Attorney general, lawmakers announce agenda to address corporate consolidation

Minnesota could more easily rein in corporate power if lawmakers pass a series of reforms to the state’s antitrust laws, Attorney General Keith Ellison said Monday. 

Ellison and some Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmakers are advocating for policies that would grant the attorney general’s office more leeway to punish large corporations that use their market share to artificially drive up prices.

At a press conference Monday, Ellison said the bills are intended to increase competition in all sectors of the state’s economy.

“You can hear all these claims of prosperity, and things are getting better, and the Dow Jones was doing this or that…but people are still struggling in this economy,” Ellison said. “Much of it is because over the last 40 years we have seen a massive concentration in nearly every industry.”

One bill (HF398/SF1069) would update the Minnesota Antitrust Law of 1971 to include definitions of monopoly and monopsony power. Those terms were not defined in the original statute, so the attorney general’s office has relied on judges’ interpretation of the concepts — and that created uncertainty in the legal landscape, Ellison said.

(Monopoly refers to a company attaining such a massive market share that it can control prices or push out competition; monopsony is when a company is the only major buyer in a market, allowing it to force suppliers or workers to agree to unsustainable terms.) 

The act would also raise the maximum penalties for violating Minnesota antitrust laws, set in 1971 at $50,000 per violation for an individual or corporation. Under the proposed bill, individuals could be fined a maximum of $100,000 per violation and corporations could be fined up to $1 million per violation.

Ellison and legislative allies are calling it a campaign to “unrig Minnesota’s economy.” It also includes medical debt reform (HF4100/SF4065) and outlawing “junk fees” — charges tacked on to the end of a transaction, like service fees added to a ticket purchase at checkout.

Those fees prevent consumers from making informed decisions based on the listed price of a product, said Rep. Emma Greenman, DFL-Minneapolis, one of the authors of the bill (HF3438/SF3537).

Greenman said the authors are working on an amendment to the bill that would make an exception for restaurants that add mandatory service charges to checks instead of a tip line — as long as those charges are disclosed up front, Greenman said.

Lawmakers also plan to introduce a right-to-repair bill for agricultural equipment, which was excluded from the Digital Fair Repair Act passed last year. Right-to-repair bills require companies to give consumers the opportunity to fix their own devices.