When the news came down that a jury in New York had found Live Nation guilty of operating an illegal monopoly, I was flying to an annual conference at the University of Chicago that a decade ago kicked off the conversation about antitrust. (It’s kind of moved on since then; the theme of the conference this year was “Can Capitalism Be Popular?” This is the University of Chicago, after all.) It was a fitting place to ponder over what could very well become the first major company in the age of revived antitrust enforcement to be broken up.

A jury of men and women made this determination. When this case was brought in 2024, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, under the direction of Jonathan Kanter, explicitly sought a jury trial, on the assumption that while a judge tries to look smart, a jury looks at the evidence.

In this case, the evidence was incredibly clear: Live Nation uses its various business lines—venue ownership, ticketing, event promotion, and artist management—as mutually reinforcing, to build dominant positions and make it impossible for competitors to operate or for anyone to escape its clutches. In internal communications, Live Nation executives regaled one another about “robbing [customers] blind.” They openly threatened venues that didn’t want to use their services, retaliated against those who didn’t heed that warning, and used proxies like Oak View Group, a nominal competitor, to send the message. And they use creative accounting, including multiple sets of books, to hide the fruits of this market domination from the public.

You could look smart and talk about relevant product markets and relative quality of ticketing services, or you could look at the evidence. “There were a couple emails—the tone, the language they used,” the foreperson told journalist Gigi Liman, that “stuck in the head of everybody as evidence.”

But beyond the structure of the trial, the nature of the victory is incredibly important for the future of the economy. Despite working tirelessly to remove liability from Live Nation, the Trump administration was wholly unsuccessful. They settled the Biden-era federal case for a fine amounting to four days of Live Nation revenue and a minor sale of small amphitheaters, amid lobbying from MAGA confidants Kellyanne Conway and Mike Davis, along with Trump’s agent Ari Emanuel, who sits on the Live Nation board. They timed the settlement to catch their partners in the case, a coalition of 40 attorneys general, completely off guard, leaving them without any resources to continue to pursue it. They browbeat the Republican states to join the settlement and hence split the bipartisan consensus. They obviously hoped the case would fizzle, that the states wouldn’t be able to scramble together enough arguments to convince the jury. And when that happened and Live Nation went back to its exploitative business model, millions of dollars would change hands for a job well done.