1. Boy, Amazon is in a heap of trouble. Evidence made public today by California AG @AGRobBonta shows blatant price fixing. And there are so many examples. Here's Amazon scheming with a pet food supplier to get Chewy to raise its prices.

Amazon found out that the number of its workers relying on SNAP and Medicaid tripled between 2020 and 2025. Their solution? A discount to Whole Foods. 🙄 In this week's Closer Look, we make the case for our solution that could actually help workers—like raising their wages. ⬇️

"The great risk for the Democratic Party right now is to fail to reckon with the much larger and more powerful issue that affordability candidates are tapping into — and to end up disappointing voters once again." — @superwuster nytimes.com/2026/09/28/opini…

This is especially concerning coming at a moment when we will need philosophers, artists and social workers more than ever. AI will challenge our our moral and ethical code, our social structures and our very humanity more than any tech in history. We should be encouraging those fields of study that prioritize societal benefit and are pro-human, even (especially?) if they are not valued by capital markets.

How did FDR weave together a coalition to fight concentrated economic power? A clip from the latest episode of "FESTIVAL with Pete Davis"—in which @ILSR's @stacyfmitchell explains how FDR brought together farmers, workers, and consumers to decentralize economic power and end the first Gilded Age. FESTIVAL Episode 2 🎧 "Two Long-Haul Heroes (with Stacy Mitchell and Lawrence Lessig)" Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube — search “FESTIVAL with Pete Davis"

The worst part of Bonta caving on the Paramount merger is that it's a big flashing signal to every other company that there is no antitrust enforcement in America and you can bully your way into getting whatever you want. It's a monumentally bad decision.

The Paramout surrender is a perfect distillation of Democratic politics: 1. Talk a big game 2. Fold despite having legal leverage and public opinion on their side 3. Empower conservative oligarchs who hate working people. Great message to send right before the elections!

The "independence board" to keep CNN and CBS editorially independent will be chosen by the Ellisons and will report to the Ellisons

Okay folks, I verified it: This settlement does not require Paramount to make any more films than the two studios made last year. In fact, it lets them make fewer films. People keep saying Paramount has agreed to "make" 30 films. In fact, the CEO of AMC theaters just said that's why he backed the deal. nitter.net/CEOAdam/status/2102152… But no, Ellison may have said that. But that's not what he signed. Ellison did not agree to make -- that is, produce -- 30 films a year. He agreed to make 15 films a year. He only agreed to distribute the rest. (See III.1.a.d., below.) That does not require the combined company make any new films. In fact, the company can make 3 fewer films than they made last year. Because last year they produced 18 films. 20% of the 30 have to be tentpole films. The rest can be of any size, with whatever marketing budget the company deems is customary. Please read the fine print. This "deal" is not what it purports to be.

A company with up to $5 billion in assets could qualify as a small business under new federal rules, becoming eligible for contracts & loans through the SBA. That includes companies building data centers for Big Tech. prospect.org/2026/09/16/trum…

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure. 1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. 2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed." 3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…). Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead. 4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible. this.weekinsecurity.com/doze… ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre… 5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

30 years ago, we decided that the best way to develop technology was to give tech platforms broad immunity for the harm they caused, to treat "the internet" as wholly different, and untether it from common law, preempt state law. Remove it from the normal domain of law built up over generations; and put it in its own special category. Wholly different = outside of common law and state law. Today, with very different motivations, the big AI companies are asking for a lot of things, but MUCH of what they are asking for is not to be subject to law itself, to be untethered from state regulators, to be untethered from existing federal law and to be untethered from tort. Wholly different = wholly new regime, reject law as it lives in the world. They are asking for their own special regime in 100 different ways--exemptions from existing law, preemption from state law, their own regulator. If we take the threats to human health and wellbeing seriously, the last thing we should do is remove them from the normal domain of law. Instead, a serious precautionary regime requires state law, tort law, strong and strengthened consumer protection law with stronger private rights of actions, using existing strong protections against corporate collusion, decentralized modes of enforcement so that capture at the federal level does not mean wholesale capture (build on state parens patraie), and likely a federal regulatory regime that is built WITHIN an existing agency, like the federal NRC and NNSA, instead of something wholly new, to avoid the most obvious risk of dangerous agency capture, both by self-interested parties and by the post-law ideology of the EA world. Any vision that requires preemption or immunity is a non-starter, and smuggles in unimaginable risk.

1. Why do we need their blessing? They didn’t ask for our permission to recklessly create technology that, by their own admission (!), can kill us all. 2. Can we try relying on expertise of people not seeking trillions of dollars for the thing we are trying to regulate? 3. An earlier version of this legislation preempts state laws. Pay close attention.

The FTC sued liquor distributor Southern Glazer's over this conduct - but didn't sue Total Wine because the wording of the law makes it hard to sue powerful retailers for conspiring with suppliers. @ChrisMurphyCT's Fair Prices for Small Businesses Act can help. ilsr.org/article/independent…

Big box stores always cost more than they paid in taxes — but then they started appealing their property taxes based on the low quality of their buildings. Raw deal for cities. (This tweet is an oldie but a goodie).

A big grocery chain closes a store — then blocks another grocer from moving in. It’s legal in many places, but cities and states are starting to act. Join us Sept. 24 for an event on how to find these “restrictive covenants” and ban them. RSVP: ilsr.org/article/independent…

We're partnering with Local First Arizona, a powerful network of 3,000 small businesses, for a event on how to rollback corporate consolidation. With Attorney General @AZAGMayes in Phoenix on Tuesday, Sept. 22nd. Join us!