A potential breaking point for tech antitrust (with Matt Perault and Blair Levin)

Explain to Shane

Several bills seeking to restructure American antitrust law are moving forward in both bodies of Congress. The bills specifically target Big Tech firms — namely Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — though they follow arbitrary metrics for “bigness,” and don’t address lawmakers’ main concerns with tech platforms. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are also stepping up enforcement against Big Tech. With a Senate markup approaching for one of the bills, we must ask: Is Congress really prepared to pass major antitrust legislation?

On this episode, Shane is joined by Matt Perault, a former Facebook public policy director and professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information & Library Science, along with Blair Levin, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and policy advisor to New Street Research. The three of them discuss what consumers stand to lose if these bills become law, and the political forces at play in tech antitrust.