Everyone hates Ticketmaster. Why'd Trump go easy on them?

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Dekoter. I'm Neil Appattel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, and Dekoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we're talking about a major antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, and what it might mean for antitrust and competition law in general, now that the Trump Department of Justice has decided to settle its part of the case, even as several states, including New York, California, and Texas, carry on. To break it all down, I'm joined by Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Finer.

Lauren's our resident court expert. By which I mean she's been in the courtroom chronicling this trial from the beginning. If you're a longtime Dokoto listener, you might recall an episode we did on Ticketmaster back in 2023, in the wake of the Taylor Swift Airs Tour fiasco. That's when Ticketmaster's website crashed during the first major rush for Airs Tour tickets. It was such a scandal, and Swifties are so politically powerful that Live Nation was dragged in front of Congress after a widespread backlash spilled over into the

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