Today in Bullsh%$

In response to complaints about the Paramont takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery about dodgy foreign funding, mass layoffs, and the destruction of journalism at the merged entity, chief legal officer Makan Delrahim is saying that this is all just antisemitism.

Way to minimize the credibility of any claims of antisemitism.

Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation.

There’s a certain desperation creeping into their arguments as state regulators send signals that they’re considering filing an antitrust lawsuit. Top Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim recently sat down for an interview with the billionaire-owned LA Times (non-paywalled alternative), and insisted that opposition to the company’s terrible merger spree is somehow antisemitic:

“Let’s be honest,” he told the Times. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction, really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.”

That is, of course, a whole lot of bullshit. Delrahim is trying to pretend that opposition to the deal stems from the fact that billionaire Trump-donor Larry Ellison, who has retooled CBS News to be more friendly to Benjamin Netanyahu, is Jewish. But if there’s any personal ire directed at Ellison as it pertains to the deal, it’s that he has a generational track record of being a foundationally terrible person.

The real-world concerns about the deal have focused on things like the fact it’s heavily financed by Saudi Arabia and China. And there’s fifty years of history showing that deals like this (especially deals involving Warner Brothers) routinely result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and both a shittier company and a less healthy film and television production market.

Way to give Nazis an excuse to Nazi.

So Now What

Now that a jury had determined that Live Nation illegally monopolized event ticketing, what happens next?

My guess is not much, beyond a tiny hit to profits for a quarter, but I am a cynic.

A jury in a high-stakes antitrust trial found Wednesday that Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market.

Jurors delivered the verdict in federal court in New York City after around five weeks of trial, which featured testimony from dozens of witnesses. The jury began deliberating Friday.

Personally, I'd like to see criminal charges filed against the executives, but likely we will see a minor financial award and some toothless remedies. 

No Presumption of Regularity

The judge who blocked Nexstar/Tegna noted the "unusual circumstances" by which federal regulators approved the deal. pic.twitter.com/j7meccTttv

— Ben Remaly (@BenRemaly) April 22, 2026

Calling Bullsh%$

For those unfamiliar with the term the, "Presumption of Regularity," is the assumption that the government is telling the truth to the court.

The judge's ruling enjoining the Nextar/Tegna merger is basically calling the DoJ, the FCC, etc. 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag.

This is remarkable for a judge to do, even though we have irrefutable evidence in United States v. Reynolds that the government lied to the court when claiming state secrets privilege.

A federal judge just put a halt to Nexstar’s proposed $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, putting in doubt the combination of the companies to create a broadcast station giant – at least for now.

With just a few hours to go on the current TRO, U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley on Friday issued a preliminary injunction, concluding that the transaction would diminish competition in violation of antitrust laws. The matter now enters a state of corporate stasis while the antitrust issues and trial play out.

………

The decision is a defeat not just for the companies but also a black eye for the Trump administration’s FCC, which gave a relatively speedy greenlight to the transaction.

In fact, in many ways, the deal was a linchpin of FCC chairman Brendan Carr‘s goal of boosting the leverage of local TV stations against the power of national networks. In hydra-like fashion, Carr’s agenda saw Jimmy Kimmel pulled into political and cultural quicksand last year as Nexstar pulled the ABC late-night host off its stations for more than a week.

Trump endorsed this merger and explicitly stated that it would create a MAGAt super network.

The judge has acknowledged this reality. 

Judge Calls Bullsh%$ on Elon

Rather unsurprisingly, when advertisers decide not to buy ads from you because you have created a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and misinformation, it is not a violation of antitrust law.

Being Elon's lawyers must be the worst job on earth. 

On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”

For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.

………

There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded, Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut X out in order to launch its own social media ad business. 

Much like any official statements regarding his businesses, in the final analysis, there is no, "There," there. 

Headline of the Day

Monopoly With A Heaping Side Of Extra Racism 

—Karl Bode, on how the Trump administration is requiring racist policies as a condition of merger approval.

Making America Jim Crow again. 

One of the Trump administration's core policies is to not just approve giant and terrible mergers, but to make racism and sexism a condition companies must meet if they want regulatory approval.

The latest case in point: the Trump FCC rubber stamped yet another major merger in the telecom industry this week. This time the FCC approved the merger of Cox and Charter, two already massive cable companies, creating the biggest cable company in the nation. Just the sort of "populism" everybody asked for!

This kind of consolidation is always harmful to the public interest. U.S. telecom already sees muted competition at the hands of regional monopolies, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and generally terrible customer service.

………

That last bit, "no DEI discrimination," is a requirement by the companies that they eliminate already fairly pathetic company programs simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. 

This is just awful.

Buck Fezos

The Washington Post just laid off 30% of its reporters, shuttering its sports desk, it's Middle East offices, it's Silly Con Valley offices.

Amazon Bezos never wanted the paper as anything beyond a political bargaining chip that would allow him to generate legislation to facilitate his rent seeking at Amazon. 

If you recall the story of the frog and the scorpion, the question as to why he would do this is simple, it is his nature.

In August of 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders faced negative coverage of his Presidential campaign by a vaunted national newspaper, the Washington Post. This publication was revered in D.C., having broken the Watergate scandals and brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. It had delivered a host of important stories over the decades since, seen as a public trust so important that Steven Spielberg made a movie about the publisher’s decision to help publish the Pentagon Papers. But like most newspapers, it had stumbled in the early 2010s.

………

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Local elites in D.C. were immensely grateful to Bezos. The paper adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and took on a sharp edge against Donald Trump. Bezos had deep pockets, and had saved the town’s pride.

Six years later, Sanders, running for President against what he called the billionaire class, did something unusual in polite liberal society. He said Bezos had an incentive to shade coverage of politicians he didn’t like. Sanders had been discussing how Amazon doesn’t pay enough in taxes.

………

And that comment created a bitter reaction within D.C. towards the populist politician. The executive editor of the Washington Post, a deeply respected man named Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film “Spotlight”), responded the way all of D.C. felt. He called Sanders a conspiracy theorist.

………

What a difference six years makes.

Yesterday, the Washington Post engaged in layoffs across the organization, getting rid of the Middle East team, war correspondents, its entire sports department, and everyone in the West coast office who covers big tech. Local coverage will be cut to just 12 people. Overall, Bezos is firing 300 out of 800 reporters, decimating what is widely regarded as a key newspaper covering government in America. “It’s an absolute bloodbath,” said one employee.

Importantly, the paper also fired the reporter tracking Amazon. The stated reason is that the company is losing money due to a loss of local market power, falling ad revenue, and generative AI. 

………

As Louis Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

That is a lesson Jeff Bezos is helping to impart to all of us, once again. 

The power of these people needs to be broken, period, full stop.

Death of the Roomba

As you may be aware, iRobot just declared bankruptcy, and the usual suspects blamed Lina Khan for blocking its merger with Amazon.

The usual suspects, of course, were the banksters on Wall Street.

In fact, the company was a dead man walking long before Lina Khan wrote her seminal paper on monopolies, because they were following the advice of those same banksters on Wall Street.

They killed all their research, stopped doing advanced work for the DoD, and eliminated all of their manufacturing, outsourcing that to China.

By last week, all they were was a holding company for the Roomba trademark, and giving their no-longer dominant position in the automated vacuum cleaner market, they had nothing.

There is nothing that high finance cannot destroy. 

A few days ago, consumer products company iRobot, the maker of iconic Roomba automated vacuum cleaner, declared bankruptcy. The CEO, a branding and mergers expert named Gary Cohen, sadly announced that the firm could not continue as a going concern.

The board, full of lawyers and financiers but not robotics experts, voted to sell iRobot off to Shenzhen Picea Robotics, the Chinese company to which it had offshored manufacturing. There are about 20 million active Roomba vacuum cleaners in operation, and unless Trump regulators or antitrust enforcers act, now all the data harvested from our homes will go to China.

The co-founder of iRobot, Colin Angle, was not introspective about this collapse, nor did he associate it within the broader context of the many firms who have had their technology transferred to China. Instead, he, like much of Wall Street, blamed the bankruptcy on Lina Khan. Why? Well she ran the Federal Trade Commission when it investigated Amazon’s possible acquisition of the company in 2022, a deal the two companies ultimately called off. Here’s Angle:

………

Many Wall Street dealmakers and foes of antitrust enforcement echoed this sentiment. For instance, former Obama chief economist Jason Furman, who is now the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, used it as an example of the problem with populist economics. Blocking mergers, he believes, leads to destructive outcomes and national security problems.

………

In the mid-2010s, during Furman’s tenure running economic policy under Obama, the company sold its defense business, offshored production, and slashed research, a result of pressure from financiers on Wall Street.

………

This is a sad story, it’s also a common one. China has captured technology and key process leadership from American and European firms, across everything from rare earths to batteries to chemicals to robotics. And the driver is that the American model of running corporations is to focus on “asset light” cream-skimming, which is to say, focusing on lines of business where the return on capital is exceptionally high.

Conversely, the Chinese government, to preserve and extend its particular authoritarian model, actually suppresses the return on capital for its financiers, forcing an “asset heavy” approach. They overly emphasize factories and engineering. The net effect of these two complementary forces used to be celebrated as “Chimerica,” where China produces and the U.S. consumes.

 

 

How Can They Both Lose?

In this case, the entities in conflict are Amazon and Perplexity.

The former is a retail and eCommerce giant, and the latter is one of the increasingly ubiquitous AI companies.

Amazon has sent demand letters demanding that Perplexity stop offering its users access to its comparison shopping comparison features on Amazon.

Amazon is claiming that this is insecure, and Perplexity is claiming that Amazon does not want its users to find better deals which make Jeff Bezos' monster less money, including showing them non-Amazon sources for things that they want to buy.

Both accusations are probably true.

Amazon has told Perplexity to get its agentic browser out of its online store, the companies both confirmed publicly on Tuesday. After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist letter, Perplexity wrote in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation.”

“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity lamented in the blog post.

Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

………

If Amazon is to be believed, then Perplexity could simply identify its agent and start shopping. Of course, the risk is that Amazon, which has its own shopping bot called Rufus, could also block Comet — or any other third-party agentic shopper — from its site.

Amazon suggests as much as its statement, which also says, “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.”

Perplexity claims that Amazon would block the shopping bot because Amazon wants to sell advertising and product placements. Unlike human shoppers, a bot tasked with buying a new laundry basket presumably wouldn’t find itself buying a more expensive one, or getting lured into buying the latest Brandon Sanderson novel and a new set of earphones (on sale!).

What Perplexity is doing is creating the sort of "lite" version of the adversarial interoperability proposed by Corey Doctorow.

It's pretty likely that the DMCA prevents this, which is all the more reason to abolish the DMCA.

Quote of the Day

Many of These Are in Blood-Red States, the Kind of Places Where It’s Impossible to Find a Readable Copy of Atlas Shrugged Because Every Page of Every Copy Is Stuck Together. 

—Cory Doctorow, discussing how much people love their municipally operated internet service providers, even in the reddest states

Truer than taxes this is. 

Oh, You Poor Dears

It appears that internet service providers in California  are having major butt hurt over the new law that prevents landlords from taking kickbacks from ISPS in order to force them to pay for over-priced connectivity.

Will someone think of the children?

Rejecting opposition from the cable and real estate industries, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that aims to increase broadband competition in apartment buildings.

The new law taking effect on January 1 says landlords must let tenants "opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75–0 vote in April, and by the Senate in a 30–7 vote last month.

"This is kind of like a first step in trying to give this industry an opportunity to just treat people fairly," Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told Ars last month. "It's not super restrictive. We are not banning bulk billing. We're not even limiting how much money the people can make. What we're saying here with this bill is that if a tenant wants to opt out of the arrangement, they should be allowed to opt out."

This is classic anti-competitive behavior, and this bill is a good thing.

There Is Evil, and Then There Is

Ticketmaster.

In the latest case, we have the ticket selling website collaborating with scalpers to drive up prices and profits.

Why am I not surprised? 

The Federal Trade Commission sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster on Thursday, alleging that the companies tacitly worked with scalpers to profit from jacking up ticket prices on the secondary market.

As the FTC alleged in a press release, Ticketmaster's years of turning a blind eye to scalpers violated the FTC Act and the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, costing customers "billions in inflated prices and additional fees." Further, artists' efforts to keep event costs low were repeatedly frustrated by executives' greedy bid to drive Ticketmaster revenue by reaping as many additional fees as possible, the FTC alleged.

Rather than blocking scalping, Ticketmaster allegedly provided tech support to help so-called brokers exceed "fake" ticket limits that seemingly only applied to genuine customers buying tickets to see events.

The FTC's investigation revealed that five of the biggest brokers controlled thousands of fake or purchased Ticketmaster accounts buying hundreds of thousands of event tickets and making it impossible for fans to "have a shot at buying fair-priced tickets," FTC chair Andrew Ferguson said.

………

Ticketmaster controls about 80 percent of "major concert venues’ primary ticketing" and increasingly controls "a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market," the FTC noted.

Seemingly, Ticketmaster uses this dominant position to "triple dip" on fees, maximizing gains from events by charging fees at initial purchase, then again from both sellers and buyers on the secondary market. Ticketmaster generates most of its revenue from these fees, the FTC said, raking in over $11 billion from 2019 through 2024—nearly $4 billion of which came from resale fees.

I'm thinking that these guys, and not the public relations department of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation will be the, "Bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

About That Google Antitrust Ruling

It's unbelievably weak tea, which is why Google's stock skyrocketed after the ruling.

Just go read Matt Stoller for the details.

This judge spent a lot of time trying to do nothing, and he succeeded. 

This Couldn't Happen Soon Enough

It looks like he DeBeers diamond cartel is on its last legs.

Between the increased output of gem quality manufactured diamonds, and the increasing demands by African nations to control their own diamond output, and get the money derived from the diamond trade, it looks like its death grip on the diamond market may be coming to an end.

To the degree that their neocolonial economic reign of terror ends, everyone, except of course for DeBeers, will be the better for it:

For over a hundred years, DeBeers has dominated and controlled the global diamond trade.

But today, Chinese factories are mass-producing lab-grown diamonds, which are chemically identical to natural stones, and prices are collapsing worldwide for both man-made and natural diamonds.

DeBeers sources most of their rough diamonds from mines in Botswana, and the new government there is determined to move DeBeers' value chains to Botswana itself, thereby retaining billions of dollars in industry revenues in-country.

Anglo-American is DeBeers' parent company, and they are trying to divest their holdings. But even after writing off $4.5 billion in book value in two years, no buyers can be found.  

The diamond industry has been a racket for over a century, with monopolists, primarily DeBeers, creating artificial scarcities to drive up the price.

For me, I'm not that concerned much about diamonds as gems, but I am interested the potential lab-grown diamonds as a heat sink material.  (Diamonds are the world's most thermally conductive substance as well as being an electrical insulator, which makes their engineering applications very interesting)

The real issue here is that DeBeers stole the wealth of (largely) African nations and kept it for themselves for many decases, and not this looks to end. 

Quote of the Day

Well We’re Now in the Sandpaper Condom Period of “Ride Sharing”, Where Investors Earn Back Their Investment by Hurting Everyone Else.

—Ian Welsh, discussing the predatory, monopolistic, and outright criminal business model of Uper and Lyft

Their model always was to use huge amounts of money to subsidize the service, drive cab companies out of business, and then jack up prices.

Now these services cost more than taxis, pay their drivers less, and are finally making a profit. 

Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, so 24.7 billion. This seems reasonable, since Uber never made a profit during the period.

So we’ll estimate Uber’s total losses at 86.2 billion from 2009-2022.

In 2023 Uber made a profit of 1.9 billion and in 2024 it made a profit of a little under ten billion. Prices for rides on Uber are between ten to twenty percent higher than taxi rides, rising to as much as 50% higher during surge pricing periods (when there’s the most demand.) Driver’s on average, get paid less than taxi drivers used to.

So–the workers get less, the customers pay more.

………

Everyone knew this was the play, and that people were getting subsidized rides now (Uber was much cheaper than taxis in the early years) in exchange for getting fucked over later. Well we’re now in the sandpaper condom period of “ride sharing”, where investors earn back their investment by hurting everyone else.

This should never have been allowed. Uber and Lyft violated massive numbers of laws and were just allowed to do so thru non-enforcement. The end result was obvious and it’s here now: worse wages, higher prices and less ability to regulate the industry.

This is one of the prominent models in Silly-Con Valley, which is why I have always advocated for prosecutions against both the founders and the funders of these sorts of companies.  They are engaging in securities fraud, and violations of anti-trust law.  (That's to say nothing of the Taxicab regulations violated by the Gypsy cab companies)

We need to start arresting these folks. 

Thank-You, Captain Obvious

Whoever writes the headlines at Jacobin needs some remedial education, because the headline, "Landlords Are One of the Leading Causes of Canada’s Rent Crisis," is one of the stupidest headlines that I have ever read. (Excluding the New York Times, of course)

Of course landlords are a major part of the rent crisis, they are the ones who overcharge rent.

The real story here, and what the actual article is about, is that there has been a cartels of landlords that have been formed across Canada, and that this is driving up prices.

A headline like, "Landlord Collusion Spiking Rents," or, "Monopolist Landlords Driving Up Rents," would be far more appropriate:

Canada’s rental crisis is often dismissed by the corporate media as a “mismatch” between supply and demand. But a deeper analysis of the country’s rental market — where tenants face some of the highest housing costs on the planet — reveals that a tiny percentage of landlords are controlling the sector and exploiting tenants for their own gain.

None of Canada’s five million tenants need to read Canada’s mainstream media to know that the county is facing a rental crisis. Over the past year, according to an RBC Economics study, the country saw its “highest annual increase in rent growth on record.” These skyrocketing rents have also caused homelessness to explode in nearly all of Canada’s major cities. Housing congestion is a growing issue as well, with nearly 20 percent of renters in Toronto, 21 percent in Mississauga, 11 percent in Montreal, 13 percent in Edmonton, and 11 percent in Vancouver are forced into overcrowded housing units “not suitable for their household size.” 

………

Blame for record-high rents seems to be placed on everything and everyone — except landlords and speculators. Lamenting that it “has become cool” to “disparage” real estate speculation, the Toronto Sun claimed earlier this year: “If it wasn’t profitable for investors to own rental properties, investors would take their capital elsewhere and supply would diminish. We need them.”

………

The country’s extortionate rent hikes are hardly an accident of mismatched supply and demand. Housing scarcity is undoubtedly a problem. But using it to hand-wave away eye-watering rental costs is obtuse or disingenuous. Canada’s landlords are not simply having their hands forced. Empowered by Canada’s governments, landlords are reaping record profits at their tenants’ expense. 

Despite the media’s focus on Canada’s so-called “small landlords,” [Senior economist from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Richard] Tranjan observes:

The widespread notion of “struggling landlords” is a grave mischaracterization of the rental market. In fact, Canada’s landlord class comprises wealthy families, small businesses, corporations, and financial investors. Rent revenue increases their wealth and political influence, allowing them to extract more income from more tenants, amass more wealth, and do it again.

………

Statistics Canada estimates that the relatively small number of homeowners, who have invested in multiple units, account for nearly one-third of total home ownership.

In 2021, half of the dwellings in the downtowns of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver were condos. But, as Statistics Canada notes, more than half of these condominiums were owned by investors — comprising a total 840,045 units overall. These investors have, on average, managed to obtain up to a 30 percent increase in the value of their assets while renting them out to desperate tenants in Canada’s major cities. 

The article is pretty good.  The headline?  Not so much. 

Jared Polis Can Go Cheney Himself

The "Democratic" governor of Colorado Jared Polis has vetoed a bill that would have prevented landlords from using software to collude on rents, a bill preventing surprise billing by ambulance companies, and .

In both cases, his justification was that if business are not allowed to rape the general public, some people might stop providing these services.

Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday vetoed a measure that would have banned the use of many computer algorithms to set rent in Colorado, saying it could have outlawed some legitimate technologies used by landlords, and risked driving some housing providers out of the market.

Rent-setting algorithms have become a target of consumer protection advocates in recent years, who say software used by companies like RealPage effectively enables landlords to collude and drive up the cost of housing.

House Bill 1004 passed the legislature along party lines. A similar measure died at the Capitol last year.

In his veto letter, Polis said he agreed with the intent of the bill, writing that “collusion between landlords for purposes of artificially constraining rental supply and increasing costs on renters is wrong.”

Yeah, letting landlords gouge renters is such a bad thing! (Not!)

A bipartisan effort to shield Coloradans from surprise ambulance bills has hit an unexpected roadblock: a veto from Gov. Jared Polis. 

House Bill 25-1088 had sailed through the state legislature without a single vote against it from Republicans or Democrats. The bill aimed to prohibit balance billing by ground ambulance services, requiring insurance companies to directly pay for both emergency and non-emergency out-of-network rides at established rates. 

………

“I have been provided with estimates on premium impact that range from $0.73 to $2.15 per member per month,” Polis said. “This means a family of four would likely pay as much as $100 more per year in insurance premiums if I were to sign this bill.”

Jared Polis is a complete piece of sh%$. 

How About Throwing Tim Cook in Jail?

The good folks at Wired note that the malicious compliance with regard to federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers order loosening Apple's control of its app ecosystem may constitute criminal contempt and that the judge has accused Apple finance VP Alex Roman of lying under oath.

Yeah, criminal contempt, that's the ticket.  Just have Apple to pay a few pennies in fines and perhaps issuing another order that they will subvert will stop this behavior.

Sorry, if Roman attempted to deceive the court, that's perjury, and it is clear that he did so with the approval of Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Jail them.  Even if it's only for a weekend, throw their flabby white asses in jail:

Apple “willfully chose not to comply” with a court order to loosen its app store restrictions—and one of its executives lied under oath about the company’s plans, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the situation to the US Attorney’s Office in San Francisco “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.”

………

Apple pursued its noncompliance strategy “with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her ruling on Wednesday. “That it thought this court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation.”

She also said that Apple executives tried to hide the real motivations for the changes. “In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” Gonzalez Rogers said. She went as far as accusing Alex Roman, a vice president of finance at Apple, of lying during testimony in which he talked about how Apple came to its decision to go with a 27 percent commission on purchases made outside the App Store. “The testimony of Mr. Roman was replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the judge said.

………

Citing internal Apple documents from 2023, Gonzalez Rogers said Apple’s App Store chief Phillip Schiller “had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction” but that CEO Tim Cook “ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.”

No, Cook decided to subvert the court order and he encouraged Apple executives to lie under oath.

That is suborning perjury, and it's a felony.

 

 

Signs of the Apocalypse

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has done something right.

Not only has she done something right, in signing a bill that bans Pharmacy Benefit Managers from owning pharmacies, she is the first in the nation to do this.

Governor Sanders had to choose between Big Pharma and ordinary folks, and she went with ordinary folks.

Good news, not not what I expected:

Arkansas became the first state in the nation to prevent healthcare conglomerates from operating drugstores here when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed House Bill 1150 on Wednesday.

State law already regulates what pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) pay to reimburse independent pharmacies, but pharmacists have complained that the companies violate the law. The state has also fined four PBMs a total of $1.47 million for paying Arkansas pharmacies below the legally required amount for prescription drugs.

PBMs negotiate prescription benefits among drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and health insurance providers, and the biggest ones also own pharmacies and insurers. The Federal Trade Commission released an interim report in July 2024 saying these conglomerates are eliminating competition and increasing drug prices at the expense of patients.

HB 1150 headed to Sanders’ desk April 9 after clearing the Senate with a bipartisan 26 votes, six days after it passed the House with 89 votes. The bill generated hours of discussion and public comment in the House and Senate committees on Insurance and Commerce this month.

“These massive corporations are attacking our state because we will be the first in the country to hold them accountable for their anticompetitive actions,” Sanders said in a statement Wednesday.

This is probably the most aggressive anti-monopoly action taken by a Republican of national stature since ……… (Checks Notes) Teddy Roosevelt?  (Maybe Nixon, or William Howard Taft, but definitely a long f%$#ing time ago)

It's welcome news, but this is profoundly weird.for this to have come from Governor "Smokey Eye".

Fuck Keir Starmer

So, Number 10 has forced out the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority because we was too diligent in protecting competition.

Bad politics and worse policy:

Ministers have forced out the chair of the UK Competition and Markets Authority, as the government seeks to dial back regulation as part of Labour’s growth agenda.

The government confirmed the departure of Marcus Bokkerink as chair of the CMA on Tuesday evening, after the Financial Times reported that business secretary Jonathan Reynolds had intervened at the agency.

The Department for Business and Trade made clear to Bokkerink on Monday that it felt the regulator was not sufficiently focused on growth, according to one government figure.

Bokkerink, a former managing director at Boston Consulting Group, was appointed in 2022. CMA chairs can serve up to a five-year term.

The government has appointed Doug Gurr as new interim chair of the CMA.

Gurr ran Amazon’s UK business during the company’s tussle with the CMA over its minority investment in Deliveroo, which the regulator ultimately approved in 2020. He is currently director of the Natural History Museum in London.

Reynolds said in a statement that the government had a “plan for change” that would boost growth for businesses and communities across the UK.

“We want to see regulators including the CMA supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets,” he added.

No it won't.

One need only look at Amazon, which has used its monopoly power to extract rents from small businesses and their customers..

They have appointed a fox to guard the hen house in the hope that they will get more eggs.

Not gonna happen.

Not a Surprise

When the exemption was given to allow colleges to collude on financial awards in the 1990s, the requirement was that admission was to be. "Need Blind, meaning that they could not favor students with rich parents, even if said parents were big donors.

It comes as no surprise that the elite colleges and institutions have been violating the terms of that exemption for almost as long as it has existed.  (How do you think that Jared Kushner made it into Harvard?)

A filing in an antitrust lawsuit against some of the nation’s top universities alleges the schools overcharged students by $685 million in a “price-fixing” scheme, raising serious questions about their past admission and financial aid policies.

Documents and testimony from officials at Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and other elite schools suggest they appeared to favor wealthy applicants despite their stated policy of accepting students without regard for their financial circumstances. That “need-blind” policy allowed the schools to collaborate on financial aid under federal law, but plaintiffs in the case say the colleges violated the statute by considering students’ family income.

Every year, according to a motion filed in federal court Monday night, Georgetown’s then-president would draw up a list of about 80 applicants based on a tracking list that often included information about their parents’ wealth and past donations, but not the applicants’ transcripts, teacher recommendations or personal essays.

“Please Admit,” was often written at the top of the list, the lawsuit contends — and almost all of the applicants were.

Former students accuse 17 elite schools, including most of the Ivy League, of colluding to limit the financial aid packages of working- and middle-class students. The claimed damages of $685 million, which were detailed in the court filing Monday night, would automatically triple to more than $2 billion under U.S. antitrust laws.

………

A coalition of highly selective universities, formed in the late 1990s and known as the 568 Presidents Group, collaborated on aid formulas under a 1994 federal antitrust exemption. The exemption applied only if schools engaged in need-blind admissions. But attorneys for the former students say at least nine universities maintained admissions policies that still favored wealthy students in violation of the antitrust exemption, which expired in the fall of 2022.

Meanwhile, according to court documents, the schools’ endowments grew dramatically from a collective total of about $55 billion in 2003 to more than $220 billion in 2022.

Details that emerged in the case Monday included allegations that a former MIT Corporation chair applied pressure for the admission of two wealthy applicants; testimony from a former Harvard official who said the school had not joined the group because it would compel the school to reduce its financial aid awards; and a Vanderbilt University official writing in 2014 that if the statute expired, the school could be forced into a bidding war for students.

The court document contends Notre Dame has admitted that it sometimes granted admission to applicants based on factors that included the donation history, or future capacity, of the applicant’s family.

And at Penn, the suit says, applicants given a special-interest designation — indicating they were from a wealthy or donor family — were more likely to get in. A spokesman for the university said, “Penn’s dean of admissions testified the tag had ‘nothing’ to do with a family’s financial circumstances.” In 2020, Penn left the group to be more generous to students, according to the court filing.

The allegations stem from a class-action lawsuit brought in 2022 by eight former students who said the universities shared a methodology for calculating students’ financial need that reduced the amount of aid the schools provided to low- and middle-income students.

………

The group dissolved after the lawsuit was filed.

If the 568 President's group was above board, they would not have dissolved it, and they would not have increased financial aid awards.

………

Ted Normand, co-lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that rather than competing based on the aid they could afford to distribute, the schools “saved themselves, and cost their students, hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.”

The schools did more than that, they engaged in a fraud on the students conspired to violate federal law.

Frog march administrators out of their offices in handcuffs.