Break Up Monopolies
Break Up Monopolies
Our government has effectively given up on stopping monopolies from forming. We are facing unprecedented consolidation across every major industry, from groceries to healthcare to airlines to media to tech. It’s nearly impossible for small businesses and new companies to compete. The largest corporations have tremendous power over markets, workers, and democratic institutions, which is exactly what antitrust laws were specifically designed to prevent.
I will fight to break up the monopolies, prevent new ones from forming, and bring back real competition.
A handful of insurance and pharmacy benefit manager conglomerates dominate healthcare, with predictable consequences for cost and access. Three companies handle the vast majority of cloud computing infrastructure, giving them outsized influence over what businesses, governments, and even militaries can do online. Two companies control most of the digital advertising market, extracting wealth from the rest of the economy while news organizations and small businesses fight for scraps.
When markets are this concentrated, the supposed benefits of capitalism–competition, choice, innovation, fair prices–disappear. What’s left is a few ultra-wealthy companies and individuals controlling most of the products and services we use every day.
The cost of consolidation is crystal clear in agriculture and the food we eat. Four companies control more than 80 percent of the beef market, four companies control roughly 70 percent of pork, and similar situations surround poultry, grain, and dairy processing. Farmers and ranchers get squeezed at one end of the supply chain while consumers pay inflated prices at the other, with the extra money flowing to a handful of massive processing companies. The seed and ag chemicals industry has consolidated into a few global giants that control what farmers can plant and what they pay to plant it. The proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger, which would have combined two of the largest grocery chains in the country, was rightly blocked by federal regulators in 2024, but similar rejections are going to be increasingly rare under a pro-corporate right-wing government.
I will fight to break up dominant agricultural processors and block mergers that would further concentrate the market for the most basic things people buy. I will also fight for fair contract protections for farmers and the restoration of the Packers and Stockyards Act enforcement that has been gutted. The food system is too important to leave in the hands of a few corporate giants.
The concentration of media and communications is uniquely dangerous because it shapes the information environment that every other democratic decision depends on. The recent wave of media buyouts and mergers has worsened the problems, especially since most of them have been deliberately designed to entrench the power of the right wing and the ultra-rich.
Skydance's takeover of Paramount, completed under conditions widely understood to favor friendly coverage of the Trump administration, was approved by an FCC that has abandoned even the pretense of fair, pro-consumer regulation. The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger will consolidate most American film, television, and news production into even fewer owners. The forced TikTok sale, structured to hand the platform's US operations to Trump-friendly billionaires, sets a dangerous precedent in aligning business decisions with political complicity. None of these are normal market transactions. We need robust regulation focused on the public good to prevent further consolidation.
I will fight to:
Block media and communications mergers that concentrate our media and information environments, regardless of which administration is approving them.
Restore meaningful FCC independence and reverse the recent rule changes that lifted long-standing limits on broadcast ownership concentration.
Restore and strengthen net neutrality, so that the few companies controlling the internet’s infrastructure cannot pick winners and losers among the platforms, publishers, and services that depend on it.
Reduce concentration in digital advertising, app stores, and cloud infrastructure, where a handful of companies now function as gatekeepers for major parts of the economy.
The largest tech companies have grown powerful enough to act as private regulators of speech, commerce, and labor. Amazon dominates online retail and cloud computing. Google controls search, digital advertising, and the dominant mobile operating system. Meta owns the largest social network, the largest messaging service, and some of the most central platforms for political and personal communication. These companies routinely buy out potential competitors, embed themselves into government infrastructure, and use their market power to extract concessions from workers, suppliers, and small businesses that depend on them for survival.
I will push for the federal government to continue ongoing antitrust cases against Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple. I’ll fight to ensure those cases lead to actual structural remedies rather than mere slaps on the wrist. I support the breakup of the largest platforms into separate, competing companies. I also support strong interoperability requirements, so that users are not locked into certain ecosystems and infrastructures. People shouldn’t have to give up all of their networks and data if they want to, say, switch from Apple to Android, or vice versa.
In Congress, I will push for a federal right to repair that covers electronics, appliances, vehicles, farm equipment, and medical devices, among other things. Dominant manufacturers have used proprietary parts, software locks, and restricted documentation to force consumers into expensive “authorized” repairs or to throw away products that could otherwise be fixed. John Deere, for example, has used software locks to prevent farmers from repairing their own tractors. Apple has designed its products to prevent independent repair of its devices for years. Hospitals have been blocked from servicing their own medical equipment during emergencies. All of these practices are about extracting recurring revenue from captive customers. They cost working people, small businesses, farmers, and hobbyists tremendous amounts of money. They also contribute to environmental degradation by creating obscene amounts of waste, including e-Waste. Right to repair would help prevent monopolization, protect consumers, reduce environmental harm, and enshrine personal property rights.
The FTC and the antitrust division of the Department of Justice are the federal agencies responsible for enforcing competition law. For decades, both agencies have been starved of resources, limited by judicial doctrines that favor concentration, and captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. The Trump administration has accelerated all of these trends, replacing aggressive antitrust enforcement with a system that punishes companies for not aligning with the admin’s ideology while waving through the mergers favored by allies or accompanied by bribes.
I will fight to fully fund and staff the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, restore their independence from political interference, and codify the more aggressive merger guidelines and enforcement standards that the Biden-era FTC began to develop. I will support legislation closing the loopholes that have allowed massive mergers absurdly framed as promoting the interests of consumers.
In addition to breaking up monopolies, we need to create and enforce rules and procedures that prevent future consolidation. In Congress, I’ll push for:
Banning anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions in concentrated industries, rather than reviewing them on a case-by-case basis under standards designed to permit consolidation.
Banning non-compete clauses that prevent workers from leaving an employer for a competitor, a practice the FTC moved to prohibit in 2024 before legal challenges from corporate interests stalled the rule.
Restricting "killer acquisitions," in which dominant companies buy potential competitors specifically to prevent them from growing into threats.
Restoring strong rules against vertical integration, such as in the healthcare industry, where insurer ownership of pharmacy benefit managers and provider networks has only led to increased costs and worsened patient care.
Antitrust law is fundamentally a question of power. The same accumulated wealth that entrenches monopolies also buys the political influence required to keep them. Taxing extreme wealth and concentrated corporate profits aggressively, on the lines I have proposed in my tax and government reform platforms, is an important step in disrupting monopoly power. Our antitrust law should focus on the prevention of private power so concentrated that it threatens democratic governance.
Supporting people at the bottom of the income and wealth distribution, rather than further enriching those at the top, is what creates more local small businesses, more beneficial economic growth, and stronger communities. The choice between an economy dominated by a handful of giants and an economy in which ordinary people can build, compete, and thrive is a political choice. I am running because I believe it’s past time we made the right choice, putting more power back in the hands of the people.
My Checklist for Congress
Stop grocery and agriculture consolidation
Break up media and communications monopolies
Break up tech monopolies
Enshrine a right to repair
Empower FTC to protect consumers
Restrict non-compete clauses
Empower workers, not CEOs