Big Tech Monopoly

For more than 100 years, the long arm of the Department of Justice has reigned in monopolistic business concerns, righting egregious wrongs in a multitude of industries – John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, Eastman Kodak in 1921, Alcoa in 1945, and breaking up AT&T in 1984.

Multiple efforts – as yet unsuccessful – have tried to roll back the power of tech titans like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others. Internet-based operations pirate content from newspapers and – perhaps more importantly for newspapers – combine to manipulate advertising markets and plunder revenues that are taken away from local media outlets.

We support the DOJ efforts to constrain monopolistic acts of profiteering at the expense of America’s newspapers.

Read or listen to the challenges and solutions to newspaper sustainability in this speech by Seattle Times Publisher/CEO Frank Blethen. Blethen spoke to members of the European Union in Brussels in 2023.