Before AT&T formally sold-off Warner Bros. to Discovery Media (DISCA), John Oliver took great delight in mocking HBO’s parent company, frequently calling them “business daddy” and skewering the company’s reputation for poor cellular service (amongst other common complaints).
In the most recent episode of his late night news show “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver uses the history of AT&T (T) as a jumping off point for a segment on antitrust legislation, in which he makes the point that monopolies are bad for business and customers.
Oliver Makes The Case For Antitrust Legislation
The segment begins with a brief history of AT&T, which Oliver explains once had a monopoly over the telephone industry, and would go out of its way to hinder competing businesses.
But once AT&T was broken up in the 1980s, Oliver points out prices dropped, service improved and the telecommunications industry began to innovate new products like answering machines and modems, and internet service became faster and more accessible to the general public.
Essentially, Oliver posits, if AT&T hadn’t been broken up, the internet as we know it wouldn’t exist. And now a current system of monopoly is keeping the internet from reaching its full potential.
From there, Oliver moved on to the current day. He made the case (and is far from the first person to make this statement) that the internet is currently controlled by the four biggest technology firms on the planet: Apple (APPL) , Alphabet (GOOG) (parent company to Google), Meta (MVRS) (the company formerly known as Facebook) and Amazon (AMZN).
Oliver pointed out that there are currently two bills making the rounds through Congress that aim to rein in anti-competitive behaviors from these companies, the American Choice and Innovation Act (AICO) and the Open App Markets Act.
Oliver Calls Amazon And Google Bad For Businesses
Oliver then spent the rest of the segment making the case against monopolies, and spent time rebutting common arguments against deregulation.
He includes a clip with Jim Cramer, co-founder of The Street, who defends all four of the named companies, noting that they are important brands loved by their customers. “Are they monopolies? I honestly don’t care. Wake me up when someone can do it better.”
The problem, as Oliver retorts, is that monopolies make it so that a competitor never even gets the chance make a better version of what we currently have.
“The problem with letting a few companies control whole sectors of our economy is that it limits what is possible by startups,” Oliver said. “An innovative app or website or startup may never get off the ground because it could be surcharged to death, buried in search results or ripped off completely.”
In particular, Oliver zeroes in on the ways Apple and Google engage, in Oliver’s opinion, in what is called “self-preferencing,” which is when companies unfairly highlight and show favor of their own products on their own platforms. Or in Oliver’s words, this practice allows tech companies to “pick winners and losers throughout our economy.”
Apple, as Oliver points out, prevents iPhone users from downloading apps from anywhere but Apple’s App Store, and Apple apps almost always show up first in searches on the store. Apple also takes a steep 30 percent of the money outside app developers make, whether by selling their app or through in-app purchases. This earns Apple billions of dollars a year, and no small amount of complaints from developers who feel they are being taken advantage of.
It is a similar situation with Google, Oliver posits, as the search giant charges a similar fee for Android apps downloaded from Google Play.
The company has, in recent years, made changes to its search engines in order to make it so users never leave Google. As Rolling Stone notes, “one study found that 65 percent of all Google searches end without the user ever leaving Google’s ecosystem. This means that other sites lose traffic, which means they lose money and customers, which means they have a more difficult time staying in business.”
Oliver Calls Out Amazon
Then the segment turned its attention to Amazon, which Oliver says might be the biggest monopoly of all. The House antitrust subcommittee reports that “65 to 70 percent of all U.S. online marketplace purchases flow through Amazon.”
“Amazon basically is the marketplace,” Oliver said. “It’s essentially the only place to sell anything on the internet -- unless, that is, you’re looking to offload some human teeth. Because then, it’s Craigslist all the way, baby.”
The segment revealed that one analysis found that Amazon points shoppers toward products sold by Amazon 40 percent of the time. When Amazon highlights another supplier, nine out of 10 times that supplier uses Amazon's services.
Amazon also makes nearly 160,000 products in-house, which critics frequently accuse are cheaper, inferior versions of products made by small online businesses, which often liquidate their offerings when they see Amazon copy their products, knowing they can’t compete. (Several years ago the sustainable shoe company Allbirds made news when it said that Amazon was selling a knock-off version of its grey sneakers.)
“Ending a monopoly is almost always a good thing, whether it’s AT&T, or Standard Oil, or literally any game of Monopoly,” Oliver said. “When harmful monopolies end, innovation flourishes.”
The segment is already blowing Twitter up, where it was cheered on by Luther Lowe, President of Public Policy at Yelp (YELP) (a company that is arguably being harmed by Google’s self-preferencing) and the anti-trust activist Evan Greer, Director, Fight for the Future.
The segment concludes by noting that the bills have cross aisle support, as breaking up technology companies is the rare issue that Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) agree on.
But while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he’ll bring the bills up for a vote, that has not yet happened. Oliver points out that Schumer is one of at least 17 Congressional lawmakers who have children that work for a tech giant; he has one child who works at Meta and one is a lobbyist for Amazon.
