Subject: Re: Day-1 Focus on price gouging coming Jan 20
#itellyouwhut

If nominations were being taken for the Most Valuable Player of the Biden Administration, I think Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commmission, would win the award hands down. In her tenure at the FTC, she has pursued litigation regarding business practices across a huge swath of industries that are having more of an impact to stop the aggregation of monopoly power and potentially reverse it than anyone in the last twenty years.

She sued the FAANG "pentopoly" for collusion on wages and employment in the form of under-the-table agreements to not solicit workers from competing firms and inclusion of language in employement contracts that restricted employees from leaving and working for competitors under the ruse of protecting intellectual property and trade secrets. These practices perfected by the FAANGs were widely adopted across many other industries, contributing to stagnant wages while executive compensation has continued to skyrocket.

Uner Khan, the FTC has been more active in establishing right-of-repair rules to limit the ability of manufacturers to turn nearly every device or piece of equipment into a "software-as-a-service" model, claiming protections on internal intellectual property as an excuse for preventing owners from physically fixing their own equipment and requiring them to use dealers to make all changes to the product. This is an important principle to (re)establish not only for $200,000 farm combines but $40,000 cars and virtually every product being made with chips and ASICs embedded within them.

Under Khan, the FTC has blocked far more merger proposals than in prior Administrations, again thwarting the growth of monopolistic economic power and all of the dangers of data privacy, etc. stemming from ever-larger companies who gave up growing through better products and services and instead fixate on growth via assimilation of existing volume in a market. One example... NVIDIA's proposed purchase of ARM in 2022 was blocked. Can you imagine the pricing power NVIDIA would hold given Intel's recent quality woes if NVIDIA owned not only the GPU hardware market but a key competitor of the flailing traditional CPU leader?

One of the main reasons America seems so unbalanced right now not only in terms of wealth but economic and legal power is the failure to properly enforce antitrust regulations over the last forty years. The excesses have been immediately clear as new monopolies and their abuses became evident but each time, government grew more reluctant to apply the brakes. The logic seemed (and still seems) to be that a firm exhibiting such bad behaviors was growing so rapidly and making so much money for its stockholders and in many cases providing services for "free" that the loss of growth and wealth being produced SURELY outweighed any minor harmful effects, right?

Well, NO. These giant firms have been abusing market power to sustain inflated prices for drugs when actuual costs of manufacturing and research have been covered adequately for years. They've been collecting petabytes of behavioral data and using it to rig markets and pricing to their benefit. They've repeatedy failed to protect those petabytes of private data from criminals through negligence and incompetence, resulting in nearly weekly data breaches affecting tens of millions of customers and even people who were NOT their customer.

It's nice to see some competent adults in government push back and use the laws already on the books to rebalance a system that badly needs rebalancing.


WTH