For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma? 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on , my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: 2/

Political scientists will tell you that policies that billionaires hate will not *ever* be enacted by politicians, no matter how popular they are among the public: 3/

And yet, all around the world - the US (under Trump I, Biden and Trump II), Canada, the UK, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, even China - governments have done more on antitrust over the past couple years than over the past four *decades*. Where is this coming from? 4/

My working theory basically boiled down to "enough is enough" - AKA Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." As in: people are just *so pissed off* with corporate power that politicians are *finally* acting to curb it. 5/

But I was never very satisfied with this. There's *lots* of stuff that the public is furious about, which politicians aren't acting on, from climate change to taxing billionaires. Why antitrust and not all *that* stuff? 6/

I've been mulling this, andgot to thinking about a low-key disagreement I had with comrades in the digital rights world, before all the antitrust stuff kicked off: Back then, people on my side of the barricades were deeply suspicious of antitrust. 7/

Back then, my thesis was, *Sure, maybe Big Telco is pushing for antitrust to target Big Tech, but once antitrust arises from its long slumber, it will turn on telcos - and every other concentrated industry.* Tldr: I'm pretty sure that's what's happening. 9/

You see, one part of the antitrust battle boils down to a fight between rentiers and capitalists. The largest tech (and other) companies are primarily rentiers - entities that make money by *owning* things, rather than *doing* things. 10/

They make *rents*, at the expense of other companies' *profits*: 11/

Companies like Epic (makers of Fortnite) want to sell your kids skins and mods for their in-game avatars without giving Apple and Google 30% of every dollar that brings in, and they've got a *lot* of money to make that desire real: 12/

This is millionaire-on-billionaire violence. It's gigantic corporations going to war against galactic-scale corporations. These pro-antitrust companies are the inheritors of the telcos' mantle, powerful belligerents in a Extremely Large Tech war on Big Tech. 13/

There are a *lot* of these large companies and they're sick of being subjected to a 30% economy-wide App Tax on all the payments they receive in-app: 14/

Let me be clear: I'm *not* saying that the only reason we're getting muscular, global anti-monopoly action is that slightly smaller corporations (who universally aspire to acquiring monopolies of their own) are fighting for their own self-interest. 15/

What I'm saying is that the *coalition* of everyday people who've had their lives ruined by monopolists *and* corporations that are stuck paying the app tax† is, in combination, sufficient to awaken the antitrust giant. 16/