Today I’m writing about how Congress is about to put the most significant antitrust reform since 1976 into law. But don’t worry, there’s also some bad news, as Senator Chuck Schumer made sure that tech antitrust provisions didn’t get into the final package.

I will cover the FTC’s fine of Epic Games in a few days, since that’s an important action that will change how the internet works. But for now I want to explain what Congress just did with antitrust law and why you should be pretty excited.

Five years ago, if someone would have told me that two powerful Senators – Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Chuck Schumer – cut a backroom deal to strengthen antitrust law, I would have rolled my eyes and laughed. There are so many reasons why it’s a ridiculous notion, the key one being that both of them are literally avatars of corporate power. And yet, it just happened. Today, we got a look at the final deal that is going to keep the government open, the last vehicle with any legislating at all. And it includes a bunch of important antitrust reforms.

So here’s what is in there, why it matters, and what it portends going forward.

First, the bad news. A lot of ink has been spilled about the tech antitrust bills, in particular one to help newspapers, a bill to break open app stores, and a bill to address non-discrimination on platforms. These were all dropped. It’s true that large tech firms spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby against them, but the reality is that they were dropped because Schumer is a fairly strong opponent of antitrust law. Schumer, as I said last week, leans towards enabling dominant tech firms. There’s a long list of his work on behalf of finance and monopoly in general, everything from hospital purchasing monopolies to protecting the carried interest loophole for hedge fund managers. But it’s also personal; one of his daughters works at Meta, and another works at Amazon.

But it wasn’t just Schumer. He was negotiating with Mitch McConnell, the Republican architect behind the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court decision. McConnell’s entire political career is organized not just around boosting corporate power, but the virtues of collecting corporate money to use in elections. His strategy has been to break the legislative process, and then let monopoly-friendly judges interpret the law. Facilitating corporate concentration is not just a way of acquiring power for McConnell, it is the very point of politics.

Neither Schumer nor McConnell are invested in the substance of antitrust law, but it would be harder to find a worse duo to be cutting a deal, if your goal is to address monopoly power. They weren’t the only ones involved. Nancy Pelosi was also in the negotiations, and she advocated for antitrust. She’s the only legislative leader who actually put a bill on the floor for a vote. There were some key people in the White House who pushed, but it wasn’t a high enough priority for Biden himself. That’s generally the case for most policymakers, they don’t like monopolies, but it’s not a high priority to address them, because they don’t connect monopoly power to the central social problems they care about. That’s changing quickly, but we’re still in transition.

And yet, Schumer-McConnell-Pelosi did actually include some very important provisions in the final package, because antitrust was too popular to ignore. Senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard