The manifesto found on Luigi Mangione before he was charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson doesn't spend much time discussing the quality of healthcare in America. It doesn't mention any of the specific health issues Mangione had complained about on Reddit or any frustrations he may have had with receiving treatment. Instead, the bulk of the note talks about the size of UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare.

"United," the note says, is one of America's largest companies by market cap, "behind only Apple, Google, Walmart." The company, it says, has "simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it." In other words, it seems Mangione wasn't upset about healthcare, per se — but was pissed off about monopolization. The backpack that was found in Central Park, which police believe belonged to Mangione, was stuffed with Monopoly money. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the shooting.)

Though the manifesto gets some facts wrong — UnitedHealth actually stood at No. 14 by market cap at the time of the shooting — it references a very real trend: Over the past 40 years, the government has allowed an unprecedented level of consolidation in almost every major sector of American business. Whether we're buying office supplies or booking a vacation or searching the internet, we're often at the mercy of a handful of companies that dominate that particular corner of the economy. Despite a century of antitrust legislation and litigation, American business is bigger than ever.

That's especially true when it comes to healthcare: The Government Accountability Office found that just three companies control at least 80% of the health insurance market in most states. UnitedHealth, in particular, has spent the past several years acquiring firms from across the healthcare sector, transforming the company into a vertically integrated behemoth that controls health insurance, medical services, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare data. Last year, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into the company, prompting UnitedHealth to drop two proposed acquisitions. The DOJ also sued to block UnitedHealth's acquisition of Amedisys, a rival provider of home healthcare — a move which UnitedHealth has called an overreach it will "vigorously defend against."

Of course, companies consolidate for all sorts of reasons. For one, size allows them to take advantage of economies of scale. A report by accounting giant PwC found that large hospitals have a lower cost per patient, since they can share resources and treat patients faster. Insurance companies also save money by serving a large customer base — the more people they cover, the lower the risk (and cost) for each person. In a statement, UnitedHealth says, "The $5 trillion US health system remains deeply fragmented and rooted in fee-for-service models that result in less-than-optimal patient outcomes, higher mortality rates, poor patient experience, redundant care, and waste. We're accelerating the transition from volume to value as it's essential that we move beyond a transaction-based health system to a model that is proactive, outcomes-driven and enables people stay healthy over the course of a lifetime."

But monopolization comes at a steep cost. When a market is controlled by just a few corporations, economists have found, companies can hold customers captive and offer shoddier products and services, simply because consumers don't have any meaningful options. Farmers who buy John Deere tractors, which controls most of the tractor market, aren't permitted to fix their own equipment because the company requires farmers to use its repair services. (The practice is being challenged by a class-action lawsuit and a suit by the Federal Trade Commission.) Apple customers, similarly, are unable to repair their own phones, pushing them to buy new products rather than fix their current models. And in 2015, a study by Yale economist Zach Cooper found that costs for patients in hospitals without competition were approximately $1,900 higher than hospitals with four or more competitors.

In recent years, we have entered a new era in which monopolistic companies "crank up prices, crank down quality, service, and wages, and consumers have nowhere else to turn," says Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah.

Americans are well aware of the problem. In a June Gallup poll of US adults, 41% of respondents said they had "very little" trust in "big business," making it the third-least-trusted institution in America, behind only TV news and Congress. In a survey conducted this past spring, four in five respondents in rural areas of swing states agreed that "corporate monopolies now run our entire economy." And in a recent poll of registered voters, 41% of respondents under 30 said the killing of United Healthcare's CEO was "acceptable" or "somewhat acceptable."

As shocking as that might be, we've been here before. At the end of the 19th century, as major trusts consolidated entire industries, Americans turned to violence. In 1877, in response to the railroads slashing wages, workers rose up in a massive general strike that left 100 people dead. In 1894, a railway strike against the Pullman Co. grew so heated that it sparked a pitched battle with the Illinois National Guard, which killed dozens of strikers. In 1920, a wagon full of explosives was parked on Wall Street to target the banker J.P. Morgan. The bombing killed more than 30 people and injured hundreds more.

The question is: Why did the anti-corporate violence subside? What happened to tamp down the open rebellion — and why do so many Americans once again seem willing to embrace violence as a response to monopolization?

Violence against monopolies dissipated for two reasons. The first was government regulation. The second was low prices.

After the stock market crash of 1929, the government began to crack down on big corporations, breaking up monopolies in oil, tobacco, and railroads. At the same time, the New Deal enabled labor unions to fight companies on a more equal footing, with unions winning higher wages and better health insurance. Taken together, those efforts helped create a large and prosperous middle class. For decades, things seemed to be going well for regular Americans.

Then, in the 1980s, the government shifted its philosophy toward antitrust enforcement. Rather than treating consolidation as an inherent evil, it adopted what became known as the "consumer welfare" standard. If companies kept their prices low, the thinking went, it didn't matter whether markets were cornered by a few corporations. No economic harm, no legal foul.

The new philosophy allowed consolidation to soar — without sparking consumer unrest.

As Walmart and Amazon began to dominate the economy, driving small shops out of business, Americans accepted the loss of local businesses and low wages in return for an abundance of cheap and convenient goods and services. Amazon might rule the world, but who cared? The prices were low, the deliveries were fast, and the returns were free.

But now, as prices have shot up and companies have begun to take advantage of their market dominance, more and more Americans are realizing that when companies get too big, regular people end up paying the price. And when the system feels unfair, civility itself begins to crumble — especially when citizens feel they have no meaningful recourse. A sense of powerlessness, as history has repeatedly shown, breeds violence.

Keeping things civil, in fact, was an explicit reason the government decided to rein in monopolies in the first place. Speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1890, Sen. John Sherman urged his fellow lawmakers, many of whom were beholden to the rail barons, to support the statute that became the foundation of the anti-monopoly movement: the Sherman Antitrust Act. Congress had to choose, Sherman said: Either heed the public's call to break up the monopolies or "be ready for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist." Today, with trust in big business deeply eroded and public satisfaction in the healthcare system at a 24-year low, America may find itself at a similar crossroads.

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein is a freelance journalist who writes for the New York Times, the New Republic, and many other publications. He is writing a book about the authoritarianism of the American workplace, publishing early 2026.

Google got some disappointing news at a status conference Tuesday, where US District Judge Amit Mehta suggested that Google's AI products may be restricted as an appropriate remedy following the government's win in the search monopoly trial.

According to Law360, Mehta said that "the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines" is rapidly shifting the search market. Because the judge is now weighing preventive measures to combat Google's anticompetitive behavior, the judge wants to hear much more about how each side views AI's role in Google's search empire during the remedies stage of litigation than he did during the search trial.

"AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase," Mehta said. "Is that because of the remedies being requested? Perhaps. But is it also potentially because the market that we have all been discussing has shifted?"

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Amazon Japan has said it will collaborate with Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) after the watchdog conducted an on-site inspection related to suspected violations of anti-monopoly laws. The e-commerce giant is under suspicion of inappropriately urging vendors to lower their prices on its online shopping platform in return for better product placement, as first reported […]

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.

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• The DOJ proposed banning Google from paying for search distribution deals.
• Google's search dominance relies on distribution, not just technology.
• Investors worry Google's market share could drop if distribution deals end.

The online search business is not about technology. It's about distribution.

The US Department of Justice made that clear Wednesday when it proposed fixes for a judge's earth-shaking ruling that Google is an illegal monopolist.

The DOJ's remedies cut to the heart of how Google distributes its search engine and how that broad reach is key to the company's dominance of this crucial and lucrative market.

The government's suggestion that Google be forced to sell Chrome initially grabbed the headlines. But, on Thursday, the potential crackdown on all distribution deals caught investors' attention.

The US government's lawyers said Google should be banned from offering "anything of value for any form" of search distribution. That especially includes Apple, but also covers any other partner or company, with limited exceptions, according to the DOJ's executive summary.

ISI Evercore internet analyst Mark Mahaney called this distribution crackdown "draconian" and said investors were surprised by the severity of the proposals. Google shares dropped 5% on Thursday.

The reason for this concern is that the online search business is not really about the quality of the technology. The edge comes from massive distribution and the huge volume of user queries that come with such a broad reach.

When people use Google to search on the web, the company monitors what results they click on. It feeds these responses back into its search engine, and the product gets constantly better. For instance, if most people click on the third result for a particular query, Google's search engine will likely adjust and rank that result higher in the future.

This self-reinforcing system is very hard to compete against. This is how the DOJ put it on Wednesday:

"Search engines rely on user data to improve search quality — an outcome that drives more users to a search engine. Users attract advertisers, and advertising dollars fund general search engines, creating a perpetual feedback loop that further entrenches Google."

One of the few ways to compete is to get more distribution than Google and pull in the extra queries and click-behavior data.

For many years, Google has paid to lock down most major sources of distribution. The most famous deal is with Apple. Google pays the iPhone maker about $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple's mobile devices.

If the search business was actually about the quality of Google's technology, why does it have to pay Apple $20 billion a year? That question is at the heart of the DOJ's case, and Google has never been able to answer it properly. Because it keeps paying Apple.

If Google search technology is so great, the company shouldn't have to pay for distribution. People would just flock to its search engine all by themselves.

We could soon see a real-world test of this.

If the judge in this case agrees with the DOJ, then these payments will end — not just with Apple, but with any other third-party source of online distribution for Google's search engine.

This may have freaked investors out on Thursday. They know that the search business is mainly about distribution, and Google may not be able to do this now.

In a worst-case scenario, Google could lose a material slice of the US search market, according to Mahaney.

"We believe Google's default search placements via contractual agreements represent 50%+ of Google's US search queries," he estimated on Thursday.

If half of Google's US search queries go away, that could threaten the self-reinforcing cycle of user click data improving its results.

Suddenly, Google Search may not be so uncatchable.

Google's top lawyer, Kent Walker, said the DOJ's proposals would "break" the company's search engine and "deliberately hobble people's ability to access" the service.

Google gets to propose its own remedies on December 20.

Welcome to Google's nightmare.

Late yesterday, the US Department of Justice filed its proposed final judgment, officially recommending a broad range of remedies to end Google's search monopoly.

Predictably, Google is not happy with the DOJ's plan, which requires the company to sell its Chrome browser. It also retains the option of forcing Google to divest Android if competition doesn't increase from behavioral remedies, including bans on exclusive default deals with other browsers and device makers. Additionally, Google is prohibited from building any new browsers and must fund an education campaign that shows people how to switch search engines and potentially even pays people to switch. Google may also be restricted from using its data scale advantage to benefit its AI products.

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Preferred by 61 percent of Internet users, Google's Chrome browser plays too big a role in maintaining the tech giant's search monopoly, the US Department of Justice has reportedly decided.

On Monday, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that top antitrust officials are planning to ask the court on Wednesday to order Google to sell off Chrome. In addition to banning Google's exclusive default deals, cutting off Google's control of the world's most popular browser may be necessary, sources suggested, to level the playing field for rivals.

Additionally, the DOJ intends to ask for a range of other remedies, Bloomberg reported, all of them discussed in a court filing last month. These include imposing data licensing requirements and requiring more transparency for advertisers on where their ads appear, as well as requiring "measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system," sources said. Those measures will likely stop Google from hoarding user data for both search results and AI products, with the DOJ seemingly paving the way for more users to opt their content out of AI training.

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