Between religious insults, a threat to destroy a civilization, memes depicting Trump as Jesus

and a fight with the Pope, you might have missed massive news of an historic clash between

financial power and the public interest. And you might have missed

the important fact that this week, the public interest won. A jury found Live Nation and its subsidiary

ticket master liable of violating three counts of federal and state antitrust laws, finding that

the company operated as an illegal monopoly that locked out competition,

coerced artists and venues, and overcharged ticket buyers for years.

Corporate America is now on notice.

The free pass era may be over, and any company that exploits its size and reach could be

next, which includes the proposed Paramount Warner Brothers merger

already under close watch by antitrust observers. And here's something worth noting. In every

previous civil monopolization case brought by the government, a single judge made the final call.

This time, for the first time in American history, that decision was put in the hands

of a jury, a jury of ordinary people. So let's talk about what just happened and why its implications

go far beyond a concert ticket. Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster,

has longed one of the most despised corporations

in America and not without reason. This is a company that controls roughly half of the

concert promotion market. It owns venues, it manages artists, and it sells the tickets through Ticketmaster,

the platform with which it merged in 2010 over the prescient objections of consumer advocates and

competition experts. A merger, the Obama administration, approved with conditions that the company

subsequently violated repeatedly. For years, if you wanted to go to a major concert, you

effectively had one option. And that option came with lots of fees, service fees, facility

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