Tech antitrust is about to get really weird

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More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash decoder. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatel, 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, well, 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 Liam Nylan, 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 Dakota 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 Khan 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.

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