"[David] Ellison is the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s wealthiest people and a friend and supporter of President Donald Trump."

"Trump on Sunday said he would be 'involved' in assessing the intended Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery deal, saying Netflix’s market share in the streaming sector 'could be a big problem.'"

From "Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros., challenging Netflix deal/The David Ellison-run company is promising Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a deal it says is more lucrative and easier for the Trump administration to approve" (WaPo).

Sample comments over there: "Another low down and dirty deal brought to you by TrumpWorld"/"The complete Trump takeover effort of major media in this country continues"/"Remember when the whined about Obama and the dems 'picking winners and losers' and how wrong that was? The good old days."

"In making a case for approval, Netflix may argue that the market in which it operates is not limited to premium film and television but rather encompasses the entire universe of human amusement..."

"... TikTok, YouTube, sports, games, books and even taking a walk. This is a standard tactic: Define the market so broadly that dominance becomes mathematically impossible.... A Netflix merger with Warner Bros. would create a monopsony problem: too few buyers with too much bargaining power. Writers, directors, actors, showrunners, puppeteers, visual effects artists — all are suppliers. The fewer buyers competing to hire them, the lower their compensation and the narrower their opportunities.... "

Writes Roy Price, chief executive of an entertainment studio and former head of Amazon Studios, in "If Netflix Eats Warner Bros., It Will Be the End of Hollywood" (NYT).

From "Monopsony" (Wikipedia): "The term 'monopsony' (from Greek μόνος (mónos) "single" and ὀψωνεῖν (opsōneîn) "'to purchase fish") was first introduced by the British economist Joan Robinson in her influential book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933)...."

Fish, eh? It has been noted that the word was miscoined. But is the coinage really fishy? The OED describes the etymology this way: "< mono- comb. form + ancient Greek ὀψωνία purchase of provisions (< ὀψωνεῖν to buy provisions (see opsonation n.) + ‑ία ‑y suffix), after monopoly n."

"Opsonation" is a new one for me. It's archaic. It's supposedly a feast, a catering, or a buying of provisions, according to the OED, which does not mention fish.

But back to the big merger — perhaps we will get more fish movies. Like this Warner Brothers classic:

"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly."

Wrote Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, quoted in "Google Violated Antitrust Laws in Online Search, Judge Rules/The ruling by Judge Amit P. Mehta was the first antitrust decision of the modern internet era in a case against a technology giant" (NYT).

The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the scale required to compete with its search engine. Instead, Google collected more data about consumers that it used to make its search engine better and more dominant....

"PGA Tour agrees to merge with Saudi-backed LIV Golf."

WaPo reports.

The stunning announcement came amid litigation between LIV and the PGA Tour, which both had filed lawsuits against the other. In August, LIV Golf filed an antitrust suit saying the tour — by banning players who had defected to LIV — was intentionally trying to curtail competition, but the PGA Tour countered with a lawsuit that claims LIV committed “tortious interference” by encouraging golfers to violate terms of their existing tour contracts.

"The government had a high-profile witness on its side with the author Stephen King, who testified that the merger would be especially harmful..."

"... to writers who are just starting out, and took a contrary position to his own publisher, Scribner, which is part of Simon & Schuster. On Monday night, Mr. King said in an email interview that he was 'delighted with the outcome.' 'Further consolidation would have caused slow but steady damage to writers, readers, independent booksellers, and small publishing companies,' he said. 'Publishing should be more focused on cultural growth and literary achievement and less on corporate balance sheets.'...  The Justice Department’s focus on author earnings, rather than harm to consumers, marked a shift in how the government applies antitrust law. Antitrust policy has largely been guided for decades by an effort to prevent large corporations from imposing higher costs on consumers, rather than focusing on the impact a monopoly might have on workers, suppliers or competitors.... 'The Biden administration wants to be aggressive to protect the overall market, and not necessarily to just protect consumers,' said Eleanor M. Fox, an antitrust expert at N.Y.U. School of Law...."

From "Judge Blocks a Merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster/The government’s case blocked the merger of two of the United States’ largest publishers and reflected a more aggressive approach to curbing consolidation. It was closely watched by the publishing industry" (NYT).

"In a stunning setback to regulators’ efforts to break up Facebook, a federal judge on Monday threw out antitrust lawsuits brought against the company..."

"... by the Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states. The judge eviscerated one of the federal government’s core arguments, that Facebook holds a monopoly over social networking, saying prosecutors had failed to provide enough facts to back up that claim. And he said the states had waited too long to bring their case, which centers on deals made in 2012 and 2014. The judge said the F.T.C. could try again within 30 days with more detail, but he suggested that the agency faced steep challenges."

 Writes Cecilia Kang at the NYT.

The top-rated comment over there, by a lot, is: "The swiftest way to eliminate Facebook’s power is to disable/delete your Facebook account. And believe me, it’s not very hard to do."

Ironically, that's a free-market answer.

The NCAA "seeks immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws" — and loses.

In the new Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Alston. It's unanimous. Gorsuch writes the opinion. A snippet:

From the start, American colleges and universities have had a complicated relationship with sports and money. In 1852, students from Harvard and Yale participated in what many regard as the Nation’s first intercollegiate competition—a boat race at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. But this was no pickup match. A railroad executive sponsored the event to promote train travel to the picturesque lake..... He offered the competitors an all-expenses-paid vacation with lavish prizes—along with unlimited alcohol. The event filled the resort with “life and excitement,” N. Y. Herald, Aug. 10, 1852... and one student-athlete described the “‘junket’” as an experience “‘as unique and irreproducible as the Rhodian colossus’ ”...

Life might be no “less than a boat race,” Holmes, On Receiving the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Yale University Commencement, June 30, 1886... but it was football that really caused  college sports to take off....

"But it may have been Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who coaches his daughter’s basketball team and who tried out unsuccessfully for the basketball team at Yale..."

"... when he was an undergraduate there, whose questions and comments were most hostile to the NCAA. Kavanaugh told [NCAA lawyer Seth] Waxman that he was starting from the premise that U.S. antitrust laws 'should not be a cover for exploitation of the student-athletes.' Kavanaugh then summarized the case as one in which the schools were conspiring with their competitors 'to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing.' Such a scenario, Kavanaugh concluded, 'seems entirely circular and even somewhat disturbing.'"

From "Justices employ full-court press in dispute over college athlete compensation" (SCOTUSblog).

"In this case, a win for the cancellation artists would validate the dark prophesies one often finds in conservative writing, including on Substack..."

"... a future where 'woke capital,' in thrall to left-wing activists, makes it effectively impossible to hold a professional-class job without enthusiastically embracing progressive orthodoxy — especially on issues of identity. That world already seems uncomfortably close for journalists and academics, given that most of their institutions lean left. But self-publishing? It ought to be immune from cancellation unless the mob can somehow convince you to fire yourself. That changes, however, if activists can enforce a secondary boycott on the newsletter services, payment processors or web hosts that writers use. If that happens, it’s hard to see where viewpoint diversity could survive for long, except possibly in conservative outlets big enough to run their own technology and thereby survive the purge.... [E]conomist Cameron Harwick suggested... We actually are witnessing woke capital do what capital normally does, if the capitalist controls a monopoly. That is, extracting excess returns from the market — what economists call 'rents.'... And woke capital, Harwick argues, is actually the creation of a labor cartel: the highly progressive monoculture of professional workers. To keep them happy, institutions that employ a lot of professionals have been pressured toward a narrow ideological consensus, corresponding to the views of roughly the left-most 8 percent of the American electorate. It’s a hidden fringe benefit that Harwick dubs 'ideological rents.' If Harwick is right, then cancel culture can’t be defeated by Republican senators hassling Facebook or Twitter, because that doesn’t touch the monoculture...."

Writes Megan McArdle in "The Substack controversy’s bigger story" (WaPo).

"The ability of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to control what people see online is so potent, it is the subject of antitrust hearings...."

"But the decision by Amazon to push Parler off its dominant cloud-computing service illustrates just how powerful its content-moderation capabilities are as well.... [T]he companies that provide the technical infrastructure that powers websites and services where people express opinions have vast power as well, though they rarely use it. They include little-known companies that register website domains for customers; so-called content delivery networks, which can boost the speed at which webpages load; and Internet service providers, which connect homes and businesses to the Web.... [Amazon's] Amazon Web Services is the dominant provider of cloud infrastructure services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the Web instead of running their own data centers.... [AWS's] Trust & Safety team, which has fewer than 100 workers, acts only on complaints received. In its reply to Parler’s suit, Amazon said it received reports in mid-November that the social network was 'hosting content threatening violence.'... It accused Amazon of conspiring with Twitter to take the smaller competitor offline just as it was significantly gaining users in the wake of Twitter permanently banning Trump.... 'Without AWS, Parler is finished as it has no way to get online.'" 

WaPo reports.

Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo: "If you support a baker choosing to not selling a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, then it follows you must support a company choosing not to do business with a customer that behaves in a manner contrary to the company's known parameters. As the same-sex couple was told, go find someone else to bake your cake. Parler should do the same. If they can't, perhaps it's the 'cake' they are trying to bake."

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee takes on the cake analogy:

Parler was already on AWS. 

So the baker (aside from scale, monopoly considerations, and anti trust issues) situation would have to be more like: 

The gay couple hired the baker, paid the baker, and then on the day of the wedding the baker refused to deliver the cake. The baker, however, delivered a lot of cakes to your ex-boyfriends wedding on the same day. And then the baker announced you were dangerous.

"Hours after it went offline on Monday, the social media start-up Parler filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing Amazon of violating antitrust law..."

"... and asking for a temporary restraining order to prevent the tech giant from blocking access to cloud computing services. Amazon told Parler over the weekend that it would shut off service because 'a steady increase in violent content' on the site showed that the company did not have a reliable process to prevent it from violating Amazon’s terms of service. Amazon said it would ensure Parler’s data was preserved so that it could migrate to a new hosting provider. Millions of people turned to Parler after Twitter and Facebook barred President Trump following the riot at the Capitol last week. Apple and Google both kicked Parler out of their app stores at the end of the week, though users who already had downloaded the app could still use it. But the app relied on Amazon’s cloud computing technology to work.... Parler did not provide direct evidence showing Amazon and Twitter coordinated the response. Instead, it pointed to a December news release announcing a multiyear strategic partnership between Amazon and Twitter, and it made references to Twitter’s own challenges policing its content."

The NYT reports.

"Casting itself as the protector of small businesses... Facebook is criticizing Apple for planning to give users of its popular devices like the iPhone more control..."

"... over the data they share with third-party apps. Starting next year, Apple will ask mobile users to 'opt in' to accept third-party tracking of their digital activity (right now, the system defaults to tracking and requires users to 'opt out' if they don’t want to be followed). Facebook relies on tracking to target ads at customers. Facebook declared in the newspaper ads that it was 'standing up to Apple and warned that such a change will be the ruin of small businesses....  Let’s be clear: Apple is no saint. While looking and acting like a defender of user privacy has long been a core tenet of the company, its bottom line does not depend on advertising, and ridding the world of intrusive marketing by kneecapping Facebook is good for its business.... Apple, pointing out Facebook’s data gluttony, and Facebook, in turn, noting Apple’s hegemony over mobile, make one thing clear: These tech companies have too much power. And no matter how you slice it, they are all in dire need of government regulation."

From "Facebook’s Tone-Deaf Attack on Apple/The company declared in newspaper ads that it was “standing up to Apple.” It’s a desperate ploy that’s unlikely to work" by Kara Swisher (NYT).

The topic is not free speech and censorship, but Swisher goes on to criticize Mark Zuckerberg for "stubbornness in the face of persistent criticism" — which may be relevant to the topic under discussion — and to justify that characterization by pointing to his company's support for the user's free speech: 

It delayed for years before finally tackling disinformation on its platform. The company continued untoward cozying up to the Trump administration. I am almost never surprised to see Facebook take the hard line when taking a softer one might do. 

Support for freedom of speech is only "delay" if you believe we are on track to suppress that freedom and it's just a matter of time. As for "untoward cozying up to the Trump administration" — it seems designed to push NYT readers to take the Apple side in this dispute. I'm already inclined to side with Apple on the privacy issue, but I don't like seeing freedom of speech processed into cozying up to Trump! That's a low move.

"Today, it’s Netflix and other major streaming services that play the role which studios did in the nineteen-thirties and forties..."

"... like the studios, streaming services control the spigot of viewing, and, like the studios, the major services are vertically integrated, controlling both the means of production and the means of distribution. Netflix both produced 'Mank' and is the place where the film will be seen—the company, in effect, owns a thousand-screen multiplex, present in every subscriber’s home. If Fincher, in 'Mank,' looks so ruefully at the intersection of media power and political power, it’s because, in the age of streaming, the reign of behemoth studios and their monopoly has, in effect, returned."

From "'Mank,' Reviewed: David Fincher’s Impassioned Dive Into Hollywood Politics" by Richard Brody (The New Yorker).

The movie is about Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay for "Citizen Kane," and the story is told in the same manner as "Citizen Kane." 

Now that I have at long last subscribed to Netflix, I have to consider whether to watch these things that are only on Netflix. Before, I was saved a lot of trouble. Some of these shows feel like assignments. And before I was a subscriber, I was able to look on calmly and know that I'm not taking that course. I don't have to do that homework. 

I did watch the first 5 minutes of "Mank." Yeah, this bed frame is way up in my face and I know why — because it's something like what Orson Welles did in "Citizen Kane." And, oh, yeah, that's Gary Oldman in the bed, and he's supposed to be such a great actor. And who are all these other characters bustling about the room supposed to be and why should I care... or just answer the second question first and if you can't answer you don't have to answer. It's like a bad dream where you can't do the work and then wake up and realize you don't have to do that work. It was never your work to begin with. So let's just watch another episode of "The Crown," the show I subscribed to Netflix because I wanted to keep watching.

But if "Mank" were a movie in the theater, I'd only be watching the first 5 minutes because I got motivated to leave my house and to buy a ticket just for that one thing, and now I was in my seat and settled in for what I'd made a tangible commitment to. So I'd do the work of paying attention and trying to get interested and figure out why everything happening is important and meaningful. That's nothing like Netflix.

"By many measures, Google is a great organization... But why then does it need to pay Apple billions of dollars to keep competitors at bay?"

"The law is demanding that Google prove its greatness by playing the game, not by buying its way out of it. Being exposed to more competition might also serve as a stimulant for the company: Insulation from competition can be a narcotic.... [Some] may urge us to trust that large companies like Google are fundamentally well-intentioned. That view became dominant among antitrust officials during George W. Bush’s administration and has now prevailed for 20 years. It has left us with an economy that is too concentrated — unfair to workers, smaller producers and entrepreneurs. It has deepened economic inequality. It has also put so much political power in so few private hands that it alarms politicians on both the left and the right."

From "With the Google Lawsuit, the Long Antitrust Winter Is Over/The Justice Department is demanding that the company prove its greatness by competing in the market, not by buying its way out of it" by Columbia lawprof Tim Wu (NYT).

"The Justice Department plans to accuse Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit to be filed on Tuesday..."

"... the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation, according to officials at the agency. In its suit, to be filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., the agency will accuse Google, a unit of Alphabet, of illegally maintaining its monopoly over search through several exclusive business contracts and agreements that lock out competition, said the officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record. Such contracts include Google’s payment of billions of dollars to Apple to place the Google search engine as the default for iPhones... By using contracts to maintain its monopoly, competition and innovation has suffered, the suit with argue.... The lawsuit may stretch on for years and could set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits from state attorneys general.... The lawsuit will likely outlast the Trump administration itself. The government’s case against Microsoft took more than a decade to settle.... While it is possible that a new Democratic administration would review the strategy behind the case, some experts said it was unlikely that it would be withdrawn under new leadership."

The NYT reports.

"I think that Facebook has experienced massive growth and has prioritized its growth over the best interests of its consumers, especially on the issue of privacy."

"There is no question in my mind that there needs to be serious regulation, and that that has not been happening. There needs to be more oversight. That has not been happening. My -- especially during my years as attorney general of California, one of my greatest areas of focus on this issue has been on consumer privacy. They have not been adequately informing consumers about where they are relinquishing their privacy.... Yes, I think we have to seriously take a look at [whether they should be broken up], yes. I mean, when you look at the issue, they're essentially a utility. Like, there are very few people that can actually get by and be involved in their communities or society or in whatever their profession without somehow, somewhere using Facebook. There -- it's very difficult for people to be engaged in any level of commerce without -- so, we have to recognize it for what it is. It is essentially a utility that has gone unregulated. And as far as I'm concerned, that's got to stop."

Said Kamala Harris today on "State of the Union" when Jake Tapper asked her if Facebook is a monopoly.

"Facebook removed several ads placed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign that called for the breakup of Facebook and other tech giants."

"But the social network later reversed course after POLITICO reported on the takedown, with the company saying it wanted to allow for 'robust debate,'" Politico reports.

“Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy. Facebook, Amazon, and Google," read the ads, which Warren's campaign had placed Friday. "We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.”...

“We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo," the spokesperson said. "In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.”

Getting censored is really boosting attention to the ad. I mean, it's making me search for it. I want to see how the logo is used. But I haven't found the ad. I stopped when I realized I was putting a lot of effort into trying to see an ad and that was a form of viral ad that was happening inside my head. At that point, I resisted.

"(1) This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all."

"(2) Aside from its free-speech* implications, which are serious indeed, this also looks like an antitrust violation: Media companies, which compete with Jones for eyeballs, colluded to get other media companies to shut him down. Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit. This is more than arguably conspiracy in restraint of trade (and possibly a conspiracy to deprive him of civil rights). (3) This is proof that we need to break up these big tech companies, which exercise way too much power via their near-monopolies. That they coordinate in the abuse of those monopolies only makes it clearer."

Writes Glenn Reynolds. Here's the footnote, which deals with something I've written about on this blog a lot over the years:

* Note that I say “free speech” and not “First Amendment.” The First Amendment only limits government, but “free speech” is — or at least until very recently was — a broader social value in favor of not shutting people up just because we don’t like their ideas or politics. As for the “private companies can do what they want,” well, that’s not the law, or the custom, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s especially not true where the companies have, as these companies have, affirmatively represented to users and shareholders that they don’t discriminate based on viewpoints.

Here's a post from last March where I collected a lot of my older posts about free speech values extending beyond the rights we hold against government.

Glenn writes "Were I Jones, I’d file an antitrust suit." Is Jones working on that? He said (via MacDailyNews):

I’ve had a lot of top lawyers call me today and say, “Alex, we need to sue Apple. We need to sue all these groups that clearly are involved in cut and dry antitrust activities, working with other companies to delist you and block you from the marketplace of ideas, so, then when they demonize you, you don’t have a way to respond to them and they can destroy you and then, with that model, move on against everybody else.”

Big day in the Supreme Court — "the last scheduled day, but they could easily add another day if they wanted to."

I'm following the live blog at SCOTUSblog.

UPDATE 1: The first case is Abbott v. Perez, a 5-4 decision about racial gerrymandering in Texas:

ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, THOMAS, and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion,in which GORSUCH,J.,joined. SOTOMAYOR,J.,filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined.

From Alito's majority opinion:

It was the challengers’ burden to show that the 2013 Legislature acted with discriminatory intent when it enacted plans that the court itself had produced. The 2013 Legislature was not obligated to show that it had “cured” the unlawful intent that the court attributed to the 2011 Legislature. Thus, the essential pillar of the three-judge court’s reasoning was critically flawed.

When the congressional and state legislative districts are reviewed under the proper legal standards, all but one of them, we conclude, are lawful.

From Sotomayor's dissent (for the 4 liberal Justices):

This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy. It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process. Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their communities and minimize their political will. 

UPDATE 2: Ohio v. AmeEx, written by Justice Thomas, also 5-4. SCOTUSblog summarizes:

This is an antitrust case, in which a group of states are challenging a provision in the contract between American Express and the merchants that accept its cards; the provision bars the merchants from trying to steer their customers to use a particular credit card.... The Court holds that Amex's steering provisions do not violate federal antitrust law.... Court defines the market as two-sided, including both merchants and cardholders. When the market is defined this way, the Court says, it is clear that the plaintiffs have not met their burden to show anti-competitive effects.

And that's all for today, so I guess there will be another day.

AND: Breyer's dissent in Amex begins:

For more than 120 years, the American economy has prospered by charting a middle path between pure lassez-faire and state capitalism, governed by an antitrust law “dedicated to the principle that markets, not individual firms and certainly not political power, produce the opti­mal mixture of goods and services.”

That is, Breyer — a former antitrust lawprof — misspelled laissez-faire.