Economics: Antitrust - Why The FTC Is Obsolete & Harmful

(Drivebycuriosity) - It seems that the media, politicians and bureaucrats are obsessed with monopolies. In the US exist coevally two huge powerful government administrations that want to fight against the "monopoly power" of corporations: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) & the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). The FTC alone has a staff of 1,123 employees and an annual budget of $425.7 million. Do we need it?

The image above refers to one of these alleged monopolists: MySpace ( theguardian). The company was once the leading social network and regarded as a monopolist. But then came Zuckerberg and destroyed the "monopoly" by creating Facebook. 

The fate of MySpace is typical for the destiny of monopolies; if they really exist, they are endangered. Their success and their profits attract others - inventors, investors & entrepreneurs - who want to have a share of their pie. Today all the leading technology corporations are attacked by a growing number of newcomers - often copycats - who are taking advantage of the technological progress and the advent of AI - and the big tech corporations are competing with each other.

 

                            Blind Eye

The FTC ignores these changes, the growing competition and the economics behind it. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson announced that over the next few years U.S. businesses can expect “vigorous antitrust enforcement” ( realclearmarkets). Today there are already about a dozen FTC law suits and inquiries:

The most prominent is a law suit against Amazon, stretching over 172 pages! The FTC claims that the corporation is a monopoly and stifles emerging competition ( ftc.gov vox.com). The FTC ignores that the numbers of Amazon competitors has been rising fast. Walmart`s online business grew in Q1 2025 21% y-o-y ( cnbc ), while Amazon´s online shops advanced just 6% ( ir.aboutamazon). The FTC doesn`t take notice of the rapid rise of e-commerce sites like Shopify (revenue +27% y-o-y), Wayfair, Etsy & Ebay and has a blind eye to innovative newcomers, who are aggressively entering the highly competitive market, like TikTok`s online shop, the Chinese shopping app Temu and the online shopping platform Shein ( driveby Temu nymag). And  Amazon competes globally with Alibaba, Tencent (both China), Rakuten (Japan), MercadoLibre (Latin America) and others. Amazon is far away from being a monopoly. 

 (source )

 The FTC sued Meta (the mother of Facebook & Instagram), alleging that Facebook illegally maintains its personal social networking monopoly and imposes
anticompetitive conditions on developers, ignoring competing platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, BlueSky, LinkedIn and TikTok.

The FTC is investigating Microsoft's cloud computing business and its investments and conduct related to AI, ignoring the competition with Amazon`s AWS and the fast growing cloud businesses of Oracle, Google, Alibaba and others. The administration previously also attempted to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

 The FTC launched an inquiry into Alphabet`s (Google)
generative AI investments and partnerships, disregarding the AI growth at Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and many others. 

Outside of the technology sector the FTC has sued Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits,  Deere & Company and sought to block Amgen's acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics plc. The administration also accused three major pharmacy benefit managers (CVS Health's Caremark, Cigna's Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth's Optum Rx) of artificially inflating insulin drug prices and hindering access to cheaper options.

Adding to this, the FTC has launched a broad inquiry into generative AI investments and partnerships involving companies like Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI and looking into potential anti-competitive practices within the cloud computing industry. Big Government!

 

                 Assuming Witchcraft?

None of the sued and inquired corporations and industries are protected from the fate of MySpace. They all are challenged by Moore´s law. The continuously falling costs for software & chips and the accelerating rise of AI opens newcomers - often with the backing of powerful hedge funds and other investors - ways to attack the stalwarts and to take their market shares. 

But the FTC does not care. The law suits and inquiries are based on arbitrary criteria - like "stifling emerging competition" - and the claim that the big corporations are abusing market power, which is "an imagined power, like witchcraft" comments Edwin Rockefeller, the author of "The Antitrust Religion" (amazon ).  

Law suits & inquiries are driven by ideology and disdain for markets, entrepreneurs & consumers. Chair Ferguson believes that the government & bureaucrats know more about how to do business than corporations. He tries to replace markets and consumer decisions by central planing. 

The real intention of the FTC bureaucrats is to gain control over America´s largest corporations and to be in charge of their business. Ferguson & Co. want to tell their CEOs what they can do and what not, how much they charge their customers and how they deal with their business partners (nationalreview ). Obviously the FTC wants to protect competitors, even those which are inefficient, which leads to less competition and will harm the consumer.

                  Sand Into Gears

Unfortunately the FTC is not only obsolete, it is also harmful. The law suits support the competitors of successful firms that want harm their rivals and take sides with firms disadvantaged by technological change.

The FTC is penalizing successful corporations and throws a lot of sand into the gears of the engines of the US economy. The FTC inquisition reduces the corporation`s ability to further innovate and is occupying their management capacities and slowing decision processes - making business more complicated and costly.  

If corporations get punished for being efficient and for keeping costs low, it will slow economic growth, raise price level and reduce living standards of low income households, who depend on purchasing cheap goods. Innovators and startups are getting discouraged when they know that strong growth will get punished.

The FTC should be shut down!  

 

 

 

Books: The Alice Behind Wonderland By Simon Winchester

 (Drivebycuriosity) - There are not many pieces of world literature that are so funny and so much pleasure to read like Lewis Carroll´s "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", better known as  "Alice in Wonderland". Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the real name of the author, dedicated the novel to a then six year old girl, Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson was employed as sub-librarian & mathematics lecturer.

Simon Winchester wrote a fine little book around Dodgson, Alice, and the most famous portrait of said Alice: "The Alice behind Wonderland" (amazon ). Aged 25 Dodgson became fascinated with photography, then a flegdling art. He took a lot effort to become a master in the new medium and gained popularity as photographer of portraits, often of celebrities like Lord Alfred Tennyson, but he also got fond of portraying little children. 

Being friend with superior dean Liddell and his family gave Dodgson the opportunity to create photographic images of the Liddell children; and Alice became his favorite and friend till the end of her childhood. Winchester just reports the facts and does not participate in the speculation why Dodgson created so many portraits of children, some of them naked. He writes:

"His utter fascination with all of these girls, his need to picture them with or without clothing, his need to make them happy, to amuse them, to have them think of him as a friend and for him to feel free to do the same, his needs to buy them dresses and stocking and bonnets and shoes, and on rare occasions to exhibit brief flashes of physical affection, reflect an aspect of Charles Dodgson`s character that puzzles and intrigues to this day". The usually timid Victorian society did not take offense and Dogdson/Carroll stayed all his life reputable as mathematician, author & artist.

Dodgson - who created a catalogue of about three thousand photographies in his lifetime - made altogether 11 portraits of Alice Liddell alone; the most famous of them - and the focus of the book - is now kept on the Princeton University campus, in the Firestone Library, New Jersey, USA. The object is dressed in a ragged beggar-maid-a costume inspired by a Tennyson poem. "She is lazing coquettishly against a grumbling garden wall of limestone and sandstone, standing in a corner in her bare feet". 

Winchester asks if mother Liddell, a sister, or Miss Prickett, the governess, were present when Dodgson arranged the photo: "The garment has been decorously disarranged - her shoulder both visible, her elbows and lower arms, and her chest" and he wonders "would anyone care that Dodgson then reached behind the little girl´s hair and adjusted the off-white garment about her shoulders, such that it fell slightly from her left and exposed only just entirely her left nipple?". 

Winchester also elaborates about the first steps of the new medium, the competing inventions & technologies and the substantial preparations necessary to create a photographic image. According to Winchester "photography had a kind of manageable madness to it". 

I found this book because I became a fan of Winchester after reading "The Professor And The Madman" (my review) and recently "The River At The Center Of The World: A Journey Up The Yangtze And Back In Chinese Time" ( review). I am impressed how he mastered very different subjects and shaped them all into elegant prose.
 

 

Books: Jules Verne`s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea Revisited

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Xixin Liu, the author of the "Three Body Problem", confessed that a Jules Verne novel introduced him in his childhood into science fiction and kindled his interest in the genre. A Jules Verne reader for young adults was also my introduction into scifi. The French writer is indeed the father of science fiction and inspired the genre with his positive thinking, his optimistic attitude and his belief in science & technology ( driveby). 

Recently I reread his "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus are part of the world cultural heritage - like Odysseus. The novel follows two involuntary passengers who accompany the travels of the Nautilus around the world. Verne wanted to entertain, but also to educate. He wrote of course for a 19th century audience, who had much less knowledge than people today. 

 

                         Nautical Towns 

One sentence by Nemo inspires my imagination: "The sea supplies all my wants". The Captain and his crew indeed lived from fish, shellfish, turtles, oceanic plants like algae, sea cucumber, sea weed, and many minerals and other materials which are abundant in the oceans. The dependence on the sea reminds me a bit of Japanese cuisine, that had developed in an islandish country with a large population, but little space for agriculture to feed them. I also believe that sea food in general is very healthy and the oceans will gain more important for supporting the future of humankind. And for me is the idea of traveling months or even years in a submarine way more appealing than a years long journey in a spaceship towards lifeless Mars.

Another idea by Verne`s Nemo sounds also inspiring: "I can imagine the foundations of nautical towns, clusters of submarine houses, which, like the Nautilus, would ascend every morning to breath at the surface of the water, free towns, independent cities." Indeed I could imagine cities build on ships, maybe retired oil tankers and container ships. Their residents could escape burgeoning real estate prices and be free of despotic governments.  

 

                 Submarine Forests  

I enjoyed Nemo`s and his passenger`s travels and find Verne`s somewhat antique style charming. And the submarine worlds he described are amazing: 

"The rays of the sun struck the surface of the waves at rather an oblique angle, and the touch of their light, decomposed by refraction as through prism, flowers, rocks, plants, shells, and polypi were shaded at the edges by the seven solar colors. It was  marvellous, a feast for the eyes, this complications of colored tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colorist".

"The forest was composed of large tree-plants. Not a herb which carpeted the ground, not a branch which clothed the trees, was either broken or bent, nor did they extend horizontally; all stretched up to the surface of the ocean. Not a filament, not a ribbon, however thin they might be, but kept straight as a rod of iron".

The image above is a screenshot from an Apple screensaver showing some submarine plants - known as kelp  ( google)

The novel is part of a giant Verne omnibus reader: Jules Verne: Complete Works (Wisehouse Classics) (47 novels! more than 10,000 pages! amazon). According to editor comments some sentences and paragraphs are erased, but this does not interrupt the plot and I did not miss them. 

Since the whole volume costs just 99 cents it doesn`t matter.   

Books: The Blue Hour By Paula Hawkins

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - A while ago I enjoyed the psychological thriller "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins (my review ) - and later the movie adaption with Emily Blunt ( review). Therefore I gave another book by the author a try: "The Blue Hour" ( amazon). 

An employee of an art gallery, who is obsessed with the work of a late female artist, travels to a remote island where the artist had lived to investigate about her estate. There he has to a deal with an uncooperative woman who has been somewhat connected with the artist and still has control over the artist`s works (this is a spoiler free blog).

The plot develops very slowly and in several threads, following the art gallery employee and parallelly the woman on the island, blended with the diary of the late artist (this is spoiler free blog). The storyline focuses first on the artwork and expanses then to the complex personal lives of all participates, becoming more and more mysterious and violent. 

I have problems with the characters, especially with the males, who are either creeps & violent or meek & overtrusting. The dramatic finally is obviously written for the big screen.

Books: A Cause For Alarm By Eric Ambler

(Drivebycuriosity) - I am usually sceptical about book recommendations because the taste of the crowd does not agree with me. But a recommendation on the blog Marginal Revolution, a bag of miracles (Wundertüte)  that I scroll weekly, got my attention. Tyler Cowen, a polymath and owner of the blog, praised Eric Ambler´s novel "Cause for Alarm" and claims that the author "redefines what it means to be a good writer of thrillers" (marginalrevolution ). Since I enjoyed some of Cowen´s recommendations in the past and Eric Ambler is famous, I gave it a try.

Unfortunately, the novel ( amazon) did not work for me. The plot reads a like theater of the absurd, for instance Ionesco`s "The Bald Soprano". The plot starts in England during the 1930s recession, when an engineer loses his job. The protagonist found another job, now as a sales representative for a English manufacturer in Italy, which was ruled by Mussolini and the Fascists. In Milan he makes the acquaintance with two shady men, who talk him into politically risky activities, which starts a chain of events (this is a spoiler free blog). 

I find the naivety of the protagonist unbelievable, his actions incredible and the other important characters bizarre. Maybe the ridiculous story was shaped by the left-wing world view of Ambler, who was famous for his  thrillers with a Marxist touch ( web.archive).   

In future I will be more skeptical with book recommendations on Cowen´s Marginal Revolution.  

Contemporary Art: Soft Horizons @ Plato New York

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Contemporary art is full of surprises. On a resent walk on Manhattan`s popular Bowery I spotted an interesting show @ gallery Plato. The art dealer displayed works by the Canadian Erik Nieminen. The show is called "Soft Horizons" (platogallery ). I show here my favorites, a very subjective selection as usual.

 

The press release claims that "drawing inspiration from classical mythology, historical narratives and the digital age, this evolving body of work blurs the boundaries between creation and decay, reality and imagination". 

 

The press release adds: "A key theme of the exhibition is the interplay between control and chaos. Some paintings exude meticulous order, while others are layered with change and fluidity, inviting ambiguity. The ‘grey area’ – a space of curiosity and transformation – emerges as a central motif, challenging rigid binaries of good and bad, past and future. This liminal space, much like history itself, is constantly rewritten".
 

To be continued 

Books: Brothers Grimm - A Biography By Ann Schmiesing

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Almost everybody knows "Snow White", "Hänsel and Gretel", "Cinderella" & "Rumpelstilzkin", the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. Ann Schmiesing describes in "The Brothers Grimm - A Biography" the life of Jacob (1785–1863) & Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) ( amazon).

The brothers are famous for collecting & publishing fairy tales, but they saw themselves as scholars and even scientists and they worked all their lives on much larger projects.

 

      1. Strengthening German Identity 

Their main goal was to preserve the German cultural heritage. The Grimms thought it necessary to strengthen Germany´s identity because the state "Germany" did not exist in their lifetimes. Before the unification in 1871 existed a patchwork of about 300 independent German speaking polities - kingdoms, duchies, counties, electorates and independent cities like Hamburg & Frankfurt; and the European continent was shaken by the rise and fall of Napoleon and the related wars & revolutions. 

The Grimm Brothers grew up - and lived many years - in a remote area, named Hessen, that in the early 19th century was occupied by France and ruled by Napoleon, his brothers and other French authorities. Their lives were influenced by the physical and cultural devastation caused by the Napoleonic Wars and their work can be seen as an answer to French cultural dominance and military occupation. 

Jacob & Wilhelm wanted to support the struggle against Napoleon. According to the biographer the brothers focused on uncovering the Germanic past by working on older literature partly as a response to the French occupation and the advent of French cultural and political influence. Jacob believed that the shared German heritage pointed the way to a unified German political state. But they also appreciated other national traditions and they published studies pertaining to the languages and literature of Scandinavia, Spain, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, among other nations or regions.

            2. Promoting German Culture

The Grimms were also driven "by the desire to preserve something considered valuable before it might be lost". They feared that the German cultural heritage, represented by language, fairy tales and legends, "had been injured by urbanization, industrialization and related factors" and might vanish soon. Therefore they created significant inputs to social sciences like linguistic, literary history, mythography, runology, folklore, medieval studies and lexicography. 

Jacob worked years on a book about "German Grammar" and published 1,100 pages in the year 1822. "Grammar" was groundbreaking because it helped establish linguistic as a science. Jacob´s detection of how sounds in the German languages had in the distant past systematically shifted became famous as Grimm`s law. The significance of this work has been compared to that of Darwin`s "On the Origin of Species". Grimm`s contemporary, the poet & literature critic, Heinrich Heine likened "Grammar" to a colossal Gothic cathedral in which the various Germanic peoples sang together, each in their own dialects.  

Close to the end of their lives the brothers worked together on their grand dictionary project, with the goal providing a dictionary that would be comprehensive not just with respect to words defined, but also in term of cultural heritage. They thought that "High German" was important for the German cultural heritage and therefore to the goal of German unification. Jacob also published works on German law and mythology and a two-volume "History of the German Language". 

3. Fighting For Freedom & Against Censorship

But the brothers didn´t just live on an ivory tower of science. They were political and romantics, skeptical of monarchy, devoted to free speech, opposed to the censorship of literature and the arts. Threatened by burgeoning literacy rates, the rulers of the German kingdoms, duchies and electorates became more zealous in controlling what people could and could not read. Wilhelm wrote in 1815: "The rulers have shown little insights into the lives of their people and little willingness. Nevertheless, I am firmly convinced that a good seed has not only been sown but has also sprouted and can no longer be suppressed. If only it can grow slowly, it will grow that much securely, just as nature manifests itself more nobly in plants that need a longer time to grow but are, as a result, more durable." 

The Grimms were part of a group of professors at  University of Göttingen (Göttingen Seven) who wrote and signed a statement protesting against the annulment of the constitution of the Kingdom of Hanover by its new ruler, King Ernest Augustus, and refused to swear an oath to the king. As a result the Grimms and the other signers got fired and they had to leave the kingdom immediately to avoid arrest. Today they are celebrated for their bold commitment to liberty. 

 

  4. Creating An UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ Heritage Document 

Almost as a byproduct Jacob & Wilhelm created an UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ Heritage Document: Their famous "Kinder und Hausmärchen" (Children’s and Household Tales). Their informants were literate, middle-class, young adult townspeople and they did not conform to the prevalent image of the storyteller as an uneducated, older peasant woman from the countryside. 

The Grimms often edited and altered the plots, for instance in an earlier version "Rumpelstiltskin merely run away in rage after the miller´s daughter correctly guesses his name", in a later version "Rumpelstiltskin angrily stomps his right foot into the ground and sinks up to his waist, then pulls his left foot so forcibly that he tears in two and destroys himself". Wilhelm also mixed two or more tales to form the version presented in the second version.

 

                   5. Personal Struggles

Grimm`s work is even more impressive because all their lives both brothers were struggling. Wilhelm had severe health issues, he suffered from asthma and had a troublesome heart ailment. And the Grimms had to deal with stressed finances because their salaries at universities, libraries and other employments were meager and their "Kinder und Hausmärchen" wasn´t a success during their life time. "They often rationed their food, at times sharing portions among themselves, skipping meals, going out without wine, and cutting out evening tea when the price of sugar rose too high".

 

                6. Conclusion 

 The biographer concludes: "Through tens of thousands of painstakingly researched pages of published scholarship and collected texts, the Grimms were among the foremost contributors to the post-Napoleonic German national awakening. Together or individually, they had collected folk songs, fairy tales, legends, myths, customs, legal texts, and related documents attesting to the cultural production of the German-speaking lands."   

Ann Schmiesing, a professor and administrator at the University of Colorado Boulder, did an impressive job. Besides covering the lives of the brothers and their families & friends, she also introduced the reader into a historical epoch of the German speaking lands and describes the fundamental political movements that changed the world of the Grimms. 

This blog post is just a condensate and it might be biased by my own world view as an economist, therefore I really recommend reading this wonderful book. 

PS On top of this post I use a fictional image of Dorothea Viehmann, the woman who allegedly delivered most of the fairy tales. The image represents the Grimms visiting Viehmann at her cottage.