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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatow, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're talking about antitrust and tech, which is at a particularly weird moment as we enter the second Trump administration. A lot of tech policy is at a weird moment, actually, but antitrust might be the weirdest part of it all.
The pendulum on antitrust has swung back and forth pretty wildly over the past few years, and it's about to swing again under Trump and his new appointees. To help me get a sense of these folks and what might be about to happen, I asked Leah Nyland, an antitrust reporter for Bloomberg News and one of the leading experts on the subject, to come on the show and help me break it all down.
Now, if you're a Decoder listener, you know that the basic frameworks of how antitrust law in the United States work have been more or less the same since Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, all the way through the Obama presidency and the first Trump administration.
But under President Biden, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lena Kahn and Department of Justice antitrust chief Jonathan Cantor have taken a bold approach to antitrust that many of us have not really seen in our lifetimes. And they've been pretty public about it. Cantor has been on Decoder twice in the past year to talk about this approach and what it means.
After all, Amazon, Apple, and Meta are all currently facing major antitrust lawsuits, with Microsoft now under investigation as well. And then there's Google, which is potentially staring down a full breakup after already losing one major antitrust suit. with a ruling in a second case about advertising due basically any day now.
And a lot of this regulatory pressure has been designed to avoid what I like to call the Instagram problem, where everyone wishes the governments of the world had prevented Facebook from buying Instagram in 2012, which might have allowed Instagram to turn into a real competitor to Facebook. But that didn't happen.
For pretty much the entire 2010s, the tech industry grew and consolidated through mergers and acquisitions of startups at a breakneck pace, which is how you ended up with what some founders and venture capitalists called a kill zone around the big companies. If they saw a startup that might compete with them, they would just buy it, and that would be that.
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