Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Less Podcast in which we delve into the effort to turn theory into practice in opening up new ways of thinking about antitrust lawsuits attempting to rein in big tech and other mega corporations which are operating in a new phase of capitalism, some argue.

Sources today include Planet Money,

the BTLJ podcast, factually with Adam Conover,

and The Majority Report,

with additional members only clips from the majority report.

The origins of antitrust law go back to the Gilded Age.

Listeners who've heard parts 1 and 2 of Planet Money series on Antitrust in America

will know the backstory to this history, but here's a quick recap.

The late 19th century saw the rise of these

massive new companies, these trusts as they were called, like John D Rockefeller's

standard oil, which were using their sheer size to push competitors out of the market.

So the antitrust laws at the federal level were passed back in 1890 against the backdrop of this phenomenal

Industrial Revolution that had delivered a lot of

technological gains in progress, but had also concentrated power over these new

industries and a very small number of hands.

And so you had farmers, for example,

who were often dependent on a single railroad

that was going through their town,

and they saw how that concentrated power could result in discrimination, it could

result in arbitrary price hikes, and there was a sense that who was winning and

who was losing in our economy was not based on who on the merits was

offering the best products or services or prices but really the whims of

...