Matt Stoller is a journalist, researcher, and anti-monopoly advocate whose newsletter BIG (published via Substack) has become one of the most widely-read accounts of how monopoly power operates in the American economy. He is a researcher at the American Economic Liberties Project and previously worked at the Open Markets Institute, the think tank founded by Barry Lynn that incubated much of the neo-Brandeisian antitrust revival.
BIG newsletter and anti-monopoly journalism
BIG covers corporate power, antitrust enforcement, supply chains, and the political economy of monopoly with a combination of historical analysis and current reporting. Stoller's approach is distinctive for treating monopoly not as an economic abstraction but as a form of political power — a tradition that runs from Louis Brandeis through New Deal antitrust enforcers and forward. His 2019 book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy traces this history in detail, arguing that the post-1970s abandonment of structural antitrust was a deliberate political choice with identifiable causes and consequences.
This historical and political framing of monopoly is closely aligned with the arguments in chokepoint-capitalism-book and the-internet-con. Doctorow's claim that enshittification is not a technical bug but a structural consequence of concentrated platform power parallels Stoller's argument in Goliath that monopoly is not an efficiency outcome but a power outcome.
Relationship to Doctorow's project
Stoller and Doctorow operate in the same anti-monopoly coalition — the overlapping network of journalists, lawyers, scholars, and advocates who drove the Biden administration's antitrust revival alongside figures like lina-khan and zephyr-teachout. They cover adjacent terrain and reach overlapping audiences: Stoller's BIG newsletter subscribers and Doctorow's pluralistic-blog readers are largely the same information-economy-aware policy audience.
There is mutual amplification between them: Stoller has covered tech platform monopoly issues that Doctorow develops in fiction and long-form argument; Doctorow has pointed readers toward Stoller's antitrust reporting as background for the arguments in the-internet-con and chokepoint-capitalism-book. Neither is primarily an academic — both write for general audiences in accessible but rigorous registers.
Supply chain and financialization analysis
Stoller's most distinctive contribution beyond tech antitrust is his analysis of supply chain monopolization and financialization — private equity, roll-up strategies, and how monopoly concentrates in sectors like healthcare, media, and logistics. This extends the chokepoint-capitalism analysis beyond tech platforms to the broader economy, showing that the same dynamics of chokehold extraction operate in nursing homes, newspapers, and concert venues as in Spotify or Amazon. Doctorow and rebecca-giblin drew on this extended analysis in their treatment of the live music and news industries in chokepoint-capitalism-book.