The 2021 Corporate Rap Sheet

After four years of Trump’s regulation bashing, the expectation was that the Biden Administration would adopt a much more aggressive posture toward corporate misconduct.

There have been some encouraging signals, such as those given by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in an October speech, but few blockbuster federal case resolutions have been announced during the past eleven months.

According to data my colleagues and I have collected for Violation Tracker, no individual company has paid a settlement or fine of $250 million or more to the Biden DOJ. In fact, there have been only two case resolutions of that size announced by any federal agency during this period.

In September, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a $539 million settlement with entities linked to Chinese businessman Guo Wengui relating to illegal sale of stock and digital assets. That same month, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Wells Fargo $250 million for ongoing risk management deficiencies.

By contrast, numerous mega-cases have been resolved by state attorneys general. Since last January, they have announced nine settlements of more than $250 million, including five worth $1 billion or more. Those are the giant cases against pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors for their role in the opioid crisis.

The largest case was the settlement worth an estimated $10 billion with the biggest opiate villain of all, Purdue Pharma, which is now in bankruptcy and will effectively go out of business. Many argue that the Sackler family got off too easy in the case, but the company is paying a substantial price for its misdeeds. The other ten-figure settlements of the year involved McKesson ($8 billion), AmeriSourceBergen ($6.5 billion), Cardinal Health (also $6.5 billion) and Johnson & Johnson ($5 billion). Also substantial was the $573 million settlement McKinsey reached with states over its role in advising opioid producers in improper marketing practices.

There were also significant state settlements on issues other than opioids. Duke Energy signed an $855 settlement with the North Carolina AG relating to coal ash pollution. Boston Scientific Corporation reached a $188 million settlement with a group of states to resolve allegations it engaged in deceptive marketing of a transvaginal surgical mesh device.

While the Biden DOJ has yet to roll out blockbuster cases, it did announce some substanial resolutions during the year. For example, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Cincinnati announced a $230 million settlement of criminal charges against utility company FirstEnergy for making improper payments to public officials to get them to pursue nuclear power legislation benefiting the company. Taro Pharmaceuticals agreed to pay $213 million to settle price-fixing charges. In a case that also involved UK and Swiss regulators, Credit Suisse paid $175 million to the DOJ to resolve criminal charges relating to a fraudulent project in Mozambique.

The year also saw the resolution of some major class action and multi-district lawsuits against large corporations. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear its appeal of a court verdict, Johnson & Johnson paid more than $2 billion in damages to a group of women who claimed they developed ovarian cancer from using the company’s talcum powder.

Hyundai Motor agreed to pay up to $1.3 billion to settle a consolidated class of claims that it and its subsidiary Kia sold vehicles with defective engines that could catch fire. Facebook paid $650 million to settle a class action over its harvesting of facial data.

Facebook was also at the center of a controversy that not yet been fully resolved by regulatory or court action. A former manager leaked a large collection of internal documents indicating that the company, which now calls itself Meta Platforms, was aware of the harmful effect its services were having on some users, especially younger ones, but did little about it. The revelations prompted widespread criticism among members of Congress but no significant legislation or litigation so far.

Another widely criticized corporation that has yet to face full consequences for its conduct is Amazon.com. The e-commerce behemoth has been reproached for the way it treats employees, the small merchants who make use of its platform, and the communities in which it operates. Yet it continues to expand at a rapid pace and has seen an enormous growth of profits during the pandemic.  

During the Facebook disclosures, there was growing speculation as to whether the big tech firms were now facing a situation similar to that of the tobacco companies, which were the subject of their own scandalous revelations and eventually had to pay out many billions of dollars in settlements and sharply curtail their marketing activities.

The key word there is “eventually.” The dangers of smoking were known for decades, yet the big cigarette companies adamantly denied the reality—the same way the fossil fuel companies have denied their role in climate change. We should not expect Meta, Amazon and the other tech giants to give in without a long and bitter fight.

Called to Account for Wage Theft

New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on job-hopping and on wage increases continue to illustrate a remarkable rise in worker assertiveness. The pandemic has finally allowed those who have been suffering for years from wage stagnation to turn the tables on employers. What business groups describe as a labor market crisis is in fact the beginning of liberation for the low-wage workforce.

These workers are reacting not only to inadequate compensation and oppressive schedules. They are also fed up with the additional indignity of being cheated out of the pay they are supposed to receive. The Great Resignation can also be seen in part as a response to the epidemic of wage theft that has afflicted the U.S. labor market.

This was brought home to me again in the course of updating the data in Violation Tracker. There continues to be a steady stream of announcements of cases involving the failure to provide proper overtime pay, the failure to provide required paid breaks and the numerous other ways employers take money out of the pockets of workers.

The cases we document come from either private litigation or regulatory actions. The larger settlements involve collective action lawsuits brought by plaintiff law firms on behalf of groups of workers. Here are some examples that were finalized in just the past few months:

  • Chipotle agreed to pay $15 million to resolve allegations that it denied overtime pay to management trainees.
  • Humana paid more than $11 million to settle allegations that it denied overtime to nurses by improperly classifying them as exempt employees.
  • T-Mobile agreed to pay $2 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging that it forced customer service representatives to do off-the-clock work.
  • The discount grocery chain Aldi paid $2 million to thousands of California employees who said they were cheated out of overtime pay.

Wage theft is, of course, also investigated by the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Labor Department. Many of the cases handled by WHD involve small firms, but it also takes on bigger employers and sometimes collects substantial amounts of back pay and penalties. Among the recent examples of these larger actions are the following:

In October, a federal court in Pittsburgh entered a consent judgment in which an oilfield services company admitted liability for more than $40 million in back wages and damages after a WHD investigation found Fair Labor Standards Act violations affecting 700 workers. The company, Holland Services, has filed for bankruptcy.

In November, a federal court in San Francisco ordered telemarketing firm Wellfleet Communications to pay more than $1.4 million in back wages and liquidated damages to more than 1,300 call center workers found by a WHD investigation to have been improperly classified as independent contractors.

There has also been an increasing focus on wage theft by state and local prosecutors. For example, the New York Attorney General, in partnership with the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, recently announced an agreement with two major home care health agencies to deliver up to $18.8 million in unpaid wages to approximately 12,000 workers who had been denied fair pay for years.

The San Francisco City Attorney announced a $5 million settlement with DoorDash to resolve allegations that it misclassified its delivery drivers as independent contractors to avoid providing required sick leave and that it improperly used tip income to cover their base pay.

Some businesses are paying a price in fines and settlements while others are now having to offer higher wages. One way or another, they are being called to account for years of labor exploitation.

Note: all these cases will be included in the Violation Tracker updated that will be posted later this month.

Populism Real and Ridiculous

Some analyses of Trumpism and Republican populism have claimed to detect a strain of anti-corporate sentiment. It is true that today’s right-wingers are willing to criticize big tech companies for supposedly treating them unfairly, but most of the times the GOP continues to serve the interests of big business.

That was clear during an important hearing just held by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law. Subcommittee chair David Cicilline, vice chair Pramila Jayapal, other Democratic members and the witnesses all raised serious questions about the current regulatory system, focusing on issues such as disclosure and social equity.

The Republicans, on the other hand, did their best to change the subject or spoke in favor of less rather than more oversight. Ranking member Ken Buck used his opening remarks to attack “executive overreach” and praise the Trump Administration’s wholesale attack on regulation.

Jim Jordan spent his time attacking what he claimed was a plan by the Justice Department to treat parents critical of school boards as domestic terrorists. One of the witnesses, NAACP climate justice director Jacqueline Patterson, was asked by Dan Bishop whether she was a revolutionary. She was also chastised for a facetious tweet about vaccines. The comments of GOP members on regulation were mainly limited to attacks on “woke bureaucrats.”

Despite these antics, there was a serious exchange between the Democrats and the witnesses on the failures of the current regulatory system. These issues are also addressed in the Stop Corporate Capture Act introduced by Rep. Jayapal. The legislation would create more transparency in rulemaking, reduce corporate influence over the process and create a framework for considering social equity. It would fine companies that lie about the impact of public interest rules. It would also create a Public Advocate to provide for more robust public participation.

It turns the usual discussion on its head. Rejecting the idea of executive overreach, the bill correctly diagnoses the problem as a situation of what one might called regulatory anemia. Agencies are not aggressive enough in tackling serious problems relating to the environment, the workplace and the marketplace. The parties meant to be targeted instead are playing an outsized role in creating the rules. Hence the reference in the bill’s title to regulatory capture.

Jayapal’s proposal is what one might call a populist approach to reforming the regulatory system—one that is not likely to receive support from corporate lobbyists. When they are not simply kicking up dust, Republicans, by contrast, are doing the bidding of big business by continuing the Trump Administration’s drumbeat against regulation.

This is one of those areas in which the conventional labels of U.S. politics continue to baffle me. Why are those working to benefit giant corporations called populist, while those who are seeking to rein in that power called elitist?

Price Gouging

Many of the increasingly clamorous inflation hawks are convinced that the main culprits behind the recent rise in prices are Congressional Democrats and the Biden Administration. Other observers point to supply chain problems or escalating wage demands. Yet there has been surprisingly little focus on the parties responsible for actually setting most of the prices: large corporations.

That’s why it was refreshing to see a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal the other day that provided a more honest account of what is happening. Its headline was: “Inflation Helps Boost Profit Margins: Companies Seize Rare Opportunity to Increase Prices and Outrun their Own Rising Costs.”

The second part of that is the most significant: corporations are raising prices not only to cover their rising costs but well beyond. In other words, they are exploiting a crisis situation to fatten their bottom lines. There is a term for this: price gouging.

Companies such as high-end mattress producer Sleep Number and heating/cooling equipment manufacturer Carrier Corp., the Journal noted, have each pushed through three major price increases this year. As a result, corporate profits are booming. The Journal article cited figures showing that many large companies are reporting margins at least 50 percent above 2019 levels.

It was appropriate for the Biden Administration to call on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether illegal conduct by petroleum companies is responsible for the spike in gasoline prices. Other sectors should also be scrutinized.

Given the high level of concentration in many industries, it is likely that anti-competitive practices may be at play. Sometimes this can verge into explicitly criminal behavior. Earlier this year, for example, poultry processor Pilgrim’s Pride pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay $107 million in criminal fines for its participation in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products.

Around the same time, Argos USA had to pay $20 million to resolve criminal allegations that it participated in a conspiracy to fix prices, rig bids, and allocate markets for sales of ready-mix concrete in the Southern District of Georgia and elsewhere.

Those who have studied economics will probably recall this comment by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” These days, the contrivance probably occurs in emails or Zoom calls, but the result is the same.

A key component of the effort to bring inflation under control is to prevent corporations from exploiting the country’s transition from the pandemic in a way that harms the rest of us.

Biden’s DOJ Announces Crackdown on Corporate Recidivists

For years, rogue corporations have in effect gotten away with murder through a system that allows them to avoid prosecution for serious offenses by promising to change their ways and paying affordable financial penalties.

These arrangements, widely used by the Justice Department, are known as deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements but they are really nothing more than leniency practices. Their supporters claim that the threat of actual prosecution in the future is sufficient to get companies to clean up their act. They also point out that the agreements have provisions requiring such changes.

Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of companies that have violated the terms of their deferred or non-prosecution agreements with apparent impunity. The Biden Justice Department is vowing to change that. Last month, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco gave a speech in which she said DOJ is tightening its procedures on leniency agreements, especially for companies with “a documented history of repeated corporate wrongdoing.” She indicated that DOJ will look not only at the offense related to the agreement but the full range of misconduct.

To assist DOJ in its efforts, Public Citizen has just published a report highlighting 20 large companies with deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements that have histories of wrongdoing documented in Violation Tracker.

Some of these rap sheets have continued after the company entered into its leniency agreement. For example, after signing an agreement in 2020, Wells Fargo was fined $250 million by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for unsound banking practices.  After signing an agreement in 2019, Merrill Lynch (owned by Bank of America) was fined several times by the Congressionally authorized industry regulator FINRA, including an $11.65 million penalty this year for overcharging customers.

After signing an agreement in 2019, Walmart has been involved in numerous violations, including a case in which it paid $20 million to the EEOC to resolve allegations of gender discrimination.

The list could go on. There are abundant examples proving that deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreement have done little to deter corporate misconduct and that recidivism has continued to run rampant.

It is encouraging to hear the Biden Justice Department talk tough about corporate crime after years in which large corporations have enjoyed exceedingly light-handed treatment from federal prosecutors. It is especially heartening to learn that DOJ will look at the entire track record of corporations in making prosecutorial decisions. I hope that Violation Tracker will help them in their deliberations.

Culpable 26

COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference now taking place in Glasgow, is primarily a gathering of governments. The idea is that political leaders from around the world can come together to make commitments that will address one of the most pressing problems confronting the human race.

The ability of nations to make substantial progress is, however, increasingly in question. European countries are reported to be worried that measures resulting in higher energy prices could prompt a populist backlash like the Yellow Vest movement in France. The ability of the U.S. Congress to enact significant climate legislation remains uncertain.

Moreover, the parties which are most responsible for the climate crisis are not governments or the people they represent, but rather the giant corporations whose operations and products account for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps we should spend more time talking about the Culpable 26, or whatever number of major polluters we deem to be most worthy of castigation.

Identifying the worst climate culprits is complicated by the fact that many of them are claiming to be part of the solution rather than the problem. They tout their efforts to reduce emissions and many even claim to be moving toward net-zero.

There are several problems with these claims. The first is the “net” part. Many companies will end up focusing more on carbon offsets than reducing their emissions substantially.

The second is that the target dates they are setting are well into the future. The Net Zero Tracker lists about 575 large publicly traded corporations as having commitments to net zero or related goals. Of those, more than half set their target date at 2050 or later. They are giving themselves three decades to respond substantively to what amounts to a global emergency.

The third problem is that progress toward these goals will likely be measured by the corporations themselves. Self-reporting is pervasive in the world of corporate social responsibility and ESG, putting into question the entire enterprise.

After all, many of the companies vowing to meet climate goals have abysmal track records when it comes to regulatory compliance. Take the example of Royal Dutch Shell, the largest industrial company with a net zero commitment (by 2050).

As shown in Violation Tracker, Shell has racked up more than $875 million in environmental penalties from federal, state and local regulators in the United States alone. That shows the extent to which the company and its subsidiaries have run roughshod over pollution regulations.

Shell’s Violation Tracker page also shows hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for other offenses such as accounting fraud (overstating its petroleum reserves) and false claims (underpaying royalties on oil produced under federal leases). In other words, Shell has a history not only of environmental misconduct but also of deceiving shareholders and the federal government.

Shell is far from unique in this regard. Many companies have a track record of deception. Self-reporting is not a reliable basis to determine whether big business is really reducing its damage to the climate.

Violation Tracker UK has Arrived

The United Kingdom, which holds the presidency of this year’s United Nations climate conference, made the wise decision to bar fossil fuel companies from being corporate sponsors of the event. This is not to say, however, that the UK is generally tough on industries that harm the environment.

That’s one of the findings from the data collected in Violation Tracker UK, a database of business misconduct my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First have just launched. We assembled 63,000 cases dating back to 2010 from more than 40 regulatory agencies. Among those are the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.

Altogether, we identified nearly 6,000 cases in which a company was found to have committed an environmental offense. Yet in more than half of these, the culprits were not required to pay any sort of monetary penalty and instead were let off with a caution.

Among those environmental cases with a fine or settlement, the aggregate penalties were just £312 million. The penalties exceeded £1 million in just a dozen cases; in only 135 instances were they above £100,000. Many of the larger environmental penalties involved privatized water companies, which should be fined even more heavily, given the frequency with which they break the rules.

These numbers stand in stark contrast to the totals for competition-related offenses and financial offenses. There are fewer cases in those categories—a total of about 2,200—but the penalties have been substantially higher, totaling £5.2 billion for competition cases and £2.8 billion for financial ones. In those categories combined there have been 285 penalties of £1 million or more, and 716 above £100,000.

The UK’s use of monetary penalties also lags when it comes to safety-related offenses, including workplace safety as well as product, healthcare and transportation safety. This category accounts for just £413 million in penalties. The aggregate fines and settlements for environmental and safety offenses combined is only one-tenth that of competition and financial offenses. The other categories covered by Violation Tracker UK—employment-related offenses and consumer protection cases—fall in between.

Like the U.S. Violation Tracker on which it is modeled, Violation Tracker UK identifies which of the entities named in the individual cases are linked to larger parent companies. The UK parent universe numbers more than 650, both publicly traded and privately held. The parents are headquartered in more than 30 countries. After the UK, parents based in the United States account for the largest number of cases and the highest penalty total.

As in the United States, the list of companies with the highest penalty totals in Violation Tracker UK contains numerous big banks, both domestic and foreign. Three of those banks are the only corporations to appear among the ten most penalized companies on both trackers: JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and UBS. Other types of large, publicly traded corporations also feature prominently in the UK rankings. Companies in the FTSE 100 account for more than one-quarter of the Violation Tracker UK monetary penalty total.

Big business does not behave any better in Britain than it does in the United States.

Fronting for Rogue Corporations

Only days before the world gathers in Glasgow to discuss the climate crisis, Greenpeace has leaked a trove of documents suggesting that some countries are coming to that gathering with sinister motives. According to the environmental group, several leading coal, oil, beef and animal feed-producing nations are trying to water down the International Panel on Climate Change’s findings to protect their domestic industries.

Among the countries said to be involved are Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil. It seems clear these efforts reflect not only the inclinations of their political leaders but also the interests of major corporations headquartered in those nations.

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the home to the Saudi Aramco—one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers and thus one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Australia is the home to mining companies such as BHP Group, the world’s largest producer of coal. Brazil is the headquarters of meat-producing giant JBS.

Along with their outsized role in CO2 emissions, these companies damage the environment in other ways and have run afoul of regulatory requirements. Take the case of Saudi Aramco. As documented in Violation Tracker, its U.S. subsidiary Motiva Enterprises has racked up more than $170 million in penalties over the past two decades for violations of the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. In addition to cases brought by the EPA, Motiva has been the target of lawsuits and enforcement actions by attorneys general and environmental regulatory agencies in states such as Texas and Louisiana.

In its U.S. operations, BHP has been cited for violations both by the EPA and by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the federal agency that oversees offshore oil and gas drilling. It has also paid fines to environmental agencies in Louisiana and Arkansas.

JBS, which has taken over several major beef and poultry producers in the United States, has been cited 59 times for environmental violations, paying a total of $5.6 million in penalties. Earlier this year, its Pilgrim’s Pride poultry subsidiary pleaded guilty and was been sentenced to pay approximately $107 million in criminal fines for its participation in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products.

JBS will also show up in Violation Tracker UK, which will be launched next week. Its Moy Park Limited subsidiary has been fined over £1.2 million since 2010, most of which came from workplace safety violations but also included £82,000 in nine environmental cases.

These examples suggest that the behind-the-scenes efforts of Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil are not just a matter of differences in climate policy. By resisting stronger controls on greenhouse gas emissions, these countries are serving the interests of corporations that repeatedly violate environmental regulations and other laws that serve the public good.

Note: Violation Tracker UK will go public on October 26. It will contain information on more than 60,000 cases brought by over 40 UK regulators such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. The database aggregates cases linked to more than 650 parent corporations based in the UK and over 30 other countries.

Trans-Atlantic Corporate Misconduct

It seems likely there is more corporate crime and misconduct in the United States than in any other country on earth. After all, Violation Tracker now documents 496,000 cases over the past two decades with total penalties of more than $724 billion. That’s a tough amount to beat, especially if you put aside kleptocracies such as Russia and look only at larger market economies with functional regulatory systems.

We will soon be able to make better comparisons between the U.S. and one of those economies—that of the United Kingdom. On October 26 the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First will release Violation Tracker UK. Like its U.S. namesake, VT UK will provide easy access to regulatory records covering a wide range of issues, including employment practices, environmental compliance, consumer protection, financial conduct and much more.

My colleagues and I are still finalizing the data, so I will not provide any actual penalty totals here. Yet there is one finding I can confidently share now: many of the same large corporations that feature prominently in the U.S. Violation Tracker will do so in the UK data as well. More than half of the 100 most penalized UK parents have also paid fines and settlements in the U.S.

The overlap between the penalty “leaders” in the two countries is concentrated in the financial services sector. I’ve noted numerous times that large UK banks such as NatWest (formerly Royal Bank of Scotland), HSBC and Barclays have behaved badly in the U.S. and have paid out billions of dollars in penalties for offenses such as interest-rate manipulation and violations of international economic sanctions.

It will come as no surprise that these same banks have been cited for some of the same sins at home. In fact, some of the U.S. cases resulted from investigations carried out in cooperation with UK regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority and the Serious Fraud Office.

At the same time, giant U.S. banks have gotten into trouble in the United Kingdom. The VT UK list of most penalized corporations will include the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Banks headquartered in countries such as Switzerland and Germany also show up with large penalty totals in the UK as well as the U.S. Among these are UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Other portions of the financial services sector also engage in misconduct on both sides of the Atlantic. These include the accounting and auditing giants such as KPMG and Deloitte, which have gotten into trouble not only with the SEC and the Justice Department but also with Britain’s Financial Reporting Council.

Not all of the culprits that will appear in VT UK are multinational players. The database will include many homegrown offenders with little or no overseas presence. You will be able to check out the track records of offenders large and small when VT UK launches on October 26.

Corruption Galore

For those convinced of the depravity of large corporations and the super-wealthy, recent days have provided an abundance of vindication. Thanks to the whistleblower at Facebook and an anonymous leaker of a vast collection of confidential financial documents dubbed the Pandora Papers, we have amazing new evidence of corruption and anti-social behavior.

Frances Haugen’s release of internal research paints a picture of Facebook as prioritizing profits ahead of taking steps to address evidence that its algorithms promote social animosity and that its products such as Instagram exacerbate mental health problems among teenage users.

The financial documents revealed in the Pandora Papers depict numerous billionaires and government leaders around the world as brazen tax cheats who are accumulating immense amounts of illegal assets in the form of high-end real estate, yachts and secret bank accounts.

Of course, none of this comes as a surprise. In fact, this is not the first large-scale leak of private financial records showing misappropriation, money laundering and tax evasion among the global elite. We already knew that Facebook is basically unconcerned about the damage caused by its services.

As is always the case after major revelations like these, the main question is whether policymakers will do anything to address the problems. The odds that the Pandora Papers will prompt Congress to act are reduced somewhat by the fact that the disclosures do not include much about members of the U.S. elite. Major controversies have erupted in countries such as Jordan, Kenya and the Czech Republic, whose leaders are among those implicated in the documents. U.S. individuals consist mainly of lesser-known billionaires and art dealers.

Perhaps the most salient U.S. angle in the Pandora Papers is the increasingly important role played by states such as South Dakota as tax havens for elites seeking to shield illicit assets. To some extent this is an issue for state legislatures, though a bill has been introduced in Congress that would require trust companies and others to screen foreign clients seeking to move assets through the U.S. financial system.

There may be more policy momentum when it comes to Facebook. It and the other tech giants have been receiving criticism, for varying reasons, from members of Congress across the political spectrum. Along with the issues raised by the whistleblower, there are increasing concerns about the concentration of ownership within the tech sector. Among other things, Facebook is the subject of a new antitrust complaint by the Federal Trade Commission.

An article in the Washington Post quotes lawmakers suggesting that this may be tech’s “Big Tobacco moment,” a reference to the time in the late 1990s when the major cigarette manufacturers lost their stranglehold over public policy and ended up having to accept stronger federal regulation and paying out tens of billions of dollars in class action settlements.

It is good to hear that legislators are thinking in those terms, but they will have to turn up the heat much higher on Facebook, which so far is not admitting any culpability and whose CEO is too young to remember much about the 1990s.