Columbia Journalism Professor Richard John — a Center faculty grant awardee — has written two pieces published at the end of 2023 regarding his funded project Bad Business: Anti-trust as anti-monopoly.
The Atlantic magazine published online Nov. 27 John's article, The Tech Giant's Anti-regulation Fantasy, subtitled "Major internet companies pretend that they’re best left alone. History shows otherwise."
John writes, "The advent of smartphones, one-click shopping, and an avalanche of digital stimuli doesn’t change the fact that, when any industry stands astride the economy and reaches into most Americans’ homes, lawmakers should assess whether the public interest is being protected. But the reality that the tech giants have long been entwined with government policy somehow got lost in the age of “Move fast and break things”—a mantra that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg coined more than a decade ago—and public officials are only now returning to the question of how best to regulate the biggest platforms."
John's paper Reframing the Monopoly Question: Commerce, Land, Industry is also set to appear in the book, Antimonopoly and American Democracy, edited by Daniel A. Crane and William J. Novak, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The Tobin Project published John's piece with permission from Oxford University Press.
In John's piece, he recounts how Thomas Jefferson had urged James Madison in 1787 to revise the recently drafted U.S. Constitution to include restrictions against monopolies -- among other rights such as the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, habeas corpus, and trial by jury.
