Eduardo Porter

Veterans of the nation’s decade-long efforts to extend the nation’s broadband footprint worry that President Joe Biden's new plan carries the same bias of its predecessors: Billions will be spent to extend the internet infrastructure to the farthest reaches of rural America, where few people live, and little will be devoted to connecting millions of urban families who live in areas with high-speed service that they cannot afford. About 81 percent of rural households are plugged into broadband, compared with about 86 percent in urban areas, according to Census Bureau data.

Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Congress under oath that by providing its users with greater and more transparent controls over the personal data they share and how it is used for targeted advertising, he insisted, Facebook could empower them to make their own call and decide how much privacy they were willing to put on the block. As he surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won’t make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more.

A look at the long decline of competition in many American industries. It is a decline that stunts entrepreneurship, hinders workers’ mobility and slows productivity growth. Slowing this trend has emerged as a tempting new avenue to address the plight of a beleaguered working class. Reviving flagging American competition might even help stop America’s ever-widening inequality.

In April, President Barack Obama issued an executive order calling on government agencies to look for ways to bolster competition in the industries they monitor. Hillary Clinton drew competition into the campaign trail, chastising dominant corporations for “using their power to raise prices, limit choices for consumers, lower wages for workers and hold back competition from start-ups and small businesses.” And Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made headlines last month when she called for antitrust agencies to crack down on Silicon Valley powers like Apple, Facebook and Google. Monopoly rents — the excess returns a company reaps when it does not have to deal with pesky competitors keeping prices down — could worsen inequality in a variety of ways. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate from Columbia University who served as top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, has asserted that exorbitant corporate profits are being run up through oligopolies and passed along to stockholders, raising the share of national income accruing to the rich.