corporatocracy (noun) — a system of government in which corporations, financial institutions, or other business entities hold effective political power, either by directly controlling the state or by exerting decisive influence over the officials and institutions that do.
Two things happened in antitrust this month, and only one of them involved the government doing anything.
The Price Increase Nobody in Washington Is Investigating
On June 25, 2026, a federal class-action lawsuit landed in the Northern District of California against Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — the three companies that together control roughly 89% of the world's DRAM memory chip supply (38%, 29%, and 22% of Q1 2026 revenue, respectively). The allegation: a coordinated scheme running since 2022 to restrict the supply of ordinary consumer memory — the DDR4 and DDR3 chips that go into laptops, phones, and desktops — while redirecting manufacturing capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI data centers, which carry far higher margins. The complaint characterizes the industry's AI transition as a cover for an old-fashioned supply squeeze on everyone else.
The number attached to that squeeze: prices for conventional DRAM have risen by as much as 700% over the past 4 years. Jefferies now projects another 40-50% increase this quarter and 30-40% in the fourth, with no meaningful relief expected before 2028. That is not a rounding error on a receipt. That is the price of every laptop, phone, and prebuilt PC in the country, moving because three companies allegedly decided AI customers were worth more than everyone else.
Here's the part that matters most: no federal antitrust agency has filed a case. The lawsuit came from 17 private plaintiffs — 14 individual consumers and three small PC-building and distribution businesses — suing on their own, at their own expense, against three of the largest semiconductor companies on earth. The Department of Justice, which has an entire Antitrust Division, has not brought an action. Neither has the FTC. This is also not these companies' first time in this exact courtroom over this exact conduct: Samsung and SK Hynix's predecessor pleaded guilty to DOJ price-fixing charges in the mid-2000s for coordinating DRAM prices between 1999 and 2002, paying $300 million and $185 million, respectively. Micron cooperated with that investigation and avoided a fine. Two decades later, with the same three companies and the same product, the government's posture this time is silence.
The One Deal the DOJ Actually Stopped
Compare that silence to what happened on July 13, 2026. TransDigm Group abandoned its $960 million bid to acquire Stellant Systems — a rival supplier of components used in radar systems for the Navy's Aegis Combat System and the Air Force's F-16 — after the DOJ's Antitrust Division signaled it would sue to block the deal. The concern was straightforward: combining the two would leave the Pentagon dependent on a single supplier for parts it needs to defend the country. Faced with that threat, TransDigm walked away rather than fight it in court.
On paper, that's antitrust enforcement working exactly as intended — a concentration risk identified, a challenge threatened, a deal abandoned before it could do damage. But it's worth being honest about why this particular deal got that treatment when so few others have.
One Merger Blocked in Eighteen Months
Reporting on the DOJ's Antitrust Division this July describes an office that, under its current leadership, has blocked exactly one merger since January 2025 — while clearing more than a dozen others through settlements or outright approval. The most striking example: a $111 billion combination of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, approved in June 2026 with no divestitures, no behavioral restrictions, and no conditions attached, over the objections of career antitrust lawyers who reportedly were leaning toward recommending the department sue to block it. Twelve states have since filed their own suit to challenge the merger, arguing the DOJ simply declined to do its job. Separately, the department has also declined to challenge consolidation in aerospace, auto repair, and pharmacy software, in each case reportedly over the objections of staff attorneys who had lawsuits prepared.
The man overseeing this posture, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, has reportedly questioned internally why the department needs to review mergers at all, calling merger review a "tax on dealmaking" and suggesting that blocking a deal could violate a company's due-process rights. Whether or not that legal theory holds up, the practical result is visible in the numbers: this administration's Antitrust Division settles or waves through nearly everything that reaches its desk. TransDigm-Stellant appears to be the one deal in eighteen months where that pattern broke — and it broke specifically because the customer at risk of losing competitive options wasn't the public. It was the Department of War.
What the Difference Actually Tells You
Nobody needed a memo to figure out that a single-source Pentagon supplier is a bad idea; that one wrote itself. The harder question is what it says about everything the same office lets through without a fight. A private citizen paying 700% more for a memory chip has no equivalent lever to pull — no Pentagon procurement office standing behind them, no sole-source national-security argument that forces a settlement conversation. What they have is the right to file their own lawsuit and pay for their own lawyers against a set of companies with a documented prior conviction for the same conduct. That's not a hypothetical failure of the system. It's the system, functioning as currently designed, showing you exactly whose leverage gets a government lawyer and whose doesn't.
Three Honest Ways to Read This
The TransDigm block might simply reflect that national-security harms are easier to prove than consumer-pricing harms. Showing a single point of failure for a Navy radar system is a cleaner legal case than proving a three-way pricing conspiracy across a global commodity market. That's a fair distinction, and it's possible this isn't favoritism so much as prosecutorial pragmatism — chase the case you can actually win.
It's also fair to note the DRAM case is only a month old, and government investigations move more slowly than press releases. The DOJ and FTC could still open a parallel inquiry; regulators in South Korea or the EU could as well, given that Samsung and SK Hynix are both foreign-headquartered. Silence in July isn't proof of permanent silence.
And it's fair to ask whether any of this would be different under a more aggressive Antitrust Division, given the sheer volume of mergers it has cleared across industries. The pattern reported this month — one blocked deal against more than a dozen approvals, including a $111 billion media merger with zero conditions — suggests an office broadly disinclined to fight, not one selectively protecting consumers over generals. The Pentagon getting a fight it didn't have to ask twice for isn't proof that the fight was available to anyone else who needed it.
My honest read: all three of those things can be true at once, and the middle one buys the least comfort. A DOJ that settles or approves nearly everything, and blocks the one deal that happened to touch its own supply chain, isn't demonstrating that national security gets special protection. It's demonstrating whose interests get treated as non-negotiable by default, and whose get treated as a private civil matter to be litigated on your own dime.
Corporatocracy is not a market failure. It is the market succeeding — at the wrong thing, for the wrong people, on purpose.
Call to Action: What Needs to Happen Now
- If you're pricing out a laptop, phone, or PC build this year, price it now rather than later — the analyst projections here point one direction through 2027, not a temporary spike.
- Watch whether the DOJ or FTC opens any parallel inquiry into the DRAM allegations in the coming months. Silence past the one-year mark is very different from silence at the one-month mark.
- If you want to understand why so few mergers get challenged right now, look up Stanley Woodward's public comments on merger review — it's a rare case of an official saying the quiet part about enforcement philosophy on the record.
- Support state-level antitrust enforcement where it exists. Twelve state attorneys general are carrying the Paramount-Warner Bros. challenge, generally because the federal government declined to do so.
Sources
Northern District of California. Class-action complaint, Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics (also naming SK Hynix and Micron Technology), filed June 25, 2026.
Tom's Hardware. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Sued Over Alleged DRAM Price Fixing Amid Record Memory Costs.
FourWeekMBA. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Face Federal Cartel Lawsuit — and AI's HBM Boom Is the Real Story.
Yahoo Finance. Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix Accused of Spiking Memory Chip Prices by 700%.
U.S. Department of Justice historical record — Samsung and Hynix Semiconductor guilty pleas, DRAM price-fixing conspiracy, 1999-2002 ($300M and $185M fines respectively).
Concurrences. The US DOJ Prompts the Abandonment of a Merger Between Two Manufacturers of Defense Radar Components (TransDigm / Stellant Systems), July 2026.
Lawyer Monthly. TransDigm Abandons $960M Stellant Systems Deal After DOJ Lawsuit Warning.
Bloomberg / Bloomberg Law. Merger Suits Stall Under DOJ Boss Who Opposes Blocking Deals (July 7-8, 2026).
Insurance Journal (Bloomberg wire). Merger Suits Stall Under DOJ Boss Who Opposes Blocking Deals.
NPR. DOJ Approves Paramount Skydance's $111 Billion Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (June 13, 2026).
Variety. Top DOJ Officials Cleared Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Before Staff Lawyers, Who Were "Leaning" Toward Antitrust Lawsuit, Could Object.
Variety. States Sue to Block Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger, Defying DOJ.