporate power is over. https://mattstoller.substack.com/ ...
3. It's weird for Biden, a 78-year old political lifer from the ‘corporate state of Delaware’ - as he put it - would break with how the Democrats have been for decades. But Democrats aren't blind, they recognized Trump was a symptom of an angry public. https://www.theatlantic.com…
2. “We are now forty years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power.” With an explicit attack on Robert Bork, Biden pronounced this experiment “a failure.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/...
14. Big business was not. The U.S. Chamber called it a ‘government knows best approach.’ Hospital barons said this will harm care and railroad execs said it'll destroy railroads. Antitrust defense lawyers were so mad. Libertarians said 'Biden doesn't understand economics!' https:…
As President Joe Biden signs a wide-ranging executive order intended to promote competition in the American economy, I ask: Just how did Netflix get so lucky? https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ...
The FTC banning Amazon from buying MGM or Warner-Media & Discovery from merging to compete with Netflix just means Netflix gets to extend its lead. At this rate Netflix & Disney will likely split up the market while all other services fight over scraps. https://www.hollywoodrepor…
All signs point to the FTC/DOJ regulating monopolies much more stringently in the digital age (overseas already do), making mergers and acquisitions for the smaller fish more difficult. If you can't join forces and you can't create organic internal growth... ☠️ https://twitter.co…
Wow, love this take by @eriqgardner. Really, the biggest benefit to Netflix in particular is to (potentially) set up a firewall between devices and streamers. A new ban on vertical integration. Very far from happening, but a potential outcome. https://twitter.com/...