In today's episode of DecoderWe're talking about antitrust policy and technology, which is at a particularly strange time as we enter the second Trump administration.
In reality, much of tech policy is in a strange moment, but antitrust policy might be the strangest of all: the pendulum has swung back and forth on antitrust policy quite violently in recent years, and is about to swing again under Trump. So I asked Leah Nylen, antitrust reporter for Bloomberg and a leading expert on this topic, to come on the show and help break it all down.
if you are a Decoder Listener, you know that the basic antitrust frameworks in the United States were more or less the same from when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, through President Barack Obama and the first Trump administration.
But in the Biden administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan and Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter have taken a broad, bold and aggressive antitrust approach that really hasn't been seen in this country in many of our lives. Kanter has been in Decoder twice over the past year to talk about this approach and what it means. After all, amazon, Apple, and Meta are all facing major antitrust lawsuits, and Microsoft is now under investigation as well. And then there's Google, potentially facing a breakup after already losing a major antitrust lawsuit, with a ruling in a second over advertising due basically any day now.
Much of this regulatory pressure has been designed to avoid what I like to call the “instagram problem,” where everyone wishes the world's governments had stopped facebook from buying instagram in 2012, but, as we know, they didn't. For virtually the entire 2010s, the tech industry grew and consolidated through mergers and acquisitions at a dizzying pace, and that's how it ended with a Biden administration agenda to do everything possible to slow this down and maybe even reverse part of it.
Some of this enforcement has been so intense that companies have even come up with creative solutions around the nature of the acquisition itself. Look at Inflection ai: Microsoft didn't acquire it; rather, it hired most of the company, licensed its technology, and installed co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as CEO of its new artificial intelligence division. You can't be blocked from an acquisition deal if, on paper, you don't actually acquire anything.
But now, President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House in a month and has already named his candidates to replace Khan and Kanter.
Trump's next pick to head the FTC, current Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, ran for chairman on a bunch of “mergers are good” platforms and is extremely supportive of big business interests, except when it comes to big technologies. Both Trump and his incoming vice president, JD Vance, have spent years criticizing big tech companies for alleged political censorship and want to punish those companies, especially Google, and Ferguson.
And Trump's pick to lead the antitrust fight at the Justice Department is Gail Slater, who appears poised to keep some of the big antitrust cases alive.
That leads to a couple of deeply strange tensions, as you'll hear Leah actually come in. On the one hand, the incoming administration is fine with allowing big companies to become huge, but it could also support a possible breakup of Google, not because Google has behaved in an anti-competitive manner, but because Google's position as a monopolist gives it the power to impose limits on expression in a way that conservatives do not like.
there is a batch happening here, and there are a lot of open questions. All the big tech companies would love to believe that we are heading into an era of less law enforcement, turning a blind eye to big deals, and going back to business as usual. But are we really going to see a big pullback from the last four years, one that means Big tech can breathe a sigh of relief and get the acquisition machine going again?
Or could we see a world in which a strange kind of bipartisan antitrust effort endures into Trump's second term? Leah is one of the smartest people I know to ask these questions, but as you'll hear her say, there are a lot of wild cards here.
If you want to read more about what we talk about in this episode, start here:
- Trump's antitrust trio portends continued crackdown on Big tech | <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-12/trump-s-antitrust-trio-heralds-big-tech-crackdown-to-continue”>Bloomberg
- Trump picks FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead agency | political
- Trump picks Gail Slater to head Justice Department's antitrust division | Reuters
- Trump names Brendan Carr as his FCC leader | The edge
- Trump's pick for FTC promises to pursue “censorship” of tech companies | The edge
- Breaking down the Justice Department's plan to end Google's search monopoly | The edge
- United States against Google Redux: all the news from the trial on advertising technology | The edge
- technology leaders kiss the ring | The edge
- Justice Department antitrust chief “delighted” after Google monopoly verdict | Decoder
- This is the Big tech manual to swallow the ai industry | command line
Decoder with Nilay Patel /
A podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems.
