Tech Won't Save Us - Will Google’s Monopoly Be Broken Up? w/ Rob Larson

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Rob Larson to discuss the recent ruling that Google is a monopolist, what consequences it might face, and what lessons we can learn from the Microsoft antitrust case in the early 2000s.Rob Larson is the author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More and Professor of Economics at Tacoma Community College.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Rob has written about the Google antitrust case and its likely outcomes.Paris also wrote about why it won’t solve the problems with the internet.Watch a highlight reel of Bill Gates' deposition on YouTube.Google has been deemed to have an illegal monopoly in online search.A second trial over Google’s monopolistic position in the online ads market is ongoing.The Obama administration let Google off the hook a decade ago.Some tech billionaire donors are pushing Kamala Harris to remove Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission if she becomes president.Support the show

That's kind of the issue. If you have a monopoly through market forces in America, we're probably going to let you keep it. But it's your inevitable use of the money and power that comes with that to then abuse your monopoly is the term that gets them in trouble, even if they're not charging money. And that is the unusual thing with Google is that, you know, it's free, at least at the POS to use. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Rob Larson.

Rob is the author of Mastering the Universe, the obscene wealth of the ruling class, what they do with their money, and why you Should Hate Them Even More. Quite the title. He's also a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College. Given the recent ruling that Google is indeed a monopolist, I thought it was a good opportunity to not just look at that case, but look back at this broader push to have antitrust enforcement against the big tech companies, to try to promote supposedly more competitive markets in the tech sector, and what the impact of this is increasingly looking like as we see more enforcement in the European Union and these cases in the United

States continuing to weave their slow way through the courts. As we discuss in this episode, the big hopes of a few years ago when everyone was talking about breaking up the big tech companies seem to be a bit more elusive the further down the track we get with these things. And while there are positive developments to come out of it in terms of restricting some of the worst practices of these major tech companies, it feels like it's a bit too little, a bit too late to actually change the power dynamics of what is actually going on here. And if we actually want to do something about how these tech companies work and the control that these tech platforms have over our lives, it feels like we would need to take a step beyond actually trying to make more competitive markets or changing a few things about how these companies actually operate.

But it doesn't seem like that is really on the table. So that's what I wanted to talk to Rob about this week so that we could dig into this a little bit further, understand the history of antitrust and competition policy in the United States in particular a little bit better, and to think about where this might ultimately be going and what we might get out of it. So I was really happy to have Rob back on the show. He's always a really fun person to talk to, and I really enjoyed this conversation as well. If you did make sure to leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the

work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week. So we can keep having these critical in depth conversations on the tech industry. You can join supporters like Richard from San Francisco, Giovanni in Rome, and Davide in London by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Rob, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. It's my pleasure, Paris. Thanks for having me. Of course. Always happy to chat.

You know, you've been on the show in the past. It's been too long since you've been here last, but I'm excited to talk again because you've been writing a bit about these antitrust cases that the U.S. government is bringing against the major tech companies. And last month, the U.S. District Court judge ruled that, quote, Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. This was a case that targeted the company's search business and the deals it makes to maintain that dominance. What did you make of that ruling? And what does it mean for Google

and the other tech monopolists that the government is going after? Yeah, that's a really good question. So listeners may or may not know a lot about what antitrust is. Antitrust is basically America's anti-monopoly laws. Most developed economies have some version of this. Like in Britain, they have the competition

and markets authority. So it's a common thing. Antitrust in the US though, Most developed economies have some version of this. Like in Britain, they have the Competition and Markets Authority. So it's a common thing. Antitrust in the U.S., though, as with most things in American economic policy, it's kind of its own beast and it's unusually kind of capitalism-oriented. So whereas, for example, the European Union's competition authorities can rule a company to be a monopolist and then you just are a monopolist in the eyes of the law. Antitrust comes from the 1890s from the Sherman Antitrust Act, and it makes it illegal to engage in restraints of trade. Originally, it was mainly used to crack down on the earliest labor unions in the United States, a tradition that carries on to this day. Fundamentally, what it's come to mean is it's basically just straight up anti-monopoly. So if there's two companies in a market and they want to merge together, like Ticketmaster and Live Nation, for example, the antitrust will try to prevent that.

But it's America. So the Justice Department, which does most of the antitrust litigation with some exceptions, they can take those two companies to court and try to block their merger. But they have to win in a federal court. Usually, a federal judge has to decide. So it's not even that the government can make that determination technocratically. It has to further convince the judge. Usually, when the Department of Justice tells companies, if you guys merge, we're going to take you to court on antitrust grounds. And also, can do it if you're doing like really clear price fixing or things like that. They'll say we can take you to court. Typically, companies will give up on that practice or on that proposed merger because it's the Department of Justice or

sometimes the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., which also shares antitrust enforcement authority. They're government bodies. They have real resources. Obviously, companies big enough to semi-monopolize a market have their own large resources, too. But usually, companies will give up, but not in every case. For example, in the U.S. a couple years ago, we used to have four cell phone companies, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. T-Mobile and Sprint tried to merge in the 2000s, in the 1990s, and then in the 2000s. And both times, the justice threatened to take him to court and they gave up. But in the 2010s, they tried to merge again. Justice said, we'll sue. They went to court and won. The government lost that case,

and we have three firms now. So it's the limit of American antitrust first is that it has to go through courts, which more and more of America's government policy has to go through. So that's an issue. When we get to the modern era, it's kind of tough for antitrust. It had a big heyday along with the kind of New Deal, Great Society era in the United States. We broke up Standard Oil in the 1910s, some other firms. The last time we broke up a monopolist, which is the technical term for a company that operates a monopoly. Technically, the market is the monopoly, the company is the monopolist, but people forget

about that distinction all the time. The last time we did one of those was 1982, when we broke up AT&T's telephone monopoly. So it's been 42 years since we broke up one of these. Microsoft had a really close call in the 1990s, which we can talk about in more detail. Basically, they, too, were declared a monopolist by a federal judge. But while their appeal was in effect, the 2000 election took place, which was a contested one, but led to the administration of George W. Bush. And his Justice Department dropped the goal of breaking up the company. So it just got some penalties put to it that didn't do

very much. But the issue today with these tech companies is that antitrust got really constrained in the 80s and 90s, along with every other government limit on the power of tech industries or the rich families that own them. And the big thing now comes out of a U of Chicago, big surprise, figure from Robert Bork, who for a while was almost a Supreme Court justice. And the big Chicago school case was, sure, companies monopolize markets. That's not necessarily bad. Like when Rockefeller had his oil and gas monopoly in the United States, he lowered prices for like diesel and lamp oil, which were the big products then, significantly because of the huge economies of scale that that brought about. And it grew the market. And when you have the whole market,

why not grow it? And so the case was, though, yes, he was powerful, but he lowered prices like he helped the consumer by lowering prices when he felt like it. Therefore, the consumers were aided. So these days with antitrust, it's not enough to show that companies are going to merge and have monopolistic power or that a company today has that. That is not enough. Companies are allowed to have monopoly position in markets. It's abuse of monopoly and specifically through higher consumer prices is the main thing that gets you a favorable antitrust ruling these days. And because so many of today's tech products are technically free at the point of service, such as Google Search, going on YouTube, starting an Instagram account, those things don't cost anything. The companies, of course, make their gigantic profitability by showing you ads constantly. If you watch YouTube and you've been noticing the increasing ad breaks and their lengthening runtimes, that's just reflecting Google using that monopolistic position for online video.

So last month's court verdict was pretty significant. We ruled that Google was a monopolist based on its power over online search. And we can get into exactly how it maintained that monopoly, which is what it really got in trouble over, and probably what the remedies will address. We're still waiting on the judge to arrive at those. Microsoft is the preceding case, but it charged for its Windows updates. So it's tougher with Google, and a lot of people think Google is going to have a much more successful appeal based on that no harm to consumers rule. Yeah, we monopolize online search through our sleazy practices, but it's still free. Consumers aren't paying anything. So I kind of expect that they'll romp on this verdict when they get to the appeal stage. Yeah, that gives us a really good insight into the history of

how antitrust has played out in the United States itself. I believe like antitrust as a term is something that is specifically in the American context. Outside of the US, we'd usually just call it like competition policy and things like that, right? Anti-monopoly laws. But this comes out of the American context with the big trusts, you know, back in the day and all this sort of stuff. Yeah. Before we had transnational corporations, you had trust structures instead. Yeah. So it's totally a historical artifact of a term. That makes a ton of sense. And, you know, as you say, right, there are often these lawsuits launched in the United States, especially more recently, in order to try to stop these major mergers. Some of them do fail, as you were talking about, for example, another one that comes to mind is Microsoft's acquisition

of Activision Blizzard, which the Federal Trade Commission tried to stop, but was able to go through anyway. Meanwhile, a few years ago, you know, one of the major book publishers tried to buy another one. And that one was effectively blocked because the argument was it would hurt authors in terms of, you know, their ability to try to sell their books to different publishers and get a better kind of rate or better advance or whatever, right? So you see these very clear distinctions. But I guess, you know, going back to this Google case that we're talking about, the one that is really significant, because as you say it, you know, going back to this Google case that we're talking about, the one that is really significant because, as you say, you know, a tech company has finally been declared a monopolist for the first time since Microsoft in the late 1990s. What is it that really made the judge say, OK, Google is clearly a monopolist here?

And what does that mean for potentially the other antitrust cases that are going to come after it? Yeah, OK, so that's a really good point. So the key thing that got it in trouble, Google, in this case was its efforts to maintain or defend, or you could say entrench, its existing monopoly. Maybe the first thing we should say is how Google came by its monopoly, because it's the same story with Microsoft. Google having a monopoly with web search, and especially mobile search, where its market share is north of 90%, that's not necessarily illegal, as we said. I mean, I always tell my students, it's sometimes legal to have a monopoly, sometimes not in America.

It depends how you get it and how you defend it. So the big thing that led to Google search's success is the same thing that led Microsoft's stupid Windows operating system to run almost every computer on earth for about 30 years. It's through network effects. And this is why I wrote my last book about Bit Tyrants that we've talked about in the past. Markets vary. Some markets have unique characteristics that others don't. So if I buy a pair of Reeboks and then you buy a pair, they're just unrelated purchases. However, if I start an Instagram account and you're already on Instagram, it makes your account slightly more valuable because now there's one more person who might view your posts or give you hearts or whatever. So the growth of markets,

if they're distributed through networks, has this effect of basically entrenching incumbents. So Microsoft got the big break because its operating system, Windows, got used on the first IBM PCs and all the hardware clones that succeeded them in the 80s and 90s when computing, you know, personal computing, computers that didn't take up a whole room like ENIAC.

It was the operating system in those early days. So everyone who wanted to make applications like, you applications like spreadsheets or video games, you make them to run on Windows because those are on the IBM PCs. Consumers buy those. And now if I'm a developer, I want to make my software to run on that Windows operating system so I can reach the biggest market. That market grows because it's attracted to more applications and that entrenches, it creates that positive feedback cycle you see in these kind of markets. So Microsoft's operating system monopoly, because it just came from these pro-monopoly market forces, was completely legally allowed. And its operating system monopoly was

never questioned. Microsoft got in trouble when it did what we call monopolization, using your existing operating system's monopoly to take over an adjacent market. In their case, it was taking over web browsers by crushing Netscape, and we can get into the details there. Google's a similar case. It gained its monopoly mainly through network effects, because many people don't realize this, but search engines, I mean, they vary in the quality of their search results, and they tend to improve to the extent they're used a lot because it allows, as they say, the training of the algorithm.

People do searches and the algorithm sees, okay, on this kind of search, everyone's clicking on the one or two top links and not coming back to the search page. So that's successful search. Other times they're going page after page and clicking a million things and coming back. So they're trying to get to that long click,

the click people don't come back from to indicate a successful search that gave them whatever they were looking for. Well, the more people that use Google, the more its algorithm got trained up. And those of us who've been online for a while, you kids today may not be familiar with this, but there was a time when we had a lot of others significantly poorer than Google search engines like Lycos and WebCrawler. Yahoo, of course, was and still remains a significant kind of minority share in the marketplace. Don't forget Ask Jeeves, man. Ask Jeeves. And I'm not trying to trash Jeeves or DuckDuckGo. These are legitimate search engines of their time and stature. But because Google, at least in those days, provided the best search

results by a fair margin, like it was a conspicuously superior engine. Now, because of its monopoly status, it's all packed with ads and various gamed search engine optimization outcomes. So it's definitely degraded because of its monopoly status. But prior to that, it built that status through having a superior product, arguably. And there's a lot to say about that. I mean, Google's got a hilarious origin story. It comes originally from a grad program that was getting National Science Foundation money in a publicly funded research university. And they wrote their main paper arguing that there were inherent conflicts of interest if you had a commercialized search engine.

They got over that around the time the IPO made them rich. But that is another just market-created monopoly. Google specifically got in trouble here for maintaining its monopoly through monopolization practices. The main one, of course, and the one that gets most of the attention is from Google actively paying entities to use Google search engine as its default. And, you know, in the past, Google's had senior tech figures who say if you control the defaults, you control the product, which has insight. Some of us are really into tech and figuring out all the settings of the platforms and hardware we use. A lot of us just want to get to the apps we use and don't want to read the long, long terms of service you get every time you update software. I mean, I skip those,

and I'm an economist. If I skip them, I know most people are skipping them. It's endless legalese you won't even understand. The point is, Google was paying money to mostly phone makers and some browser operators. So like Apple and Samsung, the two big handset manufacturers that make the actual physical phones you have. Those things come preloaded with Google as its search engine, sometimes as an app, sometimes just as the default browser preference. Also paid things like Mozilla, which is the trust that operates the Firefox browser, which I often enjoy. It defaults to Google as well. And of course, you can change these defaults or just go online and go to Yahoo or Bing or DuckDuck or whatever you wish. But just because those defaults are there, the large majority of phone users are there as consumers rather than tech critics.

And they're looking for a good search outcome. And they're kind of used to Google stuffing the top half of the first page with ads. So you get over that. But Google is paying very, very significant amounts of money, you know, tens of billions of dollars to Apple Computer every year and significant amounts to the other operators. Pretty stunning stuff. And so it was that specific action, not just the market encouraging its original monopoly, which is how this all started, is through markets encouraging monopoly, which they frequently do. People want to resist that, but it is the case. But it's when these companies then use their gigantic war chests to entrench

their monopoly or to crush threats like browsers or things like that, or independent ad entities like Google has been doing. That's when you get in trouble. And that's also why Google has a separate antitrust case that started this week about its monopoly over online ads. And that's even more important than the search monopolization verdict because it's the ads that make the company its money. But that's kind of the issue. If you have a monopoly through market forces in America, we're probably going to let you keep it. But it's your inevitable use of the money and power that comes with that to then abuse your monopoly is the term that gets them in trouble, even if they're not charging money. And that is the unusual thing with Google is that, you know,

it's free, at least at the POS to use. But they have those shared parallels there. And that's what got both of them adjudicated as monopolists in front of federal judges. That's a really great overview. And I think, you know, if we're looking at those two different Google antitrust cases, right, the one where Google has been deemed to be a monopolist around its search business, and the one that just started this week and is ongoing around its ad business, it feels like that second one is the one that can actually be the most consequential one. Because as you're saying, you know, the search business is built up because of these network effects, because people find the search engine to be convenient, useful, the best option for them. But when it comes to the ad business, it feels like, you know, you were talking about how

monopolization, right, these practices in order to maintain the monopoly is something that's a real threat. And it feels like that is potentially the market, if we want to put it that way, where you can see much more where Google is like acquiring other ad companies and making sure that it owns both sides of the platform or whatever, the ones that the ad buyers are using and the ones that the sellers are using. So that one seems like it's much more ripe for like a more interventionist action than the actual search engine itself. Oh, yeah. Like, indeed. Like right now, the current case, the search monopolization one, that one's still in the

remedy phase. The judge could call for the company to be broken up. I really doubt that. That's considered drastic these days, even though it makes sense for Google, just like it made sense for Microsoft. But they didn't do that one. They probably won't do this one. And then, of course, there'll be Google's appeal, which will take years.

Like that's universally expected. That's the typical timeframe for these kinds of state corporate litigation cases. They have that timeframe. But the ad case, yeah, that's just starting. I mean they're just going to get fried because Google's appeal will be, OK, we paid to make our browser the default, but no one's paying anything. And under our wimpy, modern, you know, very market-favorable University of Chicago antitrust standards, yes, we did monopolization, but no one's paying. So there's no real harm. So there's no standing for the DOJ.

We want this overturned. And they could do it just because of that outrageous doctrine that if you're not charging people more dollars and cents, your monopoly is acceptable. They can get away with that. The advertising thing is absolutely leading to higher prices. And specifically, not for us. I mean, perhaps some of the listeners have a business and you advertise through Google's systems. That's fine. But most of Google's advertisers, I mean, it's just the advertisers of the world. You know, it's big entities like Apple and Unilever and Disney and stuff. And those guys are paying higher prices. They will be filing, mark my words, amicus curiae, friend of the court briefs, supporting the antitrust case.

They're saying, we're being harmed by this. We're just trying to reach consumers with our wonderful commercials that they're so excited to see. And awful Google is making us pay more for it. Like there, there clearly is higher prices for consumers, not consumers that we should really be concerned about their welfare, but this is where we are. So I expect Google to get completely fried and probably forced to sell off ad mobile and maybe even double click. This stuff gets into Google's advertising dominance history. People can look at BitTyrants if you want some of the history there. I would absolutely say I like Justice's odds on the ad case a lot

better because there absolutely is dollars and cents and corporate dollars and cents. Their voice will be heard, unlike some of us. So I definitely like the government's odds better there. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, to talk a bit more about those remedies and what can actually come out of these kinds of antitrust cases, I would like to go back to Microsoft in the 1990s, right? Because I do think that that is an important precedent setting case when we think about what is happening now with, you know, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission targeting all of these major tech companies. So can you give us like the lowdown on what happened in the 90s and early 2000s with that Microsoft case, why it was so important and why Microsoft ultimately wasn't broken up?

Yeah, so I have a reputation among certain friends of mine as being obsessed with the Microsoft case, which is outrageous. It's important. You know, this is how your friends troll you, you know, in your personal life. But it is true that I, you know, like rely on some like viewers can't see this, but I'm holding up a gigantic 400-page history of the Microsoft antitrust cases. It's important both on its own terms. I mean, Microsoft is a big deal. Even if you don't have a job or you're forced to use Windows like many of us do, it still is the second biggest cloud computing platform. It's the biggest company in the world right now.

$3 trillion market capitalization at this moment. About a third of that, about $1 trillion of that, is AI hype because it bought ChatGPT and everyone's excited about melting the climate even more so we can fill the internet with hideous things and lies. So a lot of excitement around that. But Microsoft is still important and it's doubly important because it's the one precedent that we have, as we said at the beginning, for how these really big monopolistic tech platforms are going to get treated as they go through the legal system. And with Microsoft, as we said at the beginning, for how these really big monopolistic tech platforms are going to get treated as they go through the legal system. And with Microsoft, as we said, you have a full monopoly in operating systems that got entrenched over time. And that was

absolutely global. That was US, Europe, Japan, like all the machines are running Windows there, which has compatibility benefits. And that's part of the network effect with operating systems. Everything is compatible. So it makes it less likely that you're going to break from Windows and start using Apple or maybe Linux if you're really into it. So it had that same kind of network effect monopoly there and only went to court when it used it to basically destroy Netscape, which was the first browser for the web, which was the brand new way you could view sites on the internet. Very exciting technology if you're from the 90s. And that was the big thing

because their operating system was on literally nearly every computer on earth. They bundled in their really, really lousy browser, Internet Explorer, which has such a bad reputation. They like retired it two years ago and now it's like Wave or something stupid or Edge. Microsoft Edge, yeah. Thank you. It's such a dumb name. I can't even remember it. You only use this browser because you're clicking on a link in Windows and it defaults to that,

of course. Again, the power of defaults. But because that was enough to destroy Netscape, because now Explorers on everyone's computer when they updated to, as I recall, the Windows 95 update. Again, this was how the internet worked back in the day. That allowed them to just take over that industry, and that's where they got trouble in court. They had a couple of firms. Microsoft also crushed a lot of other entities and made a lot of enemies. Monopolists do do that. And so eventually, they got the attention of the FTC, which then passed the case to the Department of Justice. And ultimately, they just lost their court case. It's an amazing story. Yeah, I talk about it a lot in Bit Tyrants and some of the recent tech coverage I'm doing for Jacobin. One thing I just recommend for people, if you have some time, is just go on YouTube and pull up Bill Gates' deposition. Just search those terms from his antitrust case. You know, he's on

video. It's Bill Gates, even then the richest man in the world, incredible bully in his personal life. Like a lot of these guys like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are all famous for being bullying pricks in their personal life cause and effect. But anyway, that's the case. It really is wild to go back and watch those videos now because like, you know, Bill Gates has like so effectively rebranded himself and like bought this great image through his philanthropy and through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And to go back and look at that now to be like, this is who this guy really is, but he's really effectively convinced us that he's someone else.

It is true. And I have a whole section on this in the new book on The Rich. But yeah, philanthropy in Rockefeller's time and today, and Bill Gates always compared himself to John Rockefeller, you know, the oil monopolist. So it's, you know, a real comparison. They would use philanthropy just to clean up their image. Like Rockefeller back in those days, it was about giving money to churches, Carnegie building libraries, endowments, like Rockefeller gave a giant, in today's numbers, multimillion dollar endowment to the University of Chicago. And it's been a right-wing bastion ever since. Probably not completely coincidentally. These days, you make a giant foundation and put your names on it and then awkwardly separate the foundation when you divorce like Bill and Melinda

and Jeff and Mackenzie are doing painful divorces. Think of the children and the foundation. They're real children. So those are painful moments there. But you are right. It's amazing how that's cleaned it up. Now, Bill Gates is seen as this grandfatherly guy who hates malaria, whereas in the 90s, he was literally, not figuratively, literally a Simpsons villain. He was in need of the reputation laundering. And it's when he was under this antitrust trial that he put in his big $10 billion endowments to the foundation. That's where the big buildup all took place. Referring back to that case now, Microsoft was originally, it lost its case partially because of Gates' deposition. That's why we brought it up. If you watch it first, I mean, he's just the most smug, condescending, patronizing douchebag you've ever seen. I remember once somehow I saw footage

of Justin Bieber, the pop star, getting questioned by some sheriff after I'm sure he ran over somebody or who knows what the story is. I don't know anything about that case. But it's famous footage because he's just like, you know, sexy Justin Bieber leaning back and just being a smug dick to some sheriff. Bill Gates is like that times 10 because he actually is a billionaire and ran the most one of the most important world industries. And he gives these unbelievably effusive answers and says, well, it depends on what the meaning of is, is. Unbelievable stuff. But his answers kept getting contradicted by Microsoft's internal emails, which of course came out in the court discovery process. That's why for all the weaknesses of antitrust that I

complain about a lot, one great thing is that because it is court-based, all their documents come out in discovery. So creep economists like myself can pour over them and put their dirty laundry in books and stuff like that, which is a lot of fun. But that was a big part of the evidence against them. So they lost their court case and their federal judge ruled they were a monopolist and that they be broken up, which is the big antitrust response to adjudicated monopolies. And the technical term is a forced divestiture. You're required legally to sell off chunks of the business till you're not a monopoly and you're merely an oligopoly. That's an industry with just two or three big players like our cell phone industry with three companies. They were supposed to do

that. Then in his appeal, they got that breakup order set aside and the Bush administration just dropped that goal. The idea was to break them up into a couple firms. One would be the operating system Windows company. One would be the operating system Windows company. One would run the big Office apps, which could totally be its own giant firm. Those who are seeking to break up Google, it's a similar idea, like Search Engine, Android, YouTube, Chrome. Those would all make perfectly good freestanding entities. And they still remain corporate property of the rich after all. Again, this is ultimately a pro-market monopoly system here. But because

Microsoft avoided breakup, it got to instead, okay, we're not going to break up your company, but you are a monopolist, so we're going to punish you with what we call behavioral remedies in law, or sometimes conduct remedies. So yes, you're a monopolist. Yes, you maintain it with sleazy, lying, disingenuous techniques, but we're going to let you keep that. But you now follow certain extra rules unless you fool us somehow. And so in Microsoft's case, they were all conduct remedies. So, for example, it had to start including a browser window in its operating system for computer makers. You boot up your 2004 laptop and when it first boots, you'll get a ballot screen, they called it.

A couple of possible browser options include, in those days, Netscape and Explorer and, I guess, Opera and whatever else we had at that time. A previous era for internet browsing. It was stuck with that, and it had to accept a technical committee that forced it to release some of its technical rules so it couldn't try to dominate networking technology markets by refusing to reveal their APIs, which you have to have if you're going to have compatibility of software and hardware. So it held all these very kind of impressive sounding on their own. You know, you have to give people a browser choice. You have to accept what the tech committee says. But they're all fairly small. And because Microsoft remains this multi-trillion dollar firm, it has every tool at its discretion to try to wiggle out of those.

One especially shocking thing that I refer to in some of the tech writing is Microsoft, for example, in the European Union, it had a similar antitrust, anti-monopoly case at that time. They were required, for example, to include things like a browser screen. But at some point, they released a new version of Windows that just didn't include the browser screen. No one noticed for, I believe it was nine months, like a very long time. They just looked very, very wimpy requirements. None of them prevented Microsoft from totally taking over web browsing for some years with its rotten Explorer browser. The people that created

Netscape rolled most of its code over to the Firefox browser. So if you're using Firefox, like I am right now, you're using the legacy of Netscape. So its soul lives on. But that's something that the authors of this large book I'm looking at here of antitrust reference, they make the point. Antitrust has many abilities, but it cannot raise the debt. And because these court cases go on for years, even for the initial verdict, let alone all the appeals, by the time those things come through, whatever prey the

monopolist was eating that started all this, they've been digested long ago. So it had pretty limited effects. Microsoft, as I recall, its original consent decree went for, I believe it was five years, but because it dragged its feet so much on implementation, they ended up renewing the consent decree for several more years, but it expired. And then after, I believe it was five years, but because it dragged its feet so much on implementation, they ended up renewing the consent decree for several more years, but it expired. And then after, I believe it was 12 years, Microsoft's just free of all these obligations. And yes, you're a monopoly and they maintain, you know, by now you have Chrome OS, Chromebooks are widespread, especially in like primary ed and stuff like that. And Apple has a bigger market share than it did in the 90s when it almost went bankrupt. So now Microsoft's operating system monopoly through Windows is what we would call a sectional monopoly. In certain sectors of computing,

it still has the OS monopoly. I work for the public sector, so all of our work computers still run on Windows. But you may have a Chrome OS or something. And so much computing now is mobile through Android and Apple's iOS, those mobile operating systems. That's eaten into the power of Microsoft's operating system monopoly quite a bit. But they never got taken out of that position. So they can also use their old monopoly profits, even as their classic monopoly declines in market share with the growth of mobile.

They can roll that money into other things like becoming the second biggest player in cloud computing with their Azure platform. And of course, then buying up the upstarts for whatever the next new flash in the pan in the market is, which of course is AI. So I imagine something similar will happen to Google. You never know. So much power is in the hands of our judges in the United States that these little robed tyrants, you never know what they're going to decide will happen to us. Maybe you can have an abortion. Maybe you can keep your monopoly. Somebody in a quiet office alone with no public input will decide. It's an amazing thing. So we'll find out. But I expect something similar will happen to Google. I'm sure it will be required to end its outright purchasing of default status and

certainly have its ad monopoly at least partially broken up. Time will tell, of course. But I really think it will be similar to Microsoft in that it stays intact as a firm and remains an incredibly powerful presence. I mean, Google is arguably the most important single company on earth. So we'll all watch. But I expect something similar to the fate of Microsoft, which is to continue ruling over us for decades to come. I'm much the same, right? Like, when you think about the possible impacts of the remedies of this Google case, you think, okay, so maybe they add a choice screen, right? Or some way in the Apple browser or in Android or whatever, where you can choose your search engine as a default. But like the vast majority of people

are still going to choose Google as the default, even if they're presented with the option to do so. Yeah, that's an important point too, because yeah, the whole goal here is maybe we'll get a remedy, yeah, where people get to choose their search engine just like they get to choose their browsers under Microsoft's consent decree.

But there it just gets down to, okay, we finally got you, we moved heaven and earth to get you to include this browser screen. But now it just comes down to an American or Canadian or European consumer, who God bless them, are not necessarily high news consumers. They're like, what is this? It just becomes an annoying screen you have to get through on the course of setting up your new laptop or something. And you're like, okay, different browser. Okay, well, Google, I don't know, Bing. Okay, I've heard of Google. And you click Google, or maybe Yahoo. It's like, it does just then come down to pure name recognition, except, of course, for like the small number of people who are into tech or politics or economics,

but that is a minority section of the marketplace for sure. So the goal of all this is just to let people who haven't like heard anything about this issues or really know what the stakes are. Like I'm a big fan of popular sovereignty, but you have to have an idea of what's going on. You know, my state, we have mail-in balloting and you also get a voter guide where it's just what the issues are, what the candidates are, what their positions are. There's a referendum. You get a little one page argument for both sides. Like that's,. That's an informed electorate, at least a little bit. With this, it's the opposite of that. It's here's a ballot for something you never thought about voting of before. Isn't that annoying? Click on the first name you've heard of is what it comes down to.

And again, there may be other stuff. Again, Google will probably have a much more punishing ad industry verdict because there they're way more nakedly guilty and actually inflicting harm, money damages on some parties. So there, we'll see what this judge decides once the Lord is done speaking to him and giving him his mandate from God. We'll see what a American judge has decided on for us. Yeah, no, exactly. Right. Like, and especially when you talk about like that small section of people who are really into this stuff, maybe choosing something different. Like I feel like a lot of these potential remedies come down to that, right? Okay. These purchase agreements, these default agreements with Apple and Samsung and Mozilla and whoever else might go away. Okay. But they're, you know, Google is probably still going to be the default regardless of whether they're giving them money. And then

the other piece is like, one of the like potential things I've heard is like, maybe Google will have to make some of its search algorithms or something like that, like available, you know, in like a non-commercial sort of way or in a fair licensing agreement so that other search engines can build their own based on Google's like better search algorithms. And it's like, even then though, okay, there will be like maybe 5% of the population that's paying attention to that and is actually interested in trying different search engines. But like so many people still use Facebook, like the vast majority of people are still going to be using Google because that's what they recognize. That's what they're used to doing. And like, I don't think it's unreasonable to be like annoyed at average people for not

seeking out those like alternatives just because they might potentially exist. Yeah. When are they ever educated about any of this stuff? It's only on the news and these guys get in trouble. And then like all the background, you know, there's no room for that on a newscast between two ads and a story about a local murder or whatever is on the news. So, yeah, people aren't like aware of this stuff. People usually have like kind of thoughtful, skeptical of power centers, kind of common sense views. But you have to like and Yahoo and Bing get 15% a piece or something like that. Better, I should think. I mean, almost anything is better than a straight monopoly that's in private hands, but unlikely to significantly change the industry. And of

course, the heads of these firms don't want to preside over a defeat. That's not going to help their stock-based compensation if they preside over that. But like for the people who like own the economy, you know, for the wealthier households that own corporations through their stock, these are important decisions that could affect your quarterly earnings. But none of these like have any prospect of like threatening the system of power and private sector dominance over society. I mean, Google will probably still keep YouTube, which is one of the most important media entities that exists in the world these days, that they bought for, if I recall correctly, $2 billion, which is just such a hilariously microscopic amount of money. I mean, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a quarter billion. I mean, the amounts of money to buy these things are microscopic compared to the amount of social leverage that you get out of them. But yeah, ultimately, looking about giving people a little bit more of a choice on the margins, a little less market share dominance for the most

powerful firms. But at the end of the day, you're still going to have a market-based oligopoly of entities. Maybe you have two or three instead of one. Fine, good. But if I'm the 1% of households, that wealthiest one out of 100 households buy wealth. And remember, those households, it's not just cash and assets. I always point out, they're the ones that own corporate America. We talk about corporations are unaccountable. They have monopolies and oligopolies, and they're global, so they can play workforces against each other for the lowest pay and benefits. But they do have bosses. They have owners. They have investors, people who own their stock. And it's just relevant just to make this connection to the stuff I talk about these days about the ruling class. I just like to point this out.

There's not a huge amount of research on stock ownership by households and their wealth. The main research is from the economist Edward Wolff, who wrote a bunch of papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research. But just going with his numbers because it's what we've got. 2016, he found the wealthiest 1% of households owned 40% of all corporate stock, and the richest 10% of households owned 84% of all corporate equity, you know, of all corporate stock, just a tremendous level of concentration. And sure, if you're like a middle class person like me, who's got a professorship, I have a little retirement plan through my employer that I'm lucky to have for all of its stinginess. And so I have a mutual fund. It's a retirement thing. So it's a fund that

owns corporate stock. So it's shares of shares of companies. This is what finance is, of course. So if you're like middle class, you might have a few shares, no doubt, in your retirement account that exists. But that's less than 50% of households have even that. And again, it's tiny, tiny crumbs out of a giant corporate economy that mainly belongs to the rich. If one of your main investments is Google, and let's say it gets a negative outcome, it actually gets broken up. Unlikely, but you never know these days. So much discretion on the part of the judiciary. We'll all be surprised together. If that happens, like that could be a blow for your main stock.

But when they split these things up, you get issued shares in the successor companies. So at the end of the day, you started with Google shares and now you have shares in YouTube, Google and Android and Chrome of similar amounts. I don't want to say it's a wash because those firms will then perform. And you can make a case that the combined firm has more value than the individual pieces. That's often something we observe after corporate breakups. Historically, we don't do that much these days. People have an idea that there's a lot of populism and antitrust, like we're going after these companies. We're going to break them into two. Like that's not that revolutionary. It's what we did with Exxon. It's what happened with AT&T. Maybe it'll happen with these guys. But again, I would be more likely to expect a Microsoft outcome.

Yeah, no. And, you know, even when you talk about, say, even the top 10% or something owning 84%, it's like, you know, the people who own a bit of stocks in their mutual funds or their retirement plan or whatever, that money is being managed by, you know, people far above them. They're not making real decisions in how these companies are running. That's like, you know, the Blackstones and the Vanguards and those sorts of level. It's not actually having much impact. It's still this very small number of people near the top who are having any amount of impact on how any of these companies are really running. But I wanted to ask you about how you were saying there about this real push for antitrust and competition policy

that we've seen over the past number of years, that push has ultimately resulted in this growing critique of these major tech companies, but also the verdict that we had with Google last month, which as you say, is not final yet. We don't know the remedies. There's still an appeal to go through all this sort of stuff, but has got us to this stage where that has happened,

where the European Union has taken a number of more aggressive steps against some of these tech companies and where, you know, there are now cases against in the United States against Apple and Amazon and Facebook as well that are targeting certain aspects of their businesses to try to affect them. And I guess my question would be, like, when we think about this broader push based on what you've been talking about, what is the real likely outcome that we're going to get from all of this? When we think about how, you know, there was a lot of popular pressure around this idea of like breaking up the big tech companies and using antitrust against them, it feels like there was a lot of excitement about that. It feels like there was a lot of public support

for this idea that we need to challenge the power of these big tech companies. But based on what you're saying about how antitrust law works in the United States and the likely remedies that we might get from some of these things, it kind of feels like maybe we put a bit too much hope in antitrust and competition policy

as being the solution to these very significant problems that come from the tech industry. Yeah, I think that's a pretty strong case to be made. And I mean, again, to really see the limits, you should go to where the process is stronger, which, as you said, would be the European Union. There, their competition authority is a lot more serious. It does help, I think, that most of the tech majors are based in the United States, not Western Europe. We're the ones whose military built up the internet on the side because they had so much money. So we get to have the first crack at monopolizing all these tech spaces, and we did. So that plays a role. But the European Union's

been impressively more active on this subject. And yeah, we have now fairly large antitrust litigations happening against most of the big tech platforms. The FTC and the Department of Justice kind of split up the big four since Microsoft's already been through this. It's the other one of the big five. We put them to the side. So it is true. Apple is being investigated mainly because of how it runs its app store and its outrageous 30% commission on in-app sales, which it has done like a tiny amount to attenuate if your app doesn't sell very many.

We waived the commission on the first amount of sales, grudgingly allowing apps to refer to outside-of-app-store ways of subscribing, which cuts Apple out of its commission. But even there, Apple is going down to the level of policing the words that can be used to refer to it. The European Union has gone after them far more aggressively than the district courts have so far with Apple's litigation mainly against Epic Games, you know, the Fortnite manufacturer. And the same is true for the other platforms like Amazon's mainly in trouble for how it treats its third party marketplace, which is the basis of its own network power, its own network effects, attracting more consumers

through its main business, brings in more independent sellers, and then you get that positive reinforcement there too. With Facebook or Meta, it's mostly about its purchase of all of its rivals like Instagram. These are all purchases that could have been stopped at the time in the 90s and 2000s, but everyone then was too excited about tech applications and phones to do anything about it back then. And now it's, well, maybe we can unwind that transaction they did 15 years ago. But the European Union has been a lot more aggressive on all of these. They're really going after Apple's and Amazon's control of their own shopping marketplace platforms through their app stores and through their third-party sellers.

But even there, I mean, no one anticipates more than, like, they're not really in a position to break up the firms in Europe. Like, that is technically possible, but you don't really see that remedy being sought in the European cases because the firms aren't headquartered in the EU. It's unclear what it would mean and if their jurisdiction really can even cover that. So the firms are safer here in America. But going after also, like, their tax shelters, the specific way, like, Amazon funnels all of its earnings through Ireland and Luxembourg, just incredibly, you know, on the face of it, implausible ways of avoiding your tax burden. We'd like to keep using all your public services and shipping Amazon goods and Apple phones on the

roads, but we'd like to not pay for them. We'd like you grubby peasants to pay for them while we don't. We just get the benefits. So we'll see. But in the European Union, no one expects these firms to actually be brought under like, certainly not under any kind of popular sovereignty. And that's one reason in the book that I talk more about expropriation as a way of like really dealing with this issue rather than just antitrust, which I'm in favor of keeping antitrust because it's what we have at the moment. But just in every way – I mean, again, it's only really usable if there's a price exploitation involved. It doesn't take us any further than breaking it down to a couple of giant firms. And again, those firms stay in the wealthiest properties. So as long as we're just talking about antitrust or the European, you know,

more aggressive and better competition policing, this still leaves us with a market landscape with large tech firms that dominate really important services. So I would definitely agree we need to look past that to at least slightly more radical options if we want to make any real change here. Yeah. Like I think it makes a ton of sense, right? And like you say, I'm not opposed to antitrust or competition policy because that is what we have, right? What we can get out of it is something that we should take and that we should take advantage of, but it feels like, okay, we're going to run these cases against Google, but Google is still going to have its search monopoly. It just might not be able to do as many dominant practices as a

result of it. Or like Apple is still going to have its app store. And while some companies like Epic and Microsoft and Spotify or whatever might be able to get away from paying the 30% or pay a lower amount or put their own app stores on the phone or whatever, like the vast majority of consumers are still going to be using that default app store because that is the way it's set up. And that's what's easy to use. Like it just feels like, okay, yes, there are good things that are going to come out of it. Yes, this is something that we should be doing. Yes, we should be trying to rein in these companies. But it feels like it takes so long to get anywhere with it while these tech companies are still moving forward. And then when we finally get there, you know, if we get

there with some of these antitrust cases, that looking at what has happened in the European Union, for example, it's like, okay, this is good. They've made some changes, but like that is not fundamentally going to dismantle the power of these major tech companies that they have been able to build up because we let them do whatever they want for so long. I don't know. It just feels a bit like frustrating. It really is frustrating because too little too late is like the definition of antitrust and competition law. Like, you know, we let the bad thing happen and then we put some wimpy limits on you or maybe try to break it back up when it would have been much easier just to prevent it from being done in the first place. And technically, antitrust is empowered to do that, you know, to block these mergers. But because of how power and hype work in the private sector,

I mean, no one stopped Google from buying the big ad operators, especially DoubleClick. I mean, the FTC did actually go after Google on these ad monopolization grounds in the 2010s. I forget the exact years, in the Obama years. And the FTC just let them off completely. They did an investigation, and it is expected under political influence from the Obama administration. Google's, I don't know if he was still the CEO. He might have been the former CEO then. But the billionaire, Eric Schmidt, was a big figure in the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. And it's widely thought that that played a role in the FTC dropping that case. So pretty wimpy answers here and is frustrating. This is one reason why a lot of us say expropriation is like

the real thing. And that's certainly a more radical remedy. Expropriation, of course, just refers to taking property away from someone through some legal process. That's expropriation. And that's the kind of thing that would be like a more like as it were like left wing or socialist policy there, which is, OK, maybe there's one of you. Maybe there's three. Why are you people in charge of some big, important industry? Like, why do the three of you get to decide what will be prioritized on search results or what posts will be favored on social media feeds? Why are there only two of you that decide how much oil will be produced at our oil refineries in our country? Why do you run the

data centers? Why does Bill Gates get to be the largest private landowner in the United States with more land than the state of Connecticut? Because we have capitalism, we have private ownership, not just of your personal property, like your personal home and your clothes or your car or something, what we call your personal or sometimes your petty property. We're talking about like the productive capital that produces the goods of our society, you know, the big factories and data centers, you know, plastics, plants, things that make the modern world. That stuff is private properties, you know, it's corporate property. So it belongs to that same class of shareholders we mentioned before. Why the hell do they get to A, own it and make all the money from it, and B, almost as importantly, just decide what will happen?

Because they are the ones who, as I said, decide what investment will occur, what will build up for tomorrow's economy and what it will look like. So when I talk about the ruling class, I always say it's those segments of wealthy households that staff the senior levels of government and that run the executive echelons of the corporate world and own their stock. I mean, those are the ones who make the political and investment decisions about what tomorrow will look like. And if you look at it, it's just a bunch of remote ruling class bastards. Like, there's just no rationalization for their power at all. Like when Melinda French Gates, who divorced Bill Gates a while ago, as we mentioned, she said, it's like so arbitrary and strange that I have so much money. It's a paraphrase, but she made worse to that effect. It's like, oh, that's very well put,

Melinda. Yeah, like it is weird and arbitrary that you are in charge. So expropriation ends that. Expropriation, you take that property away in some form. And there's a lot of ways you can think about it. You know, I'm American. So, you know, we like, you know, it's North America. We like experimental approaches to things. You try a few options out. So I think nationalizing of industries that are causing real disasters for us would be like a great place to start.

I mean, the big ones there would be tech and energy. Our energy system is really on track to ruining the inhabitability of the biospheric systems that we rely on every day to keep us alive and to give us fresh air and water. You can mess those up. We economists love to brag about capitalism and its exponential growth. It grows faster every year than last year. Works great as long as you don't have any finite aspect to any of your resources.

Oh, they're all finite. Oh, dear. So we get into a lot of trouble there. Like nationalizing the energy industry would be a great place to start. I personally like a little bit more of a straight socialist approach. I feel we should have a significant amount of additional worker organization in our labor movement, which is having at least a little renaissance right now in America, and do a series of sit-down strikes where workers take control of the capital. They're the ones who have to work in every day. They're the ones who know how to actually do it. Elon Musk doesn't know how to make an electric car. Bill

Gates doesn't know how to program operating systems anymore. Some poor schmuck who works for them does that. And maybe they're well-paid. Maybe they're white-collar. Maybe they're blue-collar. We all share the threat of a pink slip and the power of the boss to decide whether we get to work for them anymore. So we should expropriate that property, in my view. The way I make this case is, you know, in America, it's a very capitalist country. Even our monopoly laws are fairly market friendly, I would say. But we have had one really big expropriation in this country, like one really large taking of private property away. And of course, it was the Emancipation Proclamation and the freedom of the slaves.

Took very, very valuable private property from the slave-owning aristocracy of the South, just because we decided that they're human beings and really should be allowed to have equal rights and dignity, and you shouldn't be able to tell them to do whatever you want or sell their children if you feel like it. That was an expropriation.

We decided people deserve rights, so we took property away from a bunch of rich and bread entitled scumbags. We should continue that, in my view, and start to include things like the fossil fuel economy and the tech platforms and other forms of like just like very socially disastrous or just naked monopolies like those should be first in line to get expropriated, in my view. And then they don't have the position to come back later because, of course, that's what happened to us. You know, I mean, you know, I'm in my 40s. And so around the time I was born, we were entering the neoliberalism era where companies, you know, fought to have their taxes lower, their regulations loosened. And it created today's billionaire dominated bubble fest of disaster that we call the marketplace. That only happened because in the New Deal era and the great society and social democratic

periods in Europe and Canada, we didn't expropriate them. We taxed them a lot and we regulated them a lot. Big era for antitrust at that time. That's when we were breaking up firms. But we left them fundamentally in possession of that physical capital and the huge fortunes. Also, yes, the cash that comes from that. They were in a position to push for Reagan and Thatcher the moment that people got so sick of 70s inflation that they were willing to accept a turn to the right.

And they were in a position to do that because we left them with their property. Why do we do that? We should take the property away. No one wants a ruling class. The only people who like a ruling class are people who are in it or people who think that they will be in it because they're diluted middle class people and think that because they have a law degree, they're going to be the president of America tomorrow. Expropriation, something to consider.

Yeah, like I think that there's definitely an argument to be made for nationalizing a lot of these major tech companies and their major platforms and their dominant businesses, right? But like even if someone is uncomfortable with going that far, even the idea of like making something a public utility, so you have very clear like rules about how it can act and how like the public benefits that it needs to provide if you're thinking about something like a Google search engine or something like that, like that seems just completely obvious in the case of something like that. If you can't get the machinations of the US state to go so far as to take things away and actually nationalize them.

But you were talking about the power of these major families and these major billionaires and the wealth that they hold. Of course, a lot of these tech billionaires are also very influential in politics. I've been doing episodes recently on, you know, the ways that they're trying to influence the Republican and Democratic campaigns. But one example of that, you know, related to antitrust is a lot of these tech billionaires like Reid Hoffman, I think his name is, of LinkedIn, Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, and some other ones, you know, have said, we are donating to the Harris campaign, but what we really want for our donations is for the Harris campaign to get rid of Lena Kahn,

who is the head of the Federal Trade Commission, if she becomes president. Like, what do you make of just all of that? Yeah, it's pretty rich. And one thing to say just very quickly about what you said at the beginning there about having, yeah, just like a regulated utility, that was what we did with AT&T before we broke it up.

Like, it was allowed to have a monopoly, but it had a legal charter at the federal level requiring it to do a bunch of stuff if it was going to have its monopoly. That's one way of doing it. And so they couldn't favor one form of traffic over another. Basically, a requirement of what we would today call net neutrality was imposed on AT&T, just to refer back to that thing that no one remembers anymore. The tech billionaires, yeah, it's pretty juicy. If you're like me, you're an economist, you have to read the Wall Street Journal every day. If you're an American economist, it's like your official publication. Personally, I prefer the Financial Times. I read that one instead. I love the Financial Times. If I was a European or Canadian,

I would definitely do that. It's even more expensive than the journal. And I already pay for the journal in the New York Times. It's too much. I'll try to get that for my birthday. But I love the Financial Times. I love Martin Wolf. Yeah, good stuff there. But the Wall Street Journal, it's like most business reporting, like the journalism, like

with the Times. Like, it's very, very high quality. I mean, really the best journalism you can get because this is media for wealthy, powerful people. You know, it's the Wall Street Journal. It's the Financial Times. They're for investors, executives, managers, stockholders, economists, analysts, stock pickers, stuff like that. So the journalism is very serious because it's about how to get money. And people want real information for that. But its editorial page, Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert

Murdoch, the same Australian billionaire that owns Fox News. And indeed, it's op-ed page. I always say it's basically Fox News with AP English. And if you look at it, I would say at least one day a week, they have an editorial about how Lita Khan needs to go. And they'll even refer to how big tech is annoying when it does anything liberal, like when it was suppressing COVID misinformation a couple of years ago. Suddenly, we really care about private entities filtering speech. Suddenly, billionaires that own media entities are very concerned about billionaires who own media entities just because that's a liberal thing and I don't like it. It's amazing to see that, which is kind of funny because you always have these very wealthy, powerful figures.

And as soon as any entity inconveniences them at all, I mean, Lena Kahn, you know, he was, again, the head of the FTC. And she is prominent among conservatives and libertarians and market lovers because she is trying to create a new way for antitrust to be relevant in the era of tech when they're dealing with that constraint from the 90s, which is, you know, you're not costing the consumers more. It's fine, which would have allowed standard oil to stay in place, which shows you like how toothless it really, really is. But she's been saying this, if you

have market power, that can be tantamount to it. So she, you know, I love her, hate her. And she's got a lot of really wimpy, technocratic Biden administration opinions herself. I'm not like a gigantic fan of hers. But I am grateful that she's brought these cases. If nothing else, it brings these corporate documents out, which give me a lot of fun afternoons. So I appreciate her for that. But every week, they are bashing her in the business press for just implying that there should be limits on the power of private entities or that there's any kind of perimeter of legitimate public interests that could counteract that. It's amazing, yeah, to see even the more liberal elements of the Silicon Valley technological aristocracy who are supporting

Harris. But they'll say, we'd like you to do two things. We'd like you to, yes, get rid of Lena Khan because she's scaring us. And then additionally, we'd like you to get rid of that wealth tax that you vaguely refer to supporting that we all know isn't going to go anywhere. Even you supporting that is too much. And again, Harris now is neck and neck with Trump, which in America probably means Trump wins. That's usually the case. He usually overperforms his poll numbers. And again, she won't run on a policy like she's doing a Clinton. She will not run on any popular progressive policy. I mean, Medicare for all, she pretended to support during a 2020 primary that was so bad she didn't even get to the first primary. And she supported then because she was trying to gain popularity. And 88 percent of

Democrats support Medicare for all. And even more than half of Republicans. It's such a popular piece of progressive policy. But because she won't run on it, I expect her to do a Clinton. She's like a Clinton with charisma, which is probably not going to be enough. It looks like I mean, I guess, you know, we'll all find out together in November, I suppose. But, yeah, they're trying to get rid of her. And, of course, like the right wing, you know, hates your guts. I mean, Donald Trump has said that he would like to appoint Elon

Musk to a government efficiency position. And I'm really not a person who likes to scold people into voting for Democrats. I mean, the Democrats, you know, the United States, we've never had a labor-based party. Like for a while, the Democrats included labor and then threw them out of the boat in the 90s. We've always had two capitalist parties. Like that's always been the case. They're very open about that. Some people like to delude themselves on it. And you can get real things done, like the Sanders campaign. You run on the parties that you got, I suppose. Parties control their own ballot lines in the United States, which is an insane, difficult obstacle for us to deal with here. But even there, like,

you know, like the far right, like they hate the FTC more than anyone. I would say one of the first things that Musk would do would be try to abolish things like OSHA, the FTC, National Labor Relations Board. So I'm not usually someone who pushes people to vote for Democrats. But I would say if you live in a swing state in America, it would be great to not have Elon Musk in the government getting rid of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I would love it if that did not happen. Like most of the American population, I live in a state where my vote for the White House race at least is not relevant. I live in Washington, which is not going to be in play, which is like to get rid of the one person who's trying to put any wimpy antitrust leashes on our behavior. I mean, it really shows, like, for all their, like, liberal affectations in big tech. I mean, your corporations love, like, the identity aspects of liberalism. They like the feel-good aspects of diversity and inclusion.

And those are positive changes that should have been made, like, 150 years ago. So I'm not trying to say, I'm anti-DEI, but as soon as it's anything involving material interests, your money, your company, its position in the marketplace, then it's, I like the one critic that exists to be fired. Here's a million dollars. Will you fire her, please? A little of that goes a long way. So yeah, I don't know. I worry about Ms. Khan. You know, she might be too good for American government, I fear. Yeah. It's a bit grim, right? As you say, she's not the most perfect person in the world, but she's probably the absolute best that you're ever going to get in a position like that.

So defend her to let her keep taking on these tech companies and driving the VCs mad. Rob, it's great to talk to you. Great to get your insights on all this antitrust stuff and everything else. Thanks so much for taking the time. Sure. My pleasure, man. See you next time. Rob Larson is the author of Mastering the Universe, the obscene wealth of the ruling class, what they do with their money, and why you should hate them even more. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Poulou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.