Why is Trump an antitrust wild card for Big Tech?

in today’s episode decoderWe’re talking about antitrust policy and tech, which is at a particularly awkward moment as we enter the second Trump administration.

In fact, a lot of tech policy is in a weird moment, but antitrust may be the weirdest of them all — the pendulum on antitrust policy has swung back and forth quite wildly over the past few years, and it’s about to swing again under Trump. Is. So I asked antitrust reporter Leah Nylen bloomberg And a leading expert on the subject, come on the show and help sort it out.

If you are a decoder Listener, you know that the basic profile of antitrust in America was more or less the same under President Barack Obama and the first Trump administration since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

But in the Biden administration, FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Cantor have taken a big, bold, aggressive approach to antitrust that really hasn’t been seen in many of our lifetimes in this country. container has started decoder twice In past year Talk about this approach and what it means. After all, Amazon, Apple, and Meta are all facing major antitrust lawsuits, and Microsoft is also now under investigation. And then there’s Google, which is already potentially on the brink of bankruptcy after losing a major antitrust lawsuit, with a second ruling about advertising due to be ruled basically any day now.

A large part of this regulatory pressure is designed to avoid what I like to call the “Instagram problem,” where everyone wants the world’s governments to stop Facebook from buying Instagram in 2012, but As we know, he didn’t. For almost the entire 2010s, the tech industry grew and consolidated at a rapid pace through mergers and acquisitions, and so you saw with the Biden administration’s agenda to make every effort to slow it down and perhaps even curtail some of it. Also worked for.

Some of this enforcement has been so intense that companies have even devised creative closures around the nature of the acquisition. Look at Inflection AI: Microsoft didn’t achieve this; Rather, it hired most of the company, licensed its technology, and installed co-founder, Mustafa Suleiman, as CEO of its new AI division. If, on paper, you haven’t actually acquired anything, you can’t be blocked for a takeover deal.

But now, President-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House in a month, and he has already named his choice to replace Khan and Cantor.

Trump’s next choice to head the FTC, current Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, pitched himself for the chairperson’s seat with a number of platitudes such as “mergers are good” and that he is extremely supportive of big business interests – except when. When it comes to big technology. Both Trump and his incoming vice president, J.D. Vance, have spent years railing against big tech companies for alleged political censorship and want to punish those companies, particularly Google and Ferguson.

And Trump’s pick to run antitrust at the DOJ is Gail Slater, who is poised to survive some big antitrust cases.

This creates some deeply awkward tension, as you hear Leah really get into it. On the one hand, the incoming administration has no problem letting big companies become bigger companies — but that could Too Support a potential Google breakup, not because Google behaved anti-competitively, but because Google’s status as a monopolist gives it the power to impose limits on speech, which conservatives don’t like.

there is one Very There’s a lot going on here, and a lot of open questions. All big tech companies would love to believe that we are heading into an era of less enforcement, turning a blind eye to big deals, and getting back to business as usual. But are we really going to see a major reversal of the last four years, meaning big tech will get a chance to breathe a sigh of relief and restart the acquisition machine?

Or could we see a world where a strange kind of bipartisan antitrust effort continues into Trump’s second term? I know Leah is one of the quickest people to ask this question – but as you’ll hear her say, there are a lot of wild cards here.

If you want to read more about what we talked about in this episode, start here:

• Trump’s antitrust trio set to continue crackdown on Big Tech bloomberg
• Trump picks FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency politico
• Trump picks Gail Slater to head Justice Department’s antitrust division reuters
• Trump appoints Brendan Carr as his FCC leader The Verge
• Trump’s FTC pick promises to go after ‘censorship’ from tech companies The Verge
• Breaking down the DOJ’s plan to end Google’s search monopoly The Verge
• US vs Google Redux: All the news from the ad tech test The Verge
• Tech leaders kiss the ring The Verge
• DOJ antitrust chief ‘very happy’ after Google’s antitrust ruling decoder
• This is Big Tech’s playbook to swallow the AI ​​industry. command line