Trustbusting advocates like Sarah Miller, who target corporate power, have finally found themselves at the center of the political conversation.

By David McCabe

WASHINGTON — One night five years ago, Sarah Miller, a former Treasury Department aide, was trying to make sense of an economic recovery that had left the country in the grips of rising inequality.

Thinking back to recent news articles about corporate mergers, she Googled “monopolies in America.” Her screen filled with links to articles detailing a nascent school of thinking that corporate concentration was to blame for inequality, and that a century-old approach to antitrust laws could help solve it.

As she read more, she felt she had found the absent piece of a puzzle. “This is probably a big deal,” Ms. Miller, now 37, remembered thinking.

It is now common to hear Democratic presidential candidates argue that tech companies like Facebook and Google are too powerful. The Trump administration, too, is investigating whether those businesses, as well as Apple and Amazon, have violated antitrust laws.

Ms. Miller has been central in making the issue prominent. From her onetime seat as the deputy director of the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group focused on antitrust, she spent three years as a thorn in Silicon Valley’s side, guiding a coalition of liberal groups that demanded federal officials break up Facebook.

Now there’s opportunity to ratchet up the pressure on policymakers even more, Ms. Miller said. So she left Open Markets at the beginning of this year to lead the American Economic Liberties Project, a new organization dedicated to pushing government to confront corporate concentration.