She Wants to Break Up Big Everything

“A lot of the values that I’d seen, I didn’t share with people in positions of power there,” she said.

Her political education began before the crisis, on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. After Mrs. Clinton dropped out of the race, Ms. Miller was hired by John Podesta, the Democratic power broker who was leading the Center for American Progress, one of Washington’s most influential progressive groups.

There, she met her eventual husband, Faiz Shakir, who was running the organization’s blog, ThinkProgress. Mr. Podesta officiated at their wedding. Mr. Shakir now manages the Democratic presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In 2015, Ms. Miller’s nighttime Google search, made after reading about corporate mergers, led her to the work of Barry Lynn.

A former reporter, Mr. Lynn had argued for years that corporate consolidation, urged on by conservative economic policies, was harming Americans — and that antitrust law was the solution. By 2015, he was running a program at New America, a progressive think tank. Ms. Miller got in touch with him.

She joined his team in 2017, as Mr. Lynn’s program was becoming independent and was renamed the Open Markets Institute. It now brings in millions of dollars in funding a year and has been credited for an outsize role in putting antitrust on the map.

The movement had already become adept at producing influential journalism and research, and had built some relationships with policymakers. Ms. Miller brought more muscle to the organization’s public campaigning, helping to lead an anti-Facebook coalition.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/technology/big-tech-antitrust.html?emc=rss&partner=rss