The Theory
The Anti-Federalists feared a distant government that could tax without limit, regulate without check, and govern at a remove from the ordinary citizens whose consent it was supposed to require. They built their entire critique around the structural argument that concentrated power, regardless of how it was formally constituted, would serve the interests closest to it rather than the citizens most subject to it.
They were writing about government because in 1787 no private institution existed at the scale that could pose an equivalent structural threat. The largest private enterprises of the founding era, merchant houses, shipping companies, early manufacturers, were significant but bounded. Their power over individuals was real but escapable: if one merchant’s terms were unfavorable, another merchant existed. Competition constrained private power in ways that competition could not constrain government power.
The theory advanced here: that constraint has eroded. In specific domains, media, digital information infrastructure, employment in consolidated industries, access to financial services, private concentration has reached the point where the structural condition the Anti-Federalists feared (power exercised over citizens who have no practical exit) exists in private form. The same argument applies, the same structural harm follows, and the constitutional protections designed to check government power do not reach it.
If the theory is correct, we should observe: private institutions exercising power over speech, employment, financial access, and information that rivals or exceeds government power in its daily effect on citizens’ lives, without the First Amendment, due process, or democratic accountability constraints that apply to government. We should observe the absence of competitive alternatives that would discipline that power through market mechanisms. And we should observe the consequences falling most heavily on people with the fewest resources to exit.
The Mechanism
The mechanism is consolidation eliminating exit.
In competitive markets, private power is constrained by the ability of consumers, employees, and citizens to choose alternatives. An employer who imposes politically objectionable conditions will lose employees to competitors who don’t. A media company that distorts information will lose readers to outlets that don’t. A platform that misuses user data will lose users to alternatives that protect it.
This disciplining mechanism requires alternatives to exist. When consolidation eliminates alternatives, the disciplining mechanism fails. The citizen who cannot leave, because there is nowhere else to go, faces private power that is structurally equivalent to the government power the Anti-Federalists feared.
Louis Brandeis, writing in 1914 in “The Curse of Bigness,” articulated this in the progressive tradition: concentrated private power posed the same structural threat to democratic governance that concentrated government power did, and for the same reason, it removed the practical autonomy of ordinary citizens to escape its authority. Brandeis was a Supreme Court justice arguing from within the same republican intellectual tradition as the Anti-Federalists, extending their logic from government to private power.
The conditions for the theory to hold: consolidation sufficient to eliminate practical exit; power exercised over domains central to daily life; absence of meaningful democratic accountability for the exercise of that power.
The Evidence
Media consolidation:
In 1983, approximately fifty companies controlled 90 percent of American media, television, radio, newspapers, film, and publishing. The statistic was reported by media critic Ben Bagdikian in “The Media Monopoly,” published that year, and was itself considered alarming at the time.
By 2012, the same 90 percent market share was controlled by six companies: Comcast, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS. Subsequent mergers have continued the consolidation. The information environment that shapes the daily understanding of political reality for most Americans is produced by a small number of large corporations whose ownership, financial interests, and advertiser relationships create structural pressures on editorial decisions.
The mechanism does not require explicit editorial interference. It operates through the structural fact that media organizations dependent on advertising revenue cannot consistently cover those advertisers negatively, cannot take editorial positions that alienate the regulatory bodies that govern their broadcast licenses, and develop over time an institutional culture that reflects the interests of the ownership class from which their leadership is drawn. This is the same structural dynamic as regulatory capture, but operating in reverse, with private ownership capturing the editorial function rather than industry capturing the regulator.
Digital platform concentration:
Two companies, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Alphabet (Google, YouTube), control approximately 60 percent of digital advertising revenue globally. Together with Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, they control the infrastructure through which most Americans access information, communicate, shop, and increasingly work.
The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting speech. It does not reach private platforms. A platform that removes content, bans accounts, or algorithmically suppresses categories of speech is not constitutionally constrained in ways that a government making the same decisions would be. The practical effect on the individual whose speech is suppressed is identical, their expression is eliminated from the public square, but the legal remedy available to them is not.
In 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, disclosed to the Wall Street Journal and Congress a collection of internal company research documents. Those documents showed that Facebook’s own internal research had found: that its algorithms amplified outrage and divisive content because such content generated more engagement; that its platform had measurable negative effects on teenage girls’ mental health; and that the company had chosen not to implement changes that its own research showed would reduce harm, because those changes also reduced engagement and therefore advertising revenue.
The documents provided direct evidence that a private institution exercising significant influence over the information environment of hundreds of millions of people had prioritized its own financial interest over the welfare of the users it governed. There was no constitutional mechanism to compel a different choice. There was no democratic accountability for the decision. The users had no practical exit, leaving Facebook does not restore access to the social networks, family connections, and community information that Facebook hosts.
Employment concentration and at-will doctrine:
The consolidation documented in Category 1 of this series, four companies controlling 85 percent of beef processing, similar concentration in pork, poultry, and other food sectors, has a direct employment consequence: workers in consolidated industries have fewer alternative employers and therefore less practical ability to exit conditions they find objectionable.
The United States is an at-will employment country, meaning employers can terminate employees for any reason not specifically prohibited by law. The First Amendment prohibits government employers from retaliating against employees for their political views. It does not prohibit private employers from doing the same. An employee of a consolidated corporation who publicly expresses views that their employer finds objectionable can be terminated for that expression without constitutional remedy.
In a competitive labor market, this power is disciplined by the employee’s ability to find alternative employment with an employer whose political preferences differ. In a consolidated market, where a single employer or a small number of employers dominate a local labor market, that disciplining mechanism is weakened or absent. The rural community where the hospital is the largest employer, or the town where the distribution center is the primary source of jobs, confronts private employment power that has no practical competitive check.
What the Founders’ Critics Actually Said
The Anti-Federalists did not theorize about information control as an abstract risk. They experienced it.
During the ratification debates of 1787-1788, the distribution of Anti-Federalist pamphlets and newspaper articles was actively obstructed by Federalist postmasters. The postal system was the only mass communication infrastructure of the era, the equivalent, in reach and function, of the digital platforms that now distribute political information to most Americans. And the Federalists, who controlled the administrative apparatus of the Continental government during the ratification period, used that control to slow, delay, and in some cases block Anti-Federalist materials from reaching readers in communities where the debate was close.
Centinel (Samuel Bryan) described the experience directly. His letters were among the most widely read Anti-Federalist documents in Pennsylvania, but distribution outside his home state was impeded. Brutus, writing in New York, faced similar constraints. The writers who warned against concentrated federal power were attempting to make their case in a communications environment where those who favored concentrated federal power controlled the distribution channel.
This is not a footnote to the ratification debate. It is the first documented instance of the mechanism the private tyranny theory describes: concentrated control of a communications infrastructure, used by those who hold that control to disadvantage those whose views they oppose, without formal censorship, without a law being passed, through the structural fact of who owned the channel.
The Anti-Federalists did not have a theory of private information control because the distinction between “public” and “private” control of the postal system was not yet legible in 1787. What they had was the direct experience of it. When Centinel warned that the Constitution would concentrate power in ways that could suppress opposition, he was writing from inside a suppression that was already underway.
The six companies that now control 90 percent of American media, and the two platforms that handle most Americans’ daily information environment, are private rather than governmental. The mechanism, concentrated control of the channel, structural disadvantage for disfavored content, is the same one the Anti-Federalists lived through.
The Counter-Arguments
The counter-arguments to the private tyranny theory are substantial and deserve honest acknowledgment.
Private power is disciplined by markets in ways that government power is not. If a platform becomes sufficiently abusive, alternatives can emerge, and have. Competitors to Facebook have emerged repeatedly, with varying success. The history of business consolidation includes periods of reconsolidation following antitrust enforcement. Market power is not permanent.
Private institutions also lack one of the most coercive tools of government: the legal monopoly on force. A corporation cannot imprison you. It cannot compel your compliance through legal sanction. The asymmetry of private vs. government power remains real even at high levels of private consolidation.
The analogy between private consolidation and government tyranny is contested in the scholarly literature. Some economists argue that consolidation can produce efficiency gains that benefit consumers, and that the market entry of new competitors is inhibited by regulatory barriers as much as by incumbent power.
The Conclusion
The evidence supports the theory in specific, bounded domains, particularly media and digital information infrastructure, where consolidation has reached the point where practical exit is limited and the structural condition the Anti-Federalists feared (power exercised over citizens with no meaningful alternative) exists in private form.
The evidence is weaker in employment and financial services, where alternatives exist more commonly, and the “tyranny” characterization is most contestable.
What the evidence clearly supports, without requiring resolution of the contested questions: private consolidation has produced structural conditions that the constitutional framework was not designed to address, because the constitution was designed to constrain government power and was written before private power at this scale existed.
The structural question, how do citizens maintain meaningful autonomy in domains where private consolidation has eliminated practical exit, is not answered by the constitutional framework as it exists. It requires either antitrust enforcement that restores competitive alternatives, or extension of some constitutional-type constraints to private institutions that exercise government-equivalent power over daily life, or both.
These are hard questions. They are beyond what the Anti-Federalists could have posed. They are not beyond what a functioning democratic republic, informed by the structural logic of the founding-era debate, should be asking.
Centinel (Samuel Bryan), Letter I, Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), October 5, 1787. Brutus, Letters I-XVI, New York Journal, October 1787 through April 1788. Richard Bernstein, “Are We to Be a Nation?”, Harvard University Press, 1987. (Documents postal obstruction during ratification.) Louis Brandeis, “The Curse of Bigness”, Harper’s Weekly, 1914. Ben Bagdikian, “The Media Monopoly”, Beacon Press, 1983 (updated through sixth edition, 2000). C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite”, Oxford University Press, 1956. Frances Haugen, testimony before the United States Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, October 5, 2021. Pew Research Center, “Digital News Fact Sheet”, 2023.