Perhaps you think that monopolies are a thing of the past—that the muckrakers uncovered enough muck and mocked the robber barons so badly that they all hid their heads in shame and went away forever; that we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act and Theodore Roosevelt rode out on his horse over a hundred years ago, trampled the trusts under his its hooves, and we all went on living in a free market paradise.
I have some bad news for you. Monopolies are alive and well, and some we see today just might make J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller all blush.
Let's start off with some alarming numbers that should alarm all of us.
Communications giant Comcast controls over 50 percent of the broadband market in the U.S. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Comcast and Charter together have complete monopolies over some 47 million Americans who have no other choice for cable providers.
Google (27.1 percent), Meta (19.5 percent), and Amazon (12.9 percent), collectively bring in about 60 percent of all digital ad revenue. Amazon also commands nearly 38 percent of retail e-commerce, controls somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of all book distribution, and maintains about a third of the data storage market (with Azure capturing 22 percent and Google 11 percent).
Apple dominates smartphone sales with a 53 percent market share, exercises vast power over other businesses through its app store, and is second in market share for music streaming at 13.7 percent (Spotify is first at 30.5 percent-the top five companies, including Amazon Music, make up about 70 percent of the market).
In 2022, three companies—AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon—accounted for almost 94 percent of all wireless subscriptions.
Three movie distributors—Universal (20.94 percent), Disney (17.20 percent), and Warner Bros. (13.90 percent)—control over half of that market.
Four airlines—American, Delta, Southwest, and United—constitute two-thirds of the domestic market share.
The top three banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—hold over 40 percent of all U.S. deposits, and the top 15 banks hold about three-quarters of all deposits. I guess we didn't learn anything from the 2008 financial crisis.
Through Walmart and Sam's Club stores, the Walmart corporation controls some 30 percent of all grocery sales. Yet this understates the company's dominance. In over 200 metropolitan and local markets throughout the U.S., Walmart accounts for over 50 percent of grocery sales; in 38 of these markets, it's over 70 percent.
The Big Four in beef—Tyson Foods, Cargill, and the Brazilian companies JBS and the National Beef Packing Company—control 85 percent of meat-packing.
As for the health sector, Yale professor Zack Cooper and Carnegie Mellon's Martin Gaynor have found that around 80 percent of our hospitals are "highly concentrated," stifling competition and causing us all outrageous health care costs. When you do get out of the hospital, there's a good chance you'll be picking up a prescription at CVS, where more than 42 percent of our prescriptions are filled.
Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan is the modern day Teddy Roosevelt, waging battles against these monoliths, including filing suit against Amazon. Khan made her bones at Yale redefining the legal argument against monopolies. For many years, courts have allowed market dominance so long as it was deemed beneficial to the consumer. But in her breakthrough paper at Yale, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, Khan demonstrated how monopolies hurt competitors and thereby harm society. Recently, when speaking with The New Yorker's David Remnick, she also noted how Amazon is no longer serving consumers well, showing us ads that diverge from our actual needs and starting to raise prices across the board.
If you haven't felt the sting of monopolistic power in some way, you're probably a rare breed. Google suspends people's ad accounts and can destroy livelihoods when it does so, yet feels no need to communicate the causes for these suspensions, often leaving people struggling for answers as the company destroys them. It acts as judge and jury.
On Long Island, where I live, two companies can provide cable service—Optimum (which I unfortunately have) and Verizon. Optimum once kept me waiting for over a week to hook up our cable, missing several appointments and then taking no responsibility for doing so. The company has overcharged me, made it difficult to cancel, and misrepresented itself.
Automation and AI has made this all worse for consumers. When we have few options, companies feel little need to provide us with actual customer service. It's why you're constantly kept waiting on the phone until you're finally routed to a call center in India, and why you might have to try back 12 times before you can get some actual help. And, no, they won't let you speak to a manager, of course.
You probably have your own horror stories in this regard, and you're welcome to share them in the comments section below. In fact, please do. Not that the company you speak of will care, because, frankly, they just don't have to—they'll have your money anyway, no matter what.
Ross Rosenfeld is a political writer and educator based on Long Island.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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