What happens when you eliminate the independence of agencies like the DOJ and FTC, replace experienced leaders with party loyalists, and tee up opportunities for selective prosecution? Equal justice under law collapses into a race to see which competitor can pay the largest ransom.
Pro-monopoly (that's what "deregulation" in practice means) is not the same as pro-business. It's pro very specific business which wants to have no competition which is very unhealthy for business in general.
> On the other their entire governing agenda is about deregulation, dismantling of federal agencies and being pro-business.
Oh, honey[1].
If the apparatchik remains spineless and lets them get away with it, there'll be some remnants the supposed agenda, but I think the real agenda is whatever makes them money. Already people close to him are charging others for access to him/cushy jobs[2]. Gosh, I'm trying to re-find this commentary account where it's headlines out of Washington but written like the way western media writes about some despotic African nation, but maybe I just need to wait until January.
Heck, Trump even bilked taxpayers by charging SS members a lot of money for accomodation in Mar-A-Lago or Trump Tower, and they had/have to stay there because they were guarding him [3]...
It needs to start with a retroactive investigation of what happened with Teams, which was such an obvious anticompetitive abuse to steal market share away from Slack and others. But it needs to go a lot deeper and touch everything. The acquisitions of GitHub, LinkedIn, and other companies. Things like shoving unwanted ads into Windows due to a lack of competition. Repeated aggressive nudges to use Edge over other browsers. Copilot agents running in the background without user consent, giving their AI an advantage no one else enjoys. Overly complicated Office file formats. The funding of OpenAI and Satya’s obvious direct control over that company, seen in the situation with the previous board, where he threatened to just dismantle OpenAI by hiring away all the staff. And on and on.
One thing I want to call out is that everyone thinks Satya is some kind of soft, nice person. He joined Microsoft in 1992. He is 100% part of the old Microsoft guard. Sure he may have continued Ballmer’s bet on Bing/services into Azure/O365/etc and turned the company’s valuation around. But he is definitely familiar with the entire playbook of Microsoft using its existing products, existing contracts/renewals, existing capital, existing staff to copy others, bundle, undercut, and keep taking over market segments that under fair competition would go to other more deserving companies like startups.
On one hand Trump and the Republicans hate these corporations, and would love the opportunity to take them down a notch.
On the other their entire governing agenda is about deregulation, dismantling of federal agencies and being pro-business.
Interesting situation to be in.
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