Whoo! Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Ronald Reagan — the libertarian dance that rewired the economy.

What's happening to independent publishers didn't start with Google. It didn't start with algorithms or AI or any particular piece of technology. It started in the 1980s when two deliberate policy changes rewired how American corporations operate. One killed the rules that kept monopolies from forming. The other changed how executives get paid. Together, they turned extraction into the most profitable corporate strategy in nearly every industry. Understanding this explains why airlines, banks, food companies, and tech platforms all consolidated the same way—and why forty years of both parties did nothing to stop it.

In This Article

• Why platform monopolies destroying publishers is just one symptom of systemic redesign
• How American corporations functioned differently before Reagan-era changes
• What happened when antitrust enforcement collapsed in the 1980s
• Why shifting executive pay to stock options broke corporate decision-making
• How the 1982 legalization of stock buybacks accelerated everything
• Why these three changes together created incentives for ecosystem destruction
• How the same consolidation pattern appears across airlines, media, banking, food, and tech
• Why platform monopolies are the logical endpoint of extractive capitalism
• Why both Democrats and Republicans maintained this system for four decades
• What would actually have to change to reverse these incentives
• Why understanding this history explains everything happening to independent media

In Part 1, we showed how Google and AI extraction are killing independent publishers. Traffic collapses. Revenue evaporates. Thirty years of work becomes raw material for systems that don't send readers back. That's what's happening. This is why it was allowed to happen.

Because the destruction of independent publishing isn't a tech problem. It's not even primarily a Google problem. Google is just the most visible expression of something that broke across the entire economy starting in the 1980s. Airlines consolidated from dozens of carriers to four. Media ownership went from fifty companies to six. Banking collapsed from dozens of institutions to four giants controlling half the assets. Food processing, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications—pick an industry, find the same pattern.

Different products. Different markets. Identical playbook.

Two specific policies from the Reagan era rewired corporate incentives: the first gutted antitrust enforcement, and the second changed executive pay structures, making monopoly formation more profitable and systemic.

This isn't just history; these policies still shape our economy today, highlighting the need for policy and governance reforms that matter to the audience's understanding of systemic causes.

The machine produces what it's designed to deliver.

How Corporations Used to Work

Before the 1980s, American antitrust law operated under the principle of "harmful dominance." The idea was straightforward: when companies get too big, they gain power to hurt workers, suppliers, communities, and the political process itself. Unaccountable concentrated power is dangerous. So the government kept companies smaller than the democratically accountable state.

This wasn't socialism. It was managed capitalism. Companies competed, made profits, and grew their businesses. They just couldn't grow so large that they could capture their regulators and write their own rules.

Antitrust enforcement was active and routine, demonstrating that market regulation can work when prioritized, encouraging the audience to believe reform is possible.

Executives during this period were paid primarily in salary. Some received bonuses tied to company performance, but the bulk of their compensation came in the form of straightforward wages. This created a simple incentive: build a company that lasts. Your job security and reputation depended on the long-term health of the business. Short-term stock manipulation didn't help you much because you weren't getting paid in stock.

Companies reinvested profits in workers, research, infrastructure, and long-term stability, not out of altruism—out of rational self-interest. Executives who built sustainable businesses kept their jobs and got raises. Executives who destroyed their companies to juice quarterly numbers got fired.

Stock buybacks were illegal. Considered market manipulation. If a company bought its own stock to inflate the price, it faced civil and criminal penalties. The Securities and Exchange Commission treated this as fraud because that's what it was—using corporate resources to artificially pump stock prices.

That was the landscape. Not perfect, not utopian, but functional. Companies competed, some won, some lost. Still, the system prevented any single player from gaining enough power to strangle competition entirely. Call it what you want. It worked for decades.

The Antitrust Collapse

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 with an explicit goal: to eliminate or reduce government regulation across the board. Antitrust enforcement was high on the target list. The intellectual framework came from the Chicago School of economics, particularly Robert Bork's book "The Antitrust Paradox."

Bork argued that antitrust law had been misunderstood from the beginning. The real purpose, he claimed, wasn't to prevent concentrated power or protect competition. It was solely to benefit consumers through lower prices. If monopolies didn't raise prices, they were fine. Let them form. Let them dominate. As long as consumer prices stayed low, no harm, no foul.

This redefinition was radical. It threw out seventy years of enforcement philosophy. "Harmful dominance" became irrelevant. Worker harm? Irrelevant. Supplier harm? Irrelevant. Community harm? Irrelevant. Political capture? Irrelevant. The only question was: did prices go up?

The Reagan Justice Department adopted this framework wholesale. Between 2008 and 2017, the DOJ filed precisely one Section 2 Sherman Act antitrust lawsuit. One. Down from sixty-two in the 1970s. Merger approval rates rose from roughly 70% in the early 1980s to 90% by the 2000s.

Industries that would have faced immediate antitrust challenges in 1975 sailed through approval in 1985. The AT&T breakup in 1982 was the last gasp of the old enforcement regime. After that, consolidation became a standard business strategy. Buy competitors. Merge with rivals. Grow until you dominate the market. The government wouldn't stop you.

This wasn't a bug. It was the explicit policy goal. As the 1982 Merger Guidelines stated: "In the overwhelming majority of cases, the Guidelines will allow firms to achieve available efficiencies through mergers without interference from the Department."

Translation: merge away. We're not watching anymore.

The Executive Pay Revolution

Around the same time, corporate boards began shifting executive compensation away from salary toward stock options and equity grants. The theory sounded reasonable: align executive interests with shareholder interests. Pay them in stock, they'll care about stock performance.

What actually happened was more predictable. When your compensation depends on stock price, you optimize for stock price. Quarterly earnings become everything. Long-term investments that don't boost this quarter's numbers become liabilities. Workers, research, infrastructure—anything that costs money without immediate returns gets cut.

Executives stopped being stewards of businesses and became financial engineers. The question shifted from "how do we build a sustainable company" to "how do we pump the stock price before my options vest?"

This might have stayed somewhat contained except for what happened in 1982. The SEC, under Reagan appointee John Shad, passed Rule 10b-18. This rule created a safe harbor for stock buybacks. What had been illegal market manipulation became a legal corporate strategy as long as companies followed specific volume and timing restrictions.

Suddenly, executives had a tool. Instead of investing profits in growth, they could buy back company stock. This reduced shares outstanding, which boosted earnings per share—a metric often tied to executive bonuses. The stock price went up. Executives got richer. The company didn't actually improve. It just got smaller while the executives cashed out.

In 2021, corporate stock buybacks totaled nearly $1 trillion. In 2022, they exceeded 1.25 trillion. Money that used to go into wages, research, and capital investment now goes into inflating stock prices so executives can meet compensation targets.

This isn't abstract. When a company announces a stock buyback, executives sell an average of $500,000 worth of their own shares in the days immediately following the announcement. The stock price bumps up about 2.5 percent. Executives time their sales to capture that bump. It's legal insider trading with a corporate stamp of approval.

The incentive is clear: maximize stock price, cash out, move on. What happens to the company after you're gone isn't your problem. You got paid.

The Fatal Combination

Here's what happens when you combine these changes. No antitrust enforcement means monopolies can form. Stock-based executive pay means short-term thinking. Buybacks mean instant stock inflation without business growth.

Put them together, and you get a system where the most profitable strategy is: consolidate your industry, eliminate competitors, extract maximum value, use the profits to buy back stock, boost your compensation, and cash out before the damage becomes visible.

Workers become disposable because cutting payroll boosts quarterly earnings. Research becomes optional because it costs money now and might not pay off before you vest. Communities become irrelevant because you don't live there anyway. Publishers become raw material because training your AI on their content costs nothing, and replacing their traffic with your own answers keeps users on your platform.

This explains things that otherwise seem irrational. Why would Google kill the publishers it depends on for content? Because executives don't rely on publishers in the long term. They depend on this quarter's stock price. Training AI on publisher content is free. Replacing publisher traffic with AI Overviews boosts engagement metrics. Engagement metrics boost stock price. Stock price boosts executive compensation.

Five years from now, when there's no quality content left to train on, those executives will be long gone. They got paid. That's what mattered.

The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed. The design just produces outcomes most people wouldn't choose if they understood the mechanism.

The Same Story, Industry After Industry

Airlines used to number in the dozens. Deregulation in 1978, along with the Reagan-era antitrust crackdown, led to consolidation. Today, four carriers control over eighty percent of domestic flights. They don't compete on price anymore. They don't have to.

Media ownership in 1983: 50 companies controlled 90% of American media. Today: six companies. Same consolidation playbook. Buy competitors. Merge operations. Cut costs. Boost stock price.

Banking in 1990: thirty-seven major banks. Today, four banks control half the assets. The "too big to fail" problem isn't an accident. It's the inevitable result of letting banks merge without restraint while paying executives to maximize stock price.

Food and agriculture: four companies control eighty-five percent of beef processing. Four companies dominate grain trading. Monsanto became Bayer. Dow merged with DuPont. ChemChina bought Syngenta. Farmers face monopoly buyers and monopoly suppliers. The food system became an extraction mechanism.

Pharmaceuticals: dozens of companies in the 1980s. Ten companies control seventy percent of the market today. Drug prices exploded not because of innovation but because consolidated companies face no competitive pressure.

AT&T was broken up in 1982. Reassembled by 2010. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. The Baby Bells grew back up and merged with each other. Circle complete.

Tech is just the latest and most visible iteration. Google didn't invent platform monopolies. It's following the playbook that worked in every other sector. Control the infrastructure. Eliminate competitors. Extract maximum value. The difference is that tech platforms control information itself, which makes the extraction more obvious and the damage harder to ignore.

But the pattern is identical. Different industries, same incentive structure, same outcomes.

Why Nothing Changed for Forty Years

Bill Clinton talked populist. His Justice Department under Anne Bingaman promised renewed antitrust enforcement. What actually happened? Bingaman studied under William Baxter, Reagan's antitrust chief. She called his legacy "monumental" and kept his merger guidelines in place. The enforcement philosophy didn't change.

Barack Obama saw some uptick in antitrust activity, but no fundamental reversal. Bill Baer, who ran enforcement at FTC and DOJ under Obama, said plainly in 2017: "There was not a fundamental change in enforcement philosophy."

Both parties adopted shareholder primacy as gospel. Maximizing shareholder value became the only legitimate corporate purpose. Workers, communities, long-term sustainability—all secondary to quarterly stock performance. This wasn't contested. It was a consensus.

Corporate political funding reinforced the consensus. When both parties depend on corporate donations, neither effectively challenges corporate power. Regulatory agencies get staffed with people from the industries they're supposed to regulate. They approve mergers, join corporate boards, and approve more mergers. The revolving door spins.

Complexity provides camouflage. Most people don't understand the connection between SEC Rule 10b-18, executive compensation structures, and the collapse of their local newspaper. The mechanisms are deliberately obscure. By the time you trace the chain from policy to outcome, people's eyes glaze over.

So the system persists. Not because it's good. Not because it's inevitable. Because the people with the power to change it benefit from keeping it the same, and the people harmed by it don't realize what's happening until it's too late.

Why This Explains Everything

The collapse of independent publishing makes sense now. Google's behavior isn't mysterious or irrational. It's following the incentives the system created. Executives get rewarded for maximizing engagement and stock price. Training AI on publisher content is free. Replacing publisher traffic with AI Overviews keeps users on Google properties. Users on Google properties generate more ad revenue. More ad revenue boosts the stock price. Stock price determines executive compensation.

Publishers die. Executives get rich. The system works as designed.

Platform monopolies aren't a tech problem. They're the endpoint of forty years of policy that removed barriers to monopoly formation while creating incentives for short-term extraction. Tech just happens to be where that dynamic reached its logical conclusion—companies that control infrastructure, gatekeep access, and now synthesize information without compensating creators.

The Reagan-era policy changes didn't predict AI or search engines. They didn't need to. They created conditions where any company that could consolidate power and extract value would do precisely that. Tech companies did it most effectively because they control information itself.

But airlines did it. Banks did it. Food companies did it. Media conglomerates did it. The playbook is universal because the incentives are universal. Until those incentives change, the outcomes won't change, no matter how many times we rearrange the deck chairs.

We didn't lose the internet to technology. We lost it to a set of policy choices made in the 1980s that rewired corporate incentives away from building and toward extracting. Those choices can be unmade. Whether anyone will actually do it is a different question.

But at least now you know why things are the way they are. Not because of algorithms, innovation, or market forces. Because someone built a machine designed to concentrate power and extract value. The machine is working perfectly. The question is whether we want to keep running it.

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf.com with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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Article Recap

Reagan deregulation gutted antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, replacing "harmful dominance" enforcement with Chicago School economics focused only on consumer prices. Simultaneously, executive compensation shifted from salary to stock options, rewarding short-term stock performance over long-term sustainability. SEC Rule 10b-18 in 1982 legalized stock buybacks, allowing companies to artificially inflate stock prices. Together, these created perverse incentives: monopoly formation became legal, extraction beat stewardship, and quarterly earnings replaced sustainable business building. The pattern repeated across airlines, media, banking, food, pharmaceuticals, and technology. Platform monopolies are the apex expression of extractive capitalism, not unique pathology. Both parties maintained Reagan's framework for forty years through regulatory capture and political funding dependence. Google's destruction of publishers follows system incentives perfectly. Understanding these structural changes explains independent publishing collapse and reveals that reversing outcomes requires reversing incentives. The machine produces what it's designed to produce.

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