For the past forty years, corporate consolidation — the trend of fewer companies controlling a greater share of markets — has grown without any significant government intervention to stop it. In fact, both major political parties have supported it. Large corporations now dominate nearly every sector of the economy. They have the power to set prices, lower wages, and crush small businesses that dare compete with them. As a result, income inequality has grown astronomically. The top one percent of household income has increased 229 percent since 1979 compared to 46 percent growth for the bottom ninety percent.

The political tools to rein in this corporate consolidation are clear, but previous Democratic and Republican administrations have failed to act aggressively to limit economic concentration, citing the benefit to consumers of low prices while ignoring the harms. Organizers are implementing diverse strategies to reject this prevailing economic orthodoxy, including grassroots worker organizing, local campaigns for municipal regulation, and national electoral campaigns. Ensuring this administration improves upon the abysmal record of its predecessors will require building off this momentum and changing the narrative around consumer harm by centering the stories of those directly impacted by corporate consolidation.

In October 2020, the House Subcommittee on Antitrust released a reportabout the impacts of unrestrained growth and consolidation among the largest “Big Tech” companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. The report makes clear that federal officials should break up big companies to change their business models and proactively regulate their anti-competitive behavior based on an impact analysis that is not limited to price effects. Though the report focuses exclusively on the technology industry, it creates a potential blueprint for structural changes in other sectors and was seen as a blockbuster development for the anti-monopoly movement.

The report officially cites investigative journalism as the impetus for the congressional inquiry, but organizing through public campaigns helped translate concerns into action. The “Freedom from Facebook” campaign, a coalition of twelve think tanks and advocacy organizations that formed in 2018, staged protests at congressional hearings on Capitol Hill where tech executives were speaking and placed ads in newspapers and via airplanes to highlight Facebook’s detrimental impact on our democracy. The campaign also filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, one of the main federal agencies with jurisdiction over competition policy, demanding investigations of the company. In 2020, the campaign expanded to include Google. These tactics are familiar to most organizers because they work. In spotlighting stories of Big Tech’s harm, Freedom from Facebook and Google reinvigorated Congress’s long-dormant suspicion of corporate monopolies. It’s no accident the final report puts these stories from consumers and small business owners front and center.