Why public anger about monopolies rose and faded

Back a few years ago, there was this moment where it felt like there was a movement building against monopolies.

It started in the United States with academics like Lena Khan and Tim Wu and journalists like Matt Stoller speaking out about the creeping corporate concentration that was infecting so much of American life.

Eventually that movement found purchase in the Biden administration, which put antitrust at the centre of their agenda.

And because Canada is always a little bit behind the United States, we got our own version of that movement. And in a weird way, Jordan and I were both a part of that, when in 2022 and 2023 we put out our series on Monopolies on Canadaland COMMONS.

It really felt like momentum was building and that everyday people were getting more and more upset about the domination of the big banks and the big telcos and the big grocery chains.

But recently, it’s felt like that momentum has kind of….gone away. And there’s still plenty of people working on this issues here, but at least in terms of journalism, the trade war and the Trump administration and a million other things seem to have distracted away from what I still believe is such an essential issue.

And that’s why I was so excited to get an email from Peter Nowak a few months ago. He said he had an idea and wanted to talk.

Now for those of you don’t know Peter, he’s a longtime journalist who has done some amazing work over the years.

When I was getting interested in business reporting more than a decade ago, Peter was one of the best out there. His main focus was the telecom industry. And that was a really interesting time for the telecoms. The Harper government was actually putting some pressure on them and had appointed an aggressive CRTC commissioner instead of just the usual corporate toady.

And Peter was a dogged reporters covering all of this and was honestly a bit of an inspiration for me. He was the kind of journalist that I one day wanted to be. But he’d gone off to work at tech savvy, a small internet service provider, a few years back, so I thought he was out of the game.

So I was really excited when he told me that not only did he want to get back into journalism, but that he saw our Monopoly series on COMMONS as his primary inspiration.

You know, when you hear that kind of thing from someone you really admire, it’s pretty damn flattering. But more than that, I just think it’s so important, so necessary right now to have dedicated journalists on the monopoly beat.

This week, Peter has finally launched his own Substack called Do Not Pass Go, the first two episodes are out already, and you should absolutely go subscribe and give it a listen.

And we wanted to sit down to talk to him about reporting on monopolies, what he has in store and why he always forces himself to drive to another city just to watch a movie.

Featured in this episode: Peter Nowak

To Learn More

Do Not Pass Go: The Debut Episode

The Great Awakening: Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell

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Music: I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque

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