Concentrated economic power in the hands of tech giants and hedge funds has helped drive the decline of the news industry, according to a new report by the nonprofit, policy-focused American Economic Liberties Project released Tuesday.

Google and Facebook have monopolized the advertising market, starving online publishers of advertising revenue, the report finds. The other major issue news publishers face is the rise of private equity funds that buy and pillage struggling newspapers.

Titled “The Courage To Learn,” the report provides an overview of antitrust and economic competition policy during President Barack Obama’s administration and covers a range of sectors from agriculture to health care to media. It finds that monopoly power is responsible for “our most serious economic challenges” and includes several recommendations for the incoming Biden-Harris administration.

The issues the news industry faces today are a result of shortsightedness from politicians on the harms of corporate consolidation, according to Matt Stoller, the Economic Liberties director of research and one of the report’s authors.

“People said, ‘Oh, well if we consolidate, things are going to be more efficient,” Stoller said. “The way that we’ll measure whether things are efficient is just through a very narrow lens of pricing to consumers. So if pricing is low and pricing for things like Google and Facebook is low, then that’s fine and it doesn’t matter if newspapers are wiped out.”

The report states that Google and Facebook have taken over the advertising market. Google’s control of a large amount of user data has allowed it to buy up companies involved with online advertising, the report found. As a result, 86% of online advertising space is bought and sold in a “stock market-like ‘advertising exchange’ controlled by these tech giants.” (Disclosure: Poynter has received funding from Google and Facebook.)