Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, and writer of the Substack BIG, discusses antitrust as the framework for understanding big tech power. He describes the think tank's work researching monopolies in technology and health care, filing briefs, and running daily coverage of the federal antitrust case against Google at Big Tech on Trial. Stoller identifies himself as a populist rather than a progressive, tracing that lineage to the merchant and farmer movements of the 1880s and 1890s that organized against the railroads, and to Wright Patman, the Texas congressman he calls the last populist, who served from 1929 to 1976 and is the subject of his book. Pinchbeck raises online speech and censorship.
Guest: Matt Stoller
In brief
- Stoller argues that liberty resides in the commercial sphere as much as the political one, and that political liberty is not possible without it.
- Stoller says large corporations now function more as governing institutions than as businesses, which is what makes deconcentrating economic power a democratic question.
- Stoller wrote Goliath to understand how the Democratic Party became corporate, using Wright Patman's career as the counter-example of a politician who held the populist line.
- Stoller declines to opine on the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, arguing that these cases turn on volumes of detail amid a great deal of bad information, and that having an opinion requires doing the work first.
- Stoller points to Epic Games' successful antitrust suit against Google over app stores as evidence that private parties, not only government, can bring these cases.
- Stoller argues that participating in the anti-monopoly movement is like asking how to improve democracy generally: the first step is learning what an empowered public means, then acting from where you are.
Full text
uh okay hey everybody today I'm here with the extraordinary Matt Stoler who uh has really a um a sstack kind of a media Enterprise which I think is really crucial for people to uh to beam into and pay attention to where he covers U you know corporate monopolies antitrust big Tech and we originally met I think about 10 years ago through Russell Brand in a in a in a different configuration is that correct yeah yeah uh do you want to tell us a little bit about your background and and kind of how you got passionate about these certain issues and so on yeah so I've been uh in public policy in and around it for about 20 years now and um I did a little bit of media as well but I got interested in a competition policy which is sort of the body of laws around how corporations are structured and how markets are structured I I got interested in that around kind of like 20091 and got into into antitrust a couple years later and so I am a um formally my my my position uh is that I'm a I'm a director of research at a think tank in Washington DC called the American economic Liberties project and we study markets and Monopoly power I also wrote a book called Goliath the 100-year war between Monopoly power and democracy and then I write uh a substack which you saw kindly refer to uh called uh the big newsletter and we have a uh we have a site right now called Big Tech on trial. com where we are doing daily coverage of a a big antitrust case against Google which is happening right now in Alexandria Virginia so there we go there you go and um so what is the think tank actually so the think tank is uh it's it's called the American economic Liberties project Alp and we have we started in 2020 although we were spin off of a different Think Tank and what we do is rewrite uh we research and write about monopolies in uh Tech in health care uh we we write about antitrust laws sometimes we file uh briefs in court although we don't litigate ourselves and the goal is really to uh deconcentrate Power in the economy to open up markets for workers small business and uh to kind of Ratchet back some of the overwhelming power of big business which at this point is kind of more uh governing than actually just sort of running businesses um so that's that's the point of um Alp we believe that Liberty resides in the commercial sphere just as it does in the political sphere and you can't have one without you can't have Liberty in politics if you don't have Liberty in uh in Commerce that's something that is a long we have a long track record of thinking about Commerce that way in America and we kind of want to uphold that tradition yeah I mean I mean we'll get into that I mean I've been looking at Goliath and um I mean I'll kind of um I guess I'll explain why I thought of you recently really wanted to reach out to you I guess I found that I was feeling confused and I and I and I sense that if I'm feeling confused probably many other people are feeling confused there's so much happening around kind of free free speech quote unquote the internet censorship and um yeah and then so many people you know discuss in different ways and kind of tweak it in different ways yeah I wanted to sort of you know I'm kind of curious how would you define your own kind of political position I mean do you feel like a do you have a defined political do you feel like an independent or do you feel more like a Bernie Sanders Democrat or kind of where would you sit on the sort of pendulum of politics well I I I think of myself as a populist more than uh that that's where I come from so I I sat on the Progressive side but I'm more of a populist and I'm a Democrat I did work I worked in the Senate budget committee ranking member Bernie Sanders I don't totally share uh his views on everything but um uh but you know I I my book was about a uh a congressman named the last populist who Nick named the last populist Wright Patman who was from Texas Texas Arcana from 1929 to 1976 he was in Congress and he modeled his career after a series of farmers in the 18 76 that's a huge career oh yeah no it's it it was a great the reason I wrote the book is because I wanted to I mean the Democrats weren't always like corporate and crappy uh there was a period when they weren't and I wanted to understand what happened and and why they changed and Patman was actually a really good figure who upheld that populist mantle and populism was based on a movement put together by merchants and farmers in the 1880s and 19 1890s that were dealing with the um with railroads the first interstate Network system uh that was privately owned but publicly regulated and they were they there it was these were massive corporations for the first time we didn't have massive corporations before railroads and farmers were getting screwed by them and they were trying to figure out what to do and these were not people who were you know lefties these were business people they were farmers and they were trying to sell their crops they were trying to buy things they're trying to get credit and they have they had a set of political um goals and concerns it was in the post Civil War era so there was a lot of culture Waring stuff race was very important and uh they defined a new plank for uh American politics and that's that's the politics that I sympathize with right that that that the the kind of the populist farmers in the 1880s and 1890s you bring that forward today you can find pieces of it everywhere um but I think it's probably most you know know if you put together kind of like Elizabeth Warren's some of her policy instincts some of Bernie Sanders instincts a little bit of Trump's instincts on like the Federal Reserve um that the like you you m Mash those all together and you get you get basically an attack on on big money oh very cool very cool yeah um yeah okay so I guess um let me start with my pressing concern or confusion in a way because I maybe that's that's the sure um you know just so many things are happening right now for instance the arrest of pavl durov the telegram CEO okay which I don't think you've written about no I and I haven't really followed it because these these are very you know I it's not that I'm not interested it's just that these are there are huge amount of details in all of these cases and there there's a lot of bad information out there and so if I want to have an opinion about it I'm going to have to really spend a lot of time to learn and right now I'm following a case on Google yeah on Google and other so I don't W to I can speak broadly to to platforms but I don't want to present myself as any sort of expert about telegram or any of yeah beautiful that's fine right so obviously there's the Google the antitrust stuff that's going with Google recently I mean let's talk about telegram I'm just I don't mean that I can't I'm just gonna I I just don't know the details um but I can give you broad conceptualizations of what how I think about these kinds of platforms I'm not a we need to to support telegram we need to support I'm not the the conception of free speech that we have today I think is very warped and and weird and in and expansive too expansive so I'm not a kind of free speech absolutist because I I don't think that it's a particularly coherent view um nor do I think it'sa it has anything to do with American traditions which are anything like this weird vision of the internet as this paradise where anyone can say anything across borders that is weird been creepy and has never been anything like that's very anti-American it's not at all what the what the first amendment was ever about so like I know this is going to sound surprising but that that's I can explain what my views on speech yeah yeah what we start that that would be great I'd love to know more yeah I mean so so I think about um I think about uh Speech in the context of of of newspapers right and and newspapers if you if you older than the American democracy are are actually newspapers and newspapers are about um they they spoke to a couple of things right dville wrote about them he said in America the one of the weird things between America and Europe and he was coming from uh from Europe the old world where there were lots of monarchies and aristocracies and um was a very different political culture and so that's what he was kind of comparing and you can think of monarchies and aristocracies as fascist regimes CU that's what they were they were not like we think of you know Kings as like people that wor wigs and stuff like that but they were fascist regimes and he in America he was he was um he was like there's so many newspapers here and they are often bad but there's so many that you can't no one who is powerful and wealthy is able to dominate discourse right because you have such a diversity of opinions and every he said every Hamlet has its own newspaper and he also said that newspapers create publics they create the ability for people to come together and take action together and organize their communities and that's kind of how I think about questions of speech does it allow for people to come together as communities and take action on their own behalf or Express their political concerns and their political needs and uh largely it's about uh a balancing of power so Thomas Jefferson talked about you know if I had to choice between a state and and uh uh a government in newspapers I would choose newspapers I I mean that you know obviously it's a silly hypothetical but but the point is that newspapers play uh the these and it doesn't have to be like the way that we think about current newspapers it's just the idea of a media institution that is that has an audience and has a relationship with audience it creates publics and that is the function of the expressive elements that are put into the American Constitution which the first amendment is not the most important the most important historically is actually the um the postal Clause the one that says that the government can make postal roads and very quickly followed by the establishment of a post office which said we're going to have Universal distribution of information and we're going to offer newspapers and magazines subsidized rates so that we can Quicken the information flow around the country these are not like I don't think you would look at sort of you know you could you could look at this as kind of a network design question but at no point were were they saying you know we need to have everybody be able to say anything that they want at any point to anyone it was we need to Quicken information within the country to build a country right and every major regulation of telecommunication systems be it telegraphs to um telephones radio television even the development of the internet all of these were constructed with the idea that you want to facilitate local control and you want to um build a poity and they also always had prohibitions the idea that you'd have unlimited amounts of pornography is insane that is you know like the that you know the the the Supreme Court's decisions on speech right some of them have prioritized things like gambling which is protected by certain speech Clauses section 230 of CDA protects big Tech firms from engaging in in uh facilitating what they call social casinos or gaming apps um the um pornography the prevalence of pornography as a free speech issue this is totally incoherent and inconsistent with hundreds of years of obscenity laws now you can make the argument that obscenity laws are a bad thing and that certain amounts you know that pornography is a good thing but the idea that it's speech or the idea that we've had no social controls on speech is just it's just not historically accurate we've always had things like prohibitions on fraud prohibitions on defamation we've always had prohibitions on foreign influence of of um of American political discourse we've always had prohibitions on foreign ownership and control of domestic platforms so it wasn't even until like we didn't allow foreigners to own radio stations or radio Technologies or key communication Technologies in fact it wasn't until 2012 under the Obama Administration that the FCC legalized the foreign ownership of radio stations rert Murdoch had to become an American citizen when he was when he was creating his American Media Empire so we've always had these these deep um and important platform restrictions to facilitate the creation of a country and to facilitate the creation of coherent political communities and that's the point of free expression it's not so that anybody can say anything and develop who they are it's to create political communities and some element of Liberty um interesting uh but I mean yeah I mean I guess it's just a different situation now because in the past you could go to the you know the local pub and say you know I don't like these people or you know think Hitler was great or whatever but you didn't you know unless owned a media company or you know had a column and some paper you couldn't reach the masses and even then you couldn't nothing could go viral the way it is now and suddenly like take off and reach like totally new audiences and so on so it seems like it's a slightly different scenario that we have now well so I'm I mean we can we can sort of I can go back and forth on the details because there used to be lots of newspapers like there used to be dozens of newspapers in like New York City right and there were multiple addition and weird things did you know go viral right it was just there used to be all of these alternative newspapers there tons of fan scenes there was you know you would there were local radio local um local uh uh TV and one of the things that I think we saw in the 90s was there were a lot of like local music scenes right if you think about the um the development of jazz the development of rock and roll the development of of hip pop of you know of grunge in the90s like these were a function of the fact that there were localized communities structures and some of them did you know exploded it did very well and some of them didn't but what has happened today I think because there's a little bit of a f channels and nothing's on vibe to it where we see all of these options but it's in fact Skin Deep And while there are um while there is while there is sort of a lot of of of um supposed Choice the actual funding mechanisms for diversity in media have really uh gone away and that's largely a function of our regulatory policy and monopolization of AD Revenue but 2,000 out of 3,000 counties in America now have no local news daily daily local newspaper and you might say oh well whatever but there's blogs and there's other things but it's like no there's no one going to the courthouse there's no one going to city hall there's no one going to the state legislatures in covering what is going on anymore there just isn't and that's so we can think that well there's there's so much uh choice and things can go viral and whatnot but the truth is that that was the point I was making yeah but communication is just highly highly centralized today in a way that it's never been before um the Atlantic had a great you know article about I guess there was some Venture firm that was buying up all the local newspapers and like strip mining them from C for cash yeah yeah have like a few years the advertising you know you know would still work even though you know there was no content anymore because you fired room and then finally they just collapse the whole thing like like like a husk Alden capital is the one of the hedge funds but is doing it too that's been a disaster I'm sure certainly there's like yeah just like we have food deserts across the have like news deserts where there's like no there's like a vacuum of local news at this point right and the reason that's happening is not because people don't want newspapers or because traffic is down because traffic is down is not down people are reading the newspapers more than they ever have um it's it's just that advertising is collapsed and advertising has collapsed uh because Google stole all the money it's not I mean there's no there like that's what the antitrust trial is right now um if you want to buy or sell newspap buy or sell advertising right now online um you you effectively have to use Google software to buy it you have to use Google software to sell it you have to use Google Google exchange to um do the transaction you have to use Google ad networks to find the right people to Market to and Google takes between 30 and 50% of the revenue that advertisers put in plus they redirect the money uh or the traffic and money and data to themselves so like Google owns You Tube own Gmail they own uh search and so they have a lot of advertisers that are coming and buying in their system and they can direct a lot of that Revenue to their own properties so it's like this is this is why when you have you know these social movements take like whatever it is whatever you want to take um black lives matter or you know some of the Trump stuff or whatever it is this kind of viral populist kind of content it's impossible to take even though there's huge demand it's very hard to take that and turn it into a sustainable media business you can do a little bit with subscriptions with substack and whatnot but but in the 60s and 70s when they were figuring out oh there's this untapped market and you had the alternative weeklys emerge they actually could turn the interest and readership that they had into sustainable businesses because they could get advertising revenue from it today you can't do that because you could before 2008 it's not an internet thing either um it it's a post uh 2008 problem when Google systematically acquired all of the major companies in the advertising technology industry and redirected the advertising money from Publishers and newspapers to themselves so that's the crisis that we're really dealing with um you have a few massively centralized Communications institutions Google Facebook um you could you could name maybe Tik Tok I don't know and Amazon also no Amazon may be you know is right because they have a they're the third biggest Advertiser but it's a little bit it some of the things they call advertising are actually just often called it's actually more like paying for shelf space which is not really whatever funded newspapers but yeah you could look at Amazon that way too but the point is is there's these massively centralized institutions Apple and Google have a cartel right over you know the the that was what the other an trust suit was about with Google that just concluded sorry if I'm going over a lot of stuff but like you basically what the reason people are mad I my view is that you have you used to have some element of political control not a huge amount as you noted like yeah there are certain things you can do today that you couldn't do back then but like broadly speaking you were in a medal ecosystem that reflected some of your concerns the local you know sports teams um the local you know your local schools local whatever there was coverage you like you know it wasn't just some random Facebook group and today there isn't today there is no there we don't have communities that we can be a part of instead we are all working through a few centralized institutions that manage us via algorithm and then we have no say over right and and that's why I mean I think if you're just in a world where these you're just like this you are an object for the purpose of being manipulated by an algorithm I don't know why I mean people are mad that that's a good reason to be mad right and that's the situation that we're in yeah um yeah so I want to talk about obviously what's happening with Google I there was also like you know Facebook Zuckerberg wrote that letter about been censored by the bided Administration uh then there was the Tik Tock case that you wrote about that you said had to had to do with this uh what communication 230 yeah so I'd love to learn about all of that stuff but what's what's the most coherent way to to proceed would it make sense maybe if you to give us a little bit of like a history lesson as to like what were like the sort of you sure I can I can do like why did what happened you know sort of the formation of the internet like how our regulatory choices yeah sort of took us from a world um of of kind of localized control to this world where we have centralized power right and then you have people like Mark Zuckerberg who are you know pretending that they were forced by the government to do things right which whether whether Mark Zuckerberg did it himself whether the government told him to do it uh whether it was a good thing or not the qu the real these are all the relevant points the question is always why do we have a system where Mark Zuckerberg has this amount of power where the government can go to Mark Zuckerberg and you know conjoined have that amount of power if if you if you build a system like Facebook someone's going to use it right it's it's like so the question is why did we build that system right not you know not oh my gosh we're using this all powerful system in a way that I don't love right um censor this other way you know not don't censor me censor my enemies right um so okay so what happens right so we have a system in America really going back to um I mean the development of the concept of the free press really isn't is the English Civil War um Oliver Cromwell like the the levelers in the 1650s and it has this English Civil War has a huge impact on the development of the American colonies um and that in many ways sets the stage for American newspapers um the Free Press here much more than it does in in England and localized control over media markets advertising has always been foundational to our country advertising is important for newspapers because it gives them a financing source that is independent of the state right we don't like advertising necessarily it's annoying could be useful but like when you read your newspaper and it's 1800 often they're very partisan or they're business journals or whatever they're not funded by the state they're not funded by Aristocrats they're funded by advertisers in Europe they're funded by the state they're funded by Aristocrats and they don't report on power in the US there's a lot of diversity and and they do right it's a rambunctious world and so you move that forward you have regulation of the telegraph um you have regulations on on a whole series on radio and not you know as technology moves forward telephone and the idea is to allow local control in fact until 1996 and we'll get to 19 96 in a second telephone networks in the US were actually regulated at a city level a lot of people don't realize you telone regulation in America has historically been done at a municipal level and the reason is because that's where you put the wires you put all the wires and and it used to be like you'd have all these you'd have a a a race to put as many for the different companies competing in the 1880s and 90s to put as many wires as they could and finally the municipalities stepped in and said no too many wires we're going to just regulate this and that that rolled into regulation of the system and there were Federal Regulations too but but it was a municipal it was at first a municipal regulatory framework it was also regulated through the use of patents and it was regulated among on an antimonopoly um with with an antimonopoly um lens so AT&T actually stands for American Telephone and Telegraph and in in 1913 they AT&T bought had owned Western Union and the government forced them to spin off Western Union so that that extra te was there for no reason for for for a hundred years right we broke up AT&T three times in the 20th century 1913 1950 and 1982 Americans are always suspicious of large concentrated uh centers of communic of power particularly in Communications right so we broke up ABC I think and turned it into NBC and ABC or maybe it was we broke up NBC in 1940s like this has always been something that's been of concern so the 1970s 1980s happens there's this intellectual movement that says concentrations of power don't matter the only thing that matters is efficiency this is a very weird moment and it this happens not just in media but across the board and you know it's a there's a sort of left-wing socialist vibe to it the people that instrumentalize it are conservative law and economics Scholars people like Milton Freedman he probably the most famous One Robert Bor a whole series you might have heard about project 2025 which is the thing that Democrats are going off about right now there's kind of like common intellectual Origins there and like Heritage is kind of the professionalization of some of those views um but it was largely the law and economics school that instrumentalized it but they were building on top of a kind of left-wing historical framework the the the Socialist left claimed that that populist Legacy in America of decentralizing power never really existed it was always we're always just a capitalist country right and so by building so the 1970s and 80s these these this these intellectual movements come in and they win right and they say we have all this inflation there were all these problems in the 70s and the reason is because we're not listening to economic experts enough and we're we're prioritizing silly things like concentrations of power instead of important things like economic models of efficiency and so so that's what begins the roll back of antitrust laws and dere and the the move forward of deregulation and so you see deregulation in across the board in transportation systems in um media systems in finance in you know pretty much everywhere and uh it starts under Carter so it starts with a democratic initiative and then Reagan amps it up and then in the 19 uh in in 1996 we passed the Telecommunications Act and the Telecommunications Act does things like lifts uh caps on the ownership of the number of radio stations that you can have so that's when Clear Channel buys up thousands of radio stations and there used to be local DJs no longer there there are no longer local DJs because they can just have one guy who's National and he's on every radio station right Clear Channel eventually that's becomes Live Nation which then eventually buys Ticket Master it also and this is important in in in the Telecom Act of 96 there's something called the Comm the the communications decency act which applies traditional obscenity rules that had always applied to all these other forms of of communication to the internet and the Supreme Court rules that that's unconstitutional it's sort of badly written uh doesn't you know it's not really administrable for the for the internet but rather than saying that the Supreme Court just says you can't do anything to restrict the flow of information online and also they were like don't worry we'll figure out like filtering mechanisms so that parents can control what their children get online and we're going to innovate our way out of it right it's very much this libertarian framework but but the but there's one part of the commun CDA uh that's retained and that's this this thing called Communications DCC act uh section 230 the section 230 of of uh of the communications DC act and what that says is is that liability for speech right which which has always been one of the restrictions on speech has been defamation you can't defame someone or or engage in infliction of emotional distress all sorts of things that you can't do um we're going to say that that still applies but if you are a platform and someone uses your platform to talk right and this was at the time this was chat rooms like AOL or prodigy or cerve you're not liable for what third parties say and if you try to put together like filtering mechanisms in in a goodfaith attempt to weed out obscenity or or um uh or fraud or just harmful speech whatever you're not liable right courts kind of misinterpreted section 230 and then and said well you know what no matter what you do you're not liable for what someone else puts on your platform and this turned into to okay you know two things happened one of them was you had this section like became the internet became a lot more than chat rooms it kind of stretched over large swats of the economy and the second thing that happened is the judges expanded it and said you know you can you can do um actually I should say the second thing that happened is because we pulled that relaxed antitrust law there were a whole series of platforms that were monopolistic that were born and grew and Consolidated their way to dominance starting in the 1990s so this is Amazon's founded in '95 I think Google's founded in 98 uh Facebook has founded in 2003 or four and they have effectively kind of roll up their particular spaces Apple was founded in the early in the late 70s but they kind of got a new lease on life in the with the with the i Pod in the early 2000s and sort of those four companies become dominant um in in on the you know as as the internet emerges and kind of takes over how we how we exchange information so now you have the these companies can do anything they want and they are dominant in different lines of business and they can redirect flows of information or data or money to whoever they want and they're not liable for anything right so Tik Tok um emerges and it's not profitable right now but it there's a lot of people that use it um or Facebook emerges and it doesn't matter what when Facebook gets an ad and puts it in front of people they're not liable or they haven't traditionally been liable for it when they cut a deal with a gambling app and they put that gambling app in front of people who who they are knowingly harming they're not liable for it when they allow scam artists to steal identities of soldiers who were at War and use those identities to to um uh to steal from women who think they're dating these these these men because they've established an online relationship actually just a catfish scammer Facebook knows about it and is not liable because of the expansive reading of section 230 so all of these um uh the monopolization and then the ability to discriminate using algorithms are a function not of Technology um it's not that the internet just did this or de developed this particular way because that's just what science leads us to it's a regulatory story we chose to pass these laws judges chose to interpret them the way that they did and um and as a result we have a media environment that is highly highly centralized and Consolidated so that's kind of the history lesson now you're seeing a lot of push back but we we um we kind of are still at the stage where we're trying to figure out all right how do we do we not want um are we going to actually enforce laws against concentrations of power again are we going to deal with conflicts of interest are we really going to make these platforms liable um you have a whole Elite that you know is in power and only knows how to run a system the way that it's being run and that's the conflict that we have yeah cool and uh yeah I mean like so Google um it's funny a a number of years ago not even that long ago I I spoke at Sergey brin's private dinner burningman uh about the sort of ecological emerg I had a little direct access to him I mean I guess um I've also met Eric Schmid I guess I mean you're not really I mean I guess the company was doing what companies do right they were trying to make a bigger and bigger profit and sort of like you know putting jigsaw puzzle pieces together that made it easier for them to to grow and so on I mean do you think they had a particularly nefarious intent or just kind of the logic of the system that that led to this well I I I would say so Eric Schmidt came from no right so so there was this networking systems no Noel was a networking systems company and they got crushed by Microsoft in the 90s and then Eric Schmidt um there was a bunch of them like a lot of the people at Google actually came from companies that were crushed by Microsoft and then Microsoft had an antitrust case against them in 1998 and was kind of pushed back it was sort of the last gasp of the old era of antitrust and Eric Schmidt saw what happened and he saw how why Microsoft got dinged and it was because a couple of reasons one Microsoft didn't have a lobbying presence and two they were extremely arrogant uh openly arrogant about what they were doing and so he said okay my lesson is not that you shouldn't monopolize my lesson is uh you need to be the Monopoly this time like I'm going to be the Monopoly this time I'm not going to be the guy that gets crushed crushed and that's what a lot of them uh thought you know let I'm not Micosoft Microsoft didn't exactly get crushed I mean no no but it didn't get it didn't get crushed but it didn't I think like it was a deep humiliation if you talk to people there you know it the people who were running Microsoft kind of had to like you know effectively leave like Bill Gates left Microsoft right he he is still important right but a whole series of of the whole way of doing business changed and there were people at Microsoft who got thrown out because of because they were super aggressive they felt really overwhelmed by by what had happened and it took them about a decade to recover um but you're right they didn't get crushed um and and they the the penalty should have been a lot more aggressive what were actually the Practical outcomes of that like were they forc to diversify or sell off different divisions well the most important outcome in just in terms of the market structure is that is so what happened with Microsoft is they they saw the internet right and they were they had this they had windows and they had they had their office suite then all of a sudden the internet emerges and they see Netscape and they're scared because they're like oh my gosh you know how you have Chromebooks today right and a Chromebook is computer and and the operating system is the is the browser like that was that was sort of one of the threats is that Netscape was just saying we'll get rid of Windows because you can just run your computer on Netscape with a server in the background so Sun Microsystems and and that was the fear and so what Microsoft did is they said we are going to well one person said cut off netscape's Air Supply and they put a Ser they put Internet Explorer in with their with Windows and then they said to and that's that would have been okay but what they did is they went to anybody that sold uh computers with Windows on it and said you can't put Netscape on Windows or we won't sell you windows and so they were able to like control the gateway to the internet now they started going around to venture cap s and saying here are the areas in the internet you're allowed to invest in and here are the areas that are just for us and they talked about just taking a vig on every transaction online like this is in the 19 they tried to buy into it which they thought well banking is really important so that's is you know nobody knew how things were going to develop social media didn't really exist yet etc etc but they were they were like we control the Gateway when the antitrust case hit Microsoft got scared and so Google they thought you know in 1998 Google comes in Google's gaining traction and they thought about putting a warning on their website saying this this site is dangerous you shouldn't go there right but they didn't do it because they were afraid of the consequences from the uh from the government and from the public because of what had happened in the antitrust case so Google really only exists because of that case same thing with Facebook why would they have been dangerous from the Microsoft oh they wouldn't have been dangerous the Microsoft would have been lying but would the idea would have been to crush right or they could have just said you know when you have Internet Explorer you're not allowed to you type in www. google. com and it doesn't direct anywhere right like the point is is they they they were the Gateway and they they were the choke point and then they decided we're not going to enforce our power they had always enforced their power as a choke point through windows and they stopped doing that after the in that's the most important thing that happened out of that out of that case um so that the internet developed the way that it did with a a lot of innovation in the early 2000s up to kind of 2006 and 7 because of that case in 200000 I think it was 2005 2004 five or six there was an antitrust case called trinko Verizon be trinko which was a unanimous Supreme Court case that said that monopolization law is basically dead right they said you can't really bring a Sherman Act claim on monopolization anymore um and Scalia wrote the opinion and said monopol monopolies are actually they're not only not bad they're actually an important part of the free market system right this is in the Supreme Court decision and so at that point just just to remind people who might be rusty on this and I admit I've heard of the Sherman just give us a one one minute or 30 seconds yeah so the body of laws that are supposed to prohibit monopolies are what are called antitrust laws and they're called antitrust laws because in the 1880s and 1890s when we didn't have big corporations we had what we're called trusts yeah and you know like if you look at like Union Trust bank or something it's the same TR trust type of corporate structure but basically it's just in instead of calling them anti-corporate Corporation laws which is what we were call them today they ended up calling them Anti-Trust laws and we still use that term so the the big one that was passed in 1890 was called the Sherman Antitrust Act it was named after uh John Sherman who's a senator from Ohio and that prohibits monopolies monopolization and restraints of trade so this is commonly understood to mean uh cartels so price fixing and uh companies that have huge amounts of Market power on their own and and use um unsavory tactics to maintain or or gain that market power um you also have The Clayton Act which prohibits you know certain business practices like tying two products together that you you shouldn't uh or you know saying if you want to buy product X you have to also buy product y um if you have Market power not allowed to do that and it has some merger prohibitions it has it's it's a body of law that's designed to say corporations can't get too powerful okay cool that's that's enough I just wanted to have a little bit of a backt track sure sure sure Ahad so the Sherman Antitrust Act is what we used against Microsoft it it's also what we used against AT&T in the 80s it's it's there and the Supreme Court kind of dismal so an Scalia disemboweled the the part of it that said monopolization is illegal and um and and also enforcers kind of gave up after that and so when that happened in 2005 I think it is or 2004 everybody in Silicon Valley is like including like Eric Schmidt is like all right we got to be the Monopoly or we're gon to get crushed right and so it's it's in a sense you could say oh it's nefarious because Eric Schmidt does a lot of lobbying and is very politically powerful but in another sense you could just say you know hate the game not the player right so so they all that immediate so there's a huge like roll up of power right in 2006 I think Google buys You Tube right that's what one thing people would would recognize in 2008 they bought a company called double click they buy a whole bunch of companies in the ad space one of them is called admob um but there's like a a lot of a lot of most of you know most of Google's um products except for search and maybe Gmail but Gmail is even Gmail are a function of Acquisitions right simar to Facebook buying Facebook they bought stagram and Whats App same with same with um uh I guess probably not Apple Amazon has a lot of Acquisitions particularly like a lot of their robotics for their warehouses but also a bunch of other things Microsoft buys you know huge numbers of companies and anyway so so the um so so that's Eric Schmidt is like all right this is what we're going to do we're g to just monopolize our way to power and interestingly like one of the people that he hires in 2001 one is is Cheryl Sandberg who then goes over to Facebook right as Mark Zuckerberg's number two where does he hire Cheryl Sandberg out of he hires her out of the Treasury Department she's Larry summers's uh Chief of Staff Larry Summers is the Clinton Secretary of the Treasury yeah who's now on the board of open AI right right I mean he's got a lot of like but but the but the point is Eric Schmidt doesn't hire a technologist he hires a political person this is weird and different right you got this rocket ship in 2001 this search engine rocket ship that's like we do this cool fancy stuff organize the world's information why are they hiring somebody out of the Treasury Department to do their business strategy the reason is because Eric Schmidt understands that it's a political game why does she go over to Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is very clear about it he actually said publicly in many ways Facebook is more like a government than a business we're really setting policies and that's why and he that's he's talking about why he hired Cheryl Sandberg so these these guys understand that they are political institutions they're so big that they are kind of governing forces and they need those kinds of skills and connections and not the skills of of just uh technology um or or scientific advance I guess also conspiracy side of the street idea is that like you know the CIA sort of had a hand in Facebook maybe from early on and kind of like you know there were deals between I mean maybe you don't think that's um legitimate but there's you know people do have those kind of concerns you know well I I don't think that it would be I mean it wouldn't be unusual for that to be the case right I I um I don't um I mean that's the thing with the paval durov telegram situation right like he refuses to put a back door into telegram so that the communication is actually protected my understanding so people people are communicating in these big groups and there's no way for um you to as a government to to to get a to get a to get a spy you know into that communication you know yeah I mean I I don't I don't know I mean it I I'm like that I again I don't just don't know the details with with telegram I mean it's all it's so I'm not gonna I'm not spe this story but this is from GL Greenwald you know who we can trust or not trust but is that actually you know pavl DAV I guess became a French Citizen and um you know I guess macron had invited him to this dinner to come to France but they actually nabbed him at that point so this was like a prepared thing because they wanted you know to create create a back door and you have people like you know Greenwald and taibe who think that you know there's sort of collusion between like the establishment Center kind of macron and and the Democrats you know to create this sort of global technocratic you know kind of apparatus uh where they want to be able to surveil everybody and so on well well so so let's take it out of this out of out of telegram for a second because I love Glenn and I love Matt they're awesome right and I've been friends with I I know Glenn much better than Matt um but Glenn I mean I've known him since 2005 I have huge amount of respect for him what I think though is that we have a kind of different view of politics and Authority right a slightly different view not not but but slightly different VI which is like at a certain point Apple was saying we're not going to let the FBI into you know i Phones right we're not going to let them hack i Phones if they want to right and and uh you know you see maybe a better example is this Tik Tok thing so Tik Tok was this is the case on Section 230 where the judges are starting to roll back section 23 so Tik Tok was showing people um was showing kids this uh like a a Challen one of the Blackout Challenge which was videos that said try to strangle yourself for as long as you can and they were knowingly showing it to kids because they you know kids liked watching it and a bunch of kids harmed themselves or killed themselves accidentally because they were trying to do the Blackout Challenge and this lawsuit um was I think it was in yeah it was in Pennsylvania it was a wrongful death lawsuit so they sued for um a for wrongful death and a a negligence a couple of other things and they sued Tik Tok and they said you are putting these videos in front of kids and my kid died and that's you're going to be liable for that right it's not murder just just to clarify but the issue of the liability is not simply that the videos were on Tik Tok because they would have still been protected as a platform it's that somehow their internal recommendation system was actually promoting that content correct that's it but was that something that they were doing cont l or was it just like their own a you know algorithms and recommendation systems like automatically push this to the top because they see the kind of Engagement it's getting that's actually a great question uh the answer is they were doing it intentionally okay so so if it was just it was purely engagement engagement driven it wouldn't they probably wouldn't have been found liable but they were they were segmenting via demographics um and uh and that's the court said you know you can't this is this is gone up to the Supreme Court in a slightly different case it was not just a pure neutral algorithm um there were there were discreet choices made it was an algorithm but it was discreet choices and they had been told these these videos are are harmful so all right you can say that it's a Prohibition on Free Speech to tell Tik Tock that they can or can't um show these videos in a in a certain way um they OTE them they can't be part right but like exactly like you can you could say that and it it would be true it is a restriction on on Tik tok's ability to show content that they would prefer to show um and it's the government doing it right this is very clear it's like a political Choice from the government to say you can't you can't say this you can say that right not it's content neutral so they're not saying you know here's what you have to say and here's what you can't say what they're saying is if you do things that cause harm you can be liable for it but it is still in a sense a restriction on speech they are responsible for the speech that they offer I think that's a good thing yeah I think it's I think it is the role of the government our Democratic systems to structure speech the way that that builds a society and a society that allows dominant platforms to encourage kids to take the Blackout Challenge that's not a society it's something that falls apart similarly if you can't get into an i Phone because Apple doesn't want to let the government get in there because they're afraid of the government what about all of the criminal activity and and murders and all the bad things that people are doing and you have a warrant saying hey this guy you know molested my kid I want to you know we need the evidence of it right I mean is that like the government is going to have to it's either the government doing it or it doesn't happen right and I think that if you don't have some mechanism for authority to use its Authority then what you're you're not you're not promoting Liberty you're promoting chaos and ultimately you're promoting what will become an atomized society that just will seek totalitar and that's where I kind ofal arism yeah you're just going to be people are going to go off and say I want a strong man because I don't believe in you know what the when when people confuse Authority with authoritarian which is what's happening now then you know the only then you know when we need authority to do something that we all agree is useful like prevent child porn or prevent like some sort of harm um we're not able to call upon it in any legitimate way and then ultimately people will say well if I can't call upon authority to help my Society or to help my community or help me when I need it then what use is this whole democratic system that we have I want to you know that guy says he'll get the people that I don't like I'm gonna go for that guy and that that's a weak government a that that is is an invitation to dictatorship yeah that's what I believe got it um yeah I mean I guess also the similar with Instagram right like how it's like promoted like teen depression teen girl suicide maybe it wasn't quite asit no I mean I think they were told too but like let's going back to telegram right the allegation is that macron or the allegation is this guy was doing there was a bunch of crime that was happening on Telegram and he did it or he didn't do it uh or or he knew about it or he facilitated it he just created a platform where he didn't have any influence over it and and nobody could the government couldn't get in there you know well I think but that they're not but they're not PR they didn't arrest him because they were like you didn't put a back door in that we no no no because of the because criminal activity is happening and they're saying that somehow he's responsible I assume I mean that's what right that's to me that's a factual determination right and and you can like the thing is is I think there's like a pretty legitimate point to say I don't trust those systems right with you have like Julian Assange or you have like what's going on in Gaza or all these other things where you're just like it's very obvious that governing the government is not legitimate in what they're doing and our systems have broken down or the bill all these other things there's a lot of reasons to be very cynical and skeptical of government and this is the challenge that we're in right where you can look at this guy and you could say well the government says that this guy's doing a lot of crimes and that's bad and and you can make one or two conclusions one conclusion is we need to make sure that those systems are more legitimate so that we can actually determine whether he committed crimes and risk the government risk our faith in government being misplaced or we can choose to say there should be no governance right and when we need Authority we can't call upon it uh and we Authority the governing government won't misuse its Authority because it won't have any but when we need Authority we can't call upon it and that is a very I mean I think those are the those are the two choices that you have to make in this situation uh cool man I'm really appreciating this dialogue by the way it's it's helping me think through things let's just to I wanted to articulate the distinction between your perspective and like greenwald's and maybe Matt Tai's also like so so for them for Greenwald I mean he sees the sort of government intrusiveness as kind of working against human freedom in some way whereas you see it's necessary to preserve society's function and to actually have a level of freedom for society right I think both of us would say that a large swath of government activity is is has lost its legitimacy right there's been enough bad faith and lying at high levels of government that we can we can both agree that you can't trust uh you can't trust powerful government officials and that that is a crisis and I think where he's just sort of more skeptical I I don't think that you can I don't think it's possible to have a society where we just sort of pull back on governance all that does is push more power into the hands of unelected people um and and dominant corporations I think we have to find our way through Glenn has more uh I think Glenn is just doesn't see as much value in the institutions as as I do I think he's just he kind of sees it on the other way he's like well we can't really afford to allow the US government to have this amount of power and if you roll that back hopefully we'll muddle out our way through that the other way right yeah and then also so I guess in a way that it becomes kind of like um ambiguous I mean there's a gray area in terms of what's going to be permissible like for instance if you are you know strenuously Christian anti-abortion you know then you know that's going to be part of what you want to control you know you you you want to stop people from having abortions and doing something you know that for for other people would be totally fine or another example would be China right where like uh I mean they have a much deeper control over you know social media and communication right so like um Tik Tok functions very differently in China and I mean in some ways it sounds better like kids are restriced they can't use it all the time and they watch you know I don't know if it's like two hours of Tik Tok videos they have to see an hour of like you know educational content um so it's not such a you know brain rot but we feel that's actually like a like a deep level of social control so how do you how do you kind of like um draw these distinctions of of what I wouldn't I wouldn't say that that what that that I wouldn't say that like um that China saying you know we're going to regulate what kids watch is some sort of authoritarian impulse right I mean we had educational programming on TV and radio and we have libraries we have schools like it it's every society makes the choice to structure how we raise our young and it's just that and we we've just happened to have been in this crazy period since the kind of 1980s 1990s where we're just sort of like yeah let we'll have kids do really stuff that's really harmful for them and that's not inherent to a Democratic Society and it's certainly not inherent to an authoritarian society that they raise kids well it's just they're you know in that particular way China is governing effectively and we're not um I I would say in many other ways China is not governing effectively and we are but you know this is again we're conflating Authority with authoritarian and I think like we're not not regulating what kids do we are regulating what kids do we're just saying Google and Facebook and Tik Tok are going to be the regulators and they're going to regulate in ways that are harmful that's a regulatory schema it's just one that I don't think anybody likes um and we've just chosen to say well we're going to we're gonna have these you know I think of them as political officials they're just not elected um yeah so I that would that mean like in a kind of you know uh in a perfect world but in a better world would would there be a level where some of these um platforms were almost like nationalized and like um you know there there's more uh yeah I like a PO like a post office or something I mean it's like almost like Facebook discovered like the global Post Office right well there there you you can do I mean the question isn't really like so nationalization gets to ownership structure and I don't think ownership structure is that important here um the the question is some sort of public control right and and nationalization introduces other problems like if the US government owns Facebook or owns Twitter or owns of these platforms you know what happens in other countries the these are not National platforms they're Global platforms so I don't I don't really have a problem with private ownership of these platforms we've had private ownership of communication platforms forever really um but you need some sort of public control not total control but some sort of public control and that would be regulation and um that's how we've always done it so you know you're starting to see some of that happen um you're starting to see the some parts of government getting more aggressive about what uh about what these companies can do there are laws on on tracking children's tracking um the the F the Federal Trade Commission has gotten fairly aggressive and has consent decrees against You Tube and Tik Tok and Facebook and they're actually like starting to Tik Tok Facebook has violated their consent decree multiple times and so now the FTC is is saying you you know they're trying to implement a a a an order that Facebook can no longer track children and they can't Target it do targeted ads to kids and Facebook is fighting it really hard so there are you know the section 230 roll back in the third circuit is an example of us saying you know what we're going to make we're not going to allow Tik Tok and these platforms to do whatever they want without liability we're gonna we're going to actually say you are liable for the harm that you cause um that's so there there there is a I think an intellectual and cultural shift happening what about another example obviously is you know the the platform forly known as Twitter uh you know x with at the helm where you know he he promotes his own content you know including you know promoting uh you know Neo-Nazi rhetoric or uh you know how how how would that be handled in kind of like some kind of Ideal circumstance yeah I mean I I I guess like you know I guess what you would say I mean it's it's I think people don't necessarily like the way that Twitter works but I don't see anything illegal about it um I mean I guess if you if you're causing people harm then you should be like if your algorithms are causing people harm then you should be liable for that but I don't know I mean I don't beyond that I'm not I'm not really sure whe whether there's a policy problem involving Twitter um yeah but even though it's aggregation of centralized power right like he's created this um I mean he's going to be a trillionaire in a few years apparently but you know he has the satellites he has the the Public Square well but that's different the satellites is a different problem than Twitter right I mean I think the uh starlink and BX are you know it's it's really interesting because musk is a weird character right I like you know like when I look at someone like Jeff Bezos I think of you know he's just seems kind of predatory and and Mark Zuckerberg same thing these are guys that just sort of are finan people that kind of Jeff Bezos explicitly came from a hedge fund and he was like I want to start a monopoly Mark Zuckerberg kind of found his way there but Elon Musk you know he his companies do real things right like Electric cars they're real like they're physical things that are hard to build bending he bends metal right spaces the spaceships are good right the starlink is a good product so you know and the it is hard in a in our financial system to invest in capital intensive goods and musk has found a way to do that now the he he kind of can convince financiers to back him and I don't I don't like a lot of what he does but the way that I I mean I I think there's he's more akin to somebody that actually kind of creates things than he's like he's not like a con artist he's kind of half con artist but half like Creator and so I I I I think when you're looking at some of the things that he's doing I I would apply traditional antimonopoly rules to them like for example with Space X I would separate out Space X and starlink and I would force him to divest starlink and you can do that because starlink is regulated by the uh I believe like the Federal Communications Commission I mean it it's launching into space is highly regulated I might put price caps on Space X just because you know Space X is essentially a utility sending satellites up up to up to space and you should probably have and they're basically a monopoly for that so you should just have price caps on that and then don't allow them to own something that requir sending satellites up which is Starling right so they they have a very strong incentive to not send rival satellites up of a rival communication system because it's the same you know so I would I would sort of split some of those things out and I would regulate them um and I think those are more of a policy problem than Twitter Twitter just seems to be like a a a place where the elites you know a lot of political Elites talk to each other and are kind of mad that like Trump style people exist and that I don't you know that's kind of the way I look at it um and what do you feel about so we're both on substack which has been like actually a Big Boon in my life proba seems like in yours too yeah there is a sense of like yeah there used to be as you say newspapers or magazines or there would be like kind of like a movement of ideas or now it's like everybody's kind of like disintermediated like everybody is like as their own little platform I mean I mean do you see a possibility for like um you know some kind of return to yeah I guess um kind of more like yeah so there right now there's an antitrust case in Virginia against Google for its control of advertising right Google has about the revenue is about $20 billion a year in what's called Google's Network Division and they the the company I think has about $300 billion um of of Revenue two 300 billion something so it's a relatively small part of the company but it is actually in many ways foundational to their to what they do um for a variety of reasons and um that is money that should be going to Publishers through advertising networks but is not and it's probably a lot more than 2020 billion if you if you actually split it off from the company now let's say you take like so in in 2006 advertising Revenue total for newspapers was about $60 billion now it's much less it's probably two3 billion something like that you could probably like just just move moving just breaking up Google's Monopoly over ad over advertising technology you could probably immediately increase the amount of money in the advertising realm that goes to newspapers by a couple of billion dollars right and that will finance the uh the creation of media institutions so the problem with substack and I love substack I'm you know I I'm a blogger back from the 2000s and sub stack is very similar allows me to do journalism and allows people to subscribe to it but I'm not really building an institution it's really just me and I get to make some money at it and and buy you know defamation insurance and whatnot but it's not building an institution if if um sub if this case goes the way that I hope it does right and all of a sudden Google can't control isn't the gateway to advertising anymore substack can build an advertising engine right and advertisers will come to it and that would allow you know that will probably allow for the creation of media institutions taking some of the things that you know people are doing on substock and actually turning them into or you know organizations that can hire um and and do more investment in content and I think that's kind of like like what I do is I cases and I write about them and I will interview people but I don't I don't like have like long form investigative journalism you need real money to do that and if you can build if you can get some of that advertising money back into the ecosystem and away from like Palo Alto housing values then you will start to get that real investment again and I think that'll be very powerful I think that could be um uh I think we could see you know substack is a skeleton of what could exist and but do you think that ultimately the Supreme Court is so tilted towards centralization monopolization that if it gets to that point they'll just uh um no I think the Supreme Court will um I think the Supreme Court is gonna so this this particular antidust case on adtech I if it goes to the Supreme Court I think the Supreme Court will uphold a good remedy on Google I I I mean it the in 2005 the Supreme Court you know it was 9 to zero for this for this bad decision I think most of those people have rolled off the court not all of them I think Roberts was on the court then but most of them are new most of them are are pretty skeptical of Monopoly power I mean in 2004 or five when they made this decision you know things the economy seemed fine right it wasn't like there were a lot of people that didn't like what was going on but it wasn't it was before the financial crisis right so ideologically there was no they didn't seem to be a big problem with the economy today I think most people feel the economy is rigged by the powerful because we explicitly saw the bailouts happening that wasn't the case in 2004 and five or in the 90s or in the 80s when a lot of these policy decisions there was a view that if you did well it's because you deserved it and I think today there's a view that if you do well it might be because you deserve it but it might also just be because you have power and you're using that power and there's been some I think the Supreme Court like Clarence Thomas has written some really interesting arguments about Monopoly recently so it's not it's not so has kataji brown Jackson I think you wrote that piece about the uh the rent the rental fixing right was that that's super fascinating thing um essentially there was like a company that built a software that allowed for of like price fixing and that's why rents are like skyrocketing in all across the US yeah yeah that that that um the uh the rents uh landlords you know there's been consolidating among corporate landlords and so you have in a bunch of different cities from Atlanta Miami mostly the in the sun in the sun Bel area but not entirely uh where you have a small group of landlords that control most multi um multif family housing or apartment rentals they um they collude with each other right and they collude in a number of ways but the the ring leader of this collusion is a company called real page which makes a software program to manage to manage a big apartment building buildings and they will collect data on what you're charging if you're a big landlord and they will share it with all of your Rivals and so one of the conditions so you you will and then they will make recommendations on what you should charge so if you're if you're a real page customer you know they'll say no no don't charge X number of dollars for this apartment charge 2x of these dollars I know that sounds outlandish but we know all of the apartments in the area and we know that if we hold collectively hold some off the market renters will be forced to pay that amount and that's what in fact happened during particularly during the pandemic but really since 2016 you've seen rents going going up because of this collusion and that is um a VI like that is a a VI probably a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Department of Justice filed a case saying that what real page was doing was IL legal um a couple weeks ago so you know that'll hopefully go to trial in a in a um fairly quickly and we can um try to bust up the rent fixing conspiracy very cool listen thank you very much for all this time I know you want to go out for a walk and it's a beautiful day so I don't want to keep you forever but I appreciate uh yeah the work you're doing it's awesome I have like maybe two more two more questions then we will wrap it up one question is like how how anxious or concerned are you about Trump uh Victory I mean some people feel that he really will sort of go on the Rampage and be kind of like the end of uh you know democracy and you know he's making all these threats do you think that's just kind of like the the institutions are still strong enough to withstand another Trump presidency with the Heritage Foundation behind him or do you have deep anxiety that this would really would be like a sea change for the US you know I think there's a there's a possibility that he tries to you know establish an authoritarian regime I don't think it's like I'm not I'm not freaking out about it mostly because it's not something I can control I don't I think it's unlikely he does it but it's not it's not like a trivial chance it's not like a not it wouldn't be outlandish for him to do it he certainly said enough things that indicates that that's what he might prefer but he says a lot of things you know he just says a lot right right and a lot of it's and you just don't know what is and isn't you know in his track record in his first term I think he didn't he didn't really you know he did a lot of really bad policy um but you know in in January 6th was I think a red line for me but it wasn't really that any different than what Bush did in 2000 except Bush was successful and Trump wasn't it worries me that he did that but it doesn't it you know a lot of I think the Liberals want to freak out about Trump he is a force that gives them meaning right and I I try to resist that Temptation and look at what he actually like his actual policies and a lot of his policies were just sort of standard bad you know policies of the Republican party to help big business and big Banks and you know that that's very dangerous stuff right it's just the kind of stuff that people have been seeing for 30 40 years and so they kind of don't think it matters that much they're just like oh that's normal politics that's the stuff that really freaks me out um so because that's the stuff that gets to a situation where you have like a guy like Mark Zuckerberg within control of such a powerful platform and then you argue about how he should use it or not and I'm like the construction of that platform is the danger and so that's what I worry about it's like if if Donald Trump laid off 20,000 reporters people would be like oh my God Donald Trump just had 20,000 reporters fired but because it was Google and Facebook doing it by redirecting ad Revenue people are like oh that's just the market and I think that's ridiculous so I'm kind of I'm not it's not that I'm not worried about Donald Trump but I just think there are these other trends that are deeply deeply dangerous and that's what I pay attention to thank you yeah and I guess one last question would be okay people listening to this uh how many however many people we get uh what could they do to be uh helpful uh you know how how can they support um any of this uh you know movement towards anti you know centralization antitrust yeah I mean I think a lot of it is learn learn the language of anti of anti-monopoly It's a Wonderful tradition it's a really fun tradition and it applies in whatever um in lots of different contexts so if you know your you know in your industry where you work um you you would you know you see Power right and it it's in every industry from cheerleading to peanut butter to search engines you have Market power questions and start learning about these traditions and you can learn there's lots of books I you could read mine but there are others and then start to think about how to apply them to what you know and encourage your political leaders to take up some of these um issues I mean for example with real page you don't you can bring an antitrust case but you can also pass a local law Banning the use of real page to set prices and San Francisco just did that so you could do that in every city and state in the country if you wanted to and there are lots of things like you could do this with all sorts of antimonopoly um policies you could also just bring litigation as an ordinary citizen so there was an antitrust case that that Google lost brought by epic games and that was brought by by a by a video game company over over app stores there are so there are class action you know there are class action sits you can bring and if you're a lawyer you know get start learning about antitrust law I mean there's a ton of possibility here and it's such a broad framework that we've forgotten about I think the first step is to learn because kind of and I'll finish with this what you're asking is like well how can people be a part of the anti- Monopoly movement in many ways that's a little bit like asking well how can I improve Democracy in America or wherever you are and it's like well there are lots of ways right and but the point is is that you just have to learn what it means to have a an empowered public and then sort of act in the way that you know best right to to do that cool and uh yeah it'll be in the in the notes to the show where do people follow you and all that kind of stuff like uh where do they go right so the big newsletter. comom is where I write you can find me on Twitter at Matthew Stoler um and which you shouldn't do because Twitter is terrible and I'm I'm a hopeless addict yeah and um uh yeah and then I'm at uh the American economic Liberties project and there's a bunch of reports and stuff that you can download for free on that website everything from different Healthcare businesses to semiconductors to um you know information on Google and the Free Press um yeah so that's how to find me amazing okay Matt thanks so much I learned a lot I really appreciated it and uh you know one of these days I may have some more questions for you but I app big fan of yours too so I appreciate you having me to chat all right enjoy the sunshine we'll do
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.