 about competition policy, anti-monopoly, anti-trust this morning or this afternoon. So I'm going to just ask a series of questions, and then we will open it to your questions probably around 120. So you'll get a chance to ask as well. I'm going to introduce Tim. First of all, I'm very proud to say this. As my former law student, I met Mr. Wu in civil procedure at Harvard Law School when I was teaching civil procedure. And it was very clear to me very quickly that he was one of those students you go to when the class is floundering. And you need somebody to put us back on track. He has also been a New America fellow and indeed worked on his book, The Master Switch, when he was here. And we take credit for his having coined the idea of net neutrality, or we take credit for supporting him in doing that. But that was his first book. His second was The Attention Merchants, which I also highly recommend. This is now the Curse of Bigness. I'm going to ask him a little about how he started thinking about anti-trust policy, but he is a professor at Columbia Law School. He also ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York. I say that because I think it is critically important that scholars with his intellectual range and social commitment also put themselves forward in public life. So we're delighted to welcome him. And we should give him a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. So Tim, you've also worked in government. Let me start just by asking, the student I knew when you were a younger scholar, you were focused on the intellectual property. You were not an anti-trust scout. Although a lot of the things that you worked on lead into it. But how did you start thinking specifically about anti-trust or competition policy? No, it's a great question. First of all, thank you for having me here. I was a fellow at New America for several years. And I kind of owe my first book to that experience. And really, frankly, my bookwriting career, I was so, you know, it's up there on the wall. It was kind of, it was great. So I'm just happy to be here. Believe it or not, I haven't been to these new offices, but they're terrific digs. I could sign outside. I was like, wow, it's kind of made it, you know? So it's great to be back. And of course, with my mentor. So this book, as you said, does rise of an interest in competition and anti-trust policy. I was earlier in my career as a Silicon Valley veteran and a lawyer. And I was mainly interested in telecom policy and things like that, although I'm interested in power. I guess it's fair to say that private power set a long fascination. And I think I was almost inevitably drawn towards anti-trust as the sort of constitutional check on private power in the United States. You know, when you think about the Constitution, it's just rules of public power. And what are the final checks on private power struck me anti-trust was that. And I sort of eventually thought I'd get to it. It was sped up a lot when I went to work at the Federal Trade Commission for a few years and worked actively in anti-trust enforcement during that period. This book, however, I think mainly owes its origins to the time I spent in the Obama White House at the very end. All the way till it started taking down the photos and furniture and everything like that. And in the later part of the Obama administration, the economists, Jason Furman was one of them, all these people started saying, what's going on with concentration in the economy? What happened? It was like sort of scientists noticing a hole in the ozone layer. It's like all of a sudden, you know, and they weren't anti-trust. They were just like, what's going on here? And maybe this has something to do with our sluggish growth. And they figured it all out, but they were curious about it. And I took that concern coupled with the time at the FTC. And I felt I wanted to sort of give anti-trust its identity back. I felt that we, in the trade commission, in a very smart people, really talented group of people, but I think we had, to some degree, lost the original spirit of what the anti-trust law was meant to do, lost that sense that I talked about. It was a check on private power and kind of cribbed in what we did and our idea of a perfect case. And my looking back at it, and I don't fault anyone involved, but I think that in some ways we let some stuff go that we shouldn't have let go and allowed some mergers that really, in retrospect, and Justice Department gets some blame too, but let some stuff go. And I felt this was the feeling at the end of the Obama administration. So I made some mistakes, maybe we can learn from them. And I wrote this book, kind of a small volume, a small book on bigness was the idea, to put, in some ways, put the political back and anti-trust, restore some of its historic role, and cast off some of the shackles, which I think we had kind of tied ourselves down with. So I wanna ask you about, you take us back to the progressive period and you show us, and again, progressive, as we're gonna use it, Republicans and Democrats, right? You write about Roosevelt, you write about Taft, you write about Wilson and Brandeis. The parties had different configurations, but this was not progressive as we use the term today, and you do recover that, and I wanna ask you about that particular legacy and where the term, the curse of bigness comes from. I'll just say, I started my career teaching at the University of Chicago Law School when the attack on this older tradition of anti-trust was in full swing. And you've described that too, where you take the political out and you go only to the economic, but take us back a little. Where does the curse of bigness come from? I should mention, this is danger becoming, just reminiscence, but I clerked for Richard Posner, who's a prominent member of the Chicago School. In fact, I dedicated the book to him. I noticed that. Yeah, he thought me out of think, and I have an incredible respect for the Chicago School, although I assailed him mercilessly in this book, but that's kind of what they like. Right, look, that's the Chicago way. That's the way, that's the culture of the place. So taking us back, there's two figures who I wanna sort of, who are in some ways the heroes of this book and have important roles. The first is Louis Brandeis. Louis Brandeis, I think, has actually been done something of a disservice. He's still famous. Places are named after him. He's Supreme Court Justice, sort of honored. Mainly talked about in terms of privacy and some of his First Amendment writings, but what he really cared about was economic structure. And what he really spent most of his life, especially pre-court, was on the struggle against what he called the curse of bigness. That's his phrase, not mine. And the sense that there was something happening in America that was taking it away from what it could be and what it had been economically as a place of opportunity and as a place that served people. Now, that's sort of abstract and almost a little nostalgic, but I think he identified a pretty important problem. He took the point of an economy and a democracy a little differently than we do now. You know, now we're sort of very material, mostly materialistic, the Dow up or down. You know, what's GDP like today or this year? I think he had more in touch with what people are dissatisfied about with the economy today. He thought in sort of more concrete terms, you know, what does your career look like? How are the opportunities for advancement? Can a person with sort of intelligence and ability sort of make it in America and start their own, how hard does it start your own business? You know, what are the conditions of work? These are the things he cared about and he thought they had a lot to do with the nation's soul. You know, for example, he's very focused on the hours of work. He thought a lot about the fact that people are overworked. So he wanted a republic that was composed of citizens and he thought hard about what does it mean to inculcate the conditions of citizenry and one of the things he believed that it had a relationship with work. If you were overworked and had no time to do anything like a law firm associate. You know, he kind of starves people, they don't have time to read, to have leisure, to kind of become thoughtful citizens. Similarly, he thought uneven work, you know, sees no work or you're getting fired and rehired all the time. Left people without the sort of security that they could become who they would want to become and to develop. So he thought the whole purpose of democracy and in the economy must be for us humans and really should be focused on human flourishing and development. And you know, I think in some ways we've lost that. We are very focused on numbers. I was reading this column by Dave Brooks the other day where he, this is where I think he got it wrong. He said, you know, the economy is doing better than ever, look at all these figures, but people seem so dissatisfied and unhappy with the economy and where it's going. And I was like, well, maybe we're measuring it wrong. He said it's good enough connections. I think that could be true human connection. But maybe we're not measuring the right thing. Maybe we're sort of emphasizing the wrong idea of what an economy is for. So Brandeis is sort of, you know, Brandeis is one of the activists who fights the trust, who believe that monopoly is a corrosion of the ideals of the American Republic. And in that way, sort of the spiritual hero of this book. The other hero of the book is Theodore Roosevelt. Who sometimes is maligned by antitrust people for some of his later actions, but I focus on the early Roosevelt. And I could talk about the later Roosevelt later. The early Roosevelt, to me, frankly, bears enormous response, gets enormous credit for inventing the enforcement tradition, which I think was at the heart of antitrust law for 80 years. And this is an observation that comes from my time in law enforcement. You know, it's one thing to have a statute. You'd be a passive big law. Sherman acts a perfect example. 1890, they pass a big law and everyone's cheering and okay, we've solved the problem. Then the law is dead for 15 years or it's used to work on small cartels, things like that. Nobody had the courage to take on J.P. Morgan, the Sue, John Rockefeller, Standard Oil. So the law was quickly becoming what some people thought it was, sort of symbolic, but of no actual effect. And Roosevelt, right after he took over the presidency, you know, within a year, had sued J.P. Morgan of a courageous lawsuit. It's one of the best parts. It's a great part of the book where you get these two titans. Yeah, and he goes for it. You know, a traitor to his class, some people said, but he did it. And the reason he did it, I think, is really interesting and important for our times. He said, or he thought that in a democracy or in any country, if government is totally indifferent to the economic suffering of its people, you will see a revolution. You will see turning to more and more extreme solutions if the moderates don't answer. And he thought the United States, you know, it had revolutions before. It only had 100 years. It had civil war 40 years ago. You know, that it was in real danger of a socialist or anarchist revolution of some kind that would completely tear to country pieces. So it's like, you know, we have to demonstrate through these lawsuits that even the greatest corporations are not above the law. And I think that, you know, obviously has lessons today. I think that a lot of the anger you see today, a lot of the turn to extremism is a sense of failure of the moderates. You know, that we, you know, kind of constitutionally a moderate person. You know, we haven't provided. So these are the heroes. I think the law enforcement is very important. I think courage and law enforcement is, it's hard to come by. You need a tradition. You need someone like Roosevelt, the trust buster who, you know, is willing to do something. I think a lot of law enforcement in our country is more scared today, concerned about their future jobs, concerned about, you know, they do, they get a reputation of taking on the wrong people that maybe they don't get, you know, they end up with a, they don't get the fruits of an attractive job afterwards. And so, yeah, those are two of the people. And just to fill in the picture a little bit when Teddy Roosevelt does decide to enforce the Sherman Act. And I found that fascinating. If you'd asked me when the Sherman Act was passed, I would have said quite a bit later. I really, because I didn't know it was passed in the 1890s. I thought it was really the early odds because it lay there as a dead letter. But the Justice Department starts to go after J.P. Morgan. In this case, Northern Securities, and Morgan goes into the White House and he says, you know, come on, let's resolve this. Let's fix it in the way that he had been doing. And Roosevelt says, nope, we're not fixing it. We're actually going after you. So it is a quite dramatic moment. Let's, of course, we should add that Roosevelt himself told the story later. Well, okay. Fair point. Fair point. And you mentioned that your wife thinks you're a little hard on J.P. Morgan. One of your readers thinks you're hard on J.P. Morgan, who can probably handle it. Let's parse the curse of ignorance. Let's parse it in terms of diagnosing the problem that we may need, as you say, in the second half of the book, here's your prescriptions for revived antitrust to solve. But it's a squishier problem, I think, than we may assume. So if you can go through, there's a set of economic problems with the curse of bigness, and then there's some political problem. So if you can walk us through precisely, what is that curse? Yeah, sure. So I think I'd actually have three dimensions to it. Economic, political, and social. When institutions or companies become too large. The first is sort of the straight economic case, which is one that may be the most familiar to this audience. The sense that monopoly is a distortion of the economy, it tends to result in higher prices. Monopoly or tidaligopoly, tends to result in higher prices. It tends to yield the, at times that, in the early days of monopoly, sometimes they'd be quite vigorous and exciting. There's a golden age, sometimes in the, say, first five or 10 years, but they tend to stick around. I studied AT&T in great depth for the master switch. And the first time, maybe 20 years of AT&T, history as a monopoly, there was a terrifically productive expanse of company, but then they hung around for another 50 years. So there's this problem of firms becoming entrenched and sort of sticking there. At some point in their history, they often become very suppressive of new inventions and ideas and technologies. AT&T had Bell Labs and invented a lot of things, but it also kept back the modem, didn't deploy the laser, held back the answering machine of all things. And there's a long track record of industries that kind of get stuck. American car industry might be in that as well. Sorry, go ahead. But no, no, just to sharpen. So you've said now, so there are two separate things. The one is higher prices and I'd add lower, bad service. So the consumer dimension, which is, it's just bad for us. If we pay more, we get bad service. But then the Bell Labs point is related but distinct, which means you're stifling innovation. Is that fair? That's right. Yeah, I mean, I guess an economist would call the static costs and dynamic costs to be clear. One is like prices are higher, the other is sort of a slowdown of new entrants and new ideas in the economy. So there's a kind of classic costs of oligopoly or monopoly, which are well documented. But this book also contributes to the idea there's political costs as well. And I'm not the first to make this point. Some ways, Roosevelt was the first. But I think that you have a link between concentrated industrial power, small groups with a lot of influence. And the smallness of the group and the ability to have effective political influence in Washington and Congress and state legislatures. Manker Olson, the political theorist, pointed out that in general, smaller groups tend to lobby better. And if you imagine an industry with, say, 80 members versus three members that you understand that suddenly have a much easier time coordinating the lobbying efforts. And when you look at some of the most influential groups, it's not the only explanation, but I do think a certain concentration. Also, concentrated industries tend to have higher profits and see more to invest in influence. So I think these are some of the other reasons. So they then take over the political. Yes, that's right. Or have a better answer. Yeah, and I'm not the only person to suggest that the outputs of Congress have been sort of different than what the marginal voter theory might suggest. And you know, it's often, I don't know, let's take Medicare Part D, which I mentioned in the book, and the idea that Medicare is not allowed to bargain for lower prices from pharmaceutical companies. You know, it's the... Now it required a big investment, over $100 million in lobbying. And if you have a basic sort of collective action analysis, nobody individually has the incentive to put that money up, unless they think they're all gonna gain from it. So the group has to be quite concentrated before it can gain from these really expensive lobbying efforts. But then the payoffs are massive. I can't remember, but it's like $10 or $15 billion a year that is earned by the industry, pharmaceuticals, because of the non-negotiation law. So, you know, you have, I think, a role, which I don't think has been really fully developed of a relationship between antitrust idea of de-concentrating the industry and the idea of avoiding excessive influence over Congress or other things that these are actually related. The third is a kind of social curse. I don't develop this as much in the book. It's a little bit, it's sort of the hardest to describe. It's sort of the most brandisian, right? Yeah, I wanna get at this. Yeah, but it's, and myself, I'm a little bit more ambivalent about it, but sometimes I think it might be right. So another concern with bigness has also been tied to the idea that it changes what it means to live in this country. It creates a society of employees as opposed to owners. It reduces industrial freedom. It tends to center private power, private rule of the economy in a national space with a few people. If you imagine, let's say Walmart, stuff like that, you know, a few people run it and then you have lots and lots of employees as opposed to, you know, say thousands of small business where everybody's their own boss. And so there's a sense that it changes the fabric of the country and the identity of the country to have that much power concentrated in small, and this has been, you know, now for 100 years. I'm not, this was the original case against chain stores. And it's a slightly different than these economic or political ideas. It is more in that purely brandisian school and it's a concern both about labor and about employment and, you know, how life has lived. And so let's push on that a little bit in terms of the impact of the Chicago School and then I'll move you to your prescriptions because even as you describe it, it's a little squishy. It's a sense that, you know, we're supposed to be in a society where everybody can make it. You play by the rules, the American dream. And yet there's this feeling that when you have the disparity of wealth that we have with the top 1% of the part, top 0.01% essentially hoovering up all the economic gains, but also this feeling that there's the super rich and they live in their bubble and there's everyone else. It undermined, as you say, it shreds the very fabric of our notion of ourselves. Now, even our difficulty in describing it, that's a lot of what the Chicago School attacked, right? So I want to hear you how you respond to this which was, wait a minute, brandisian antitrust, first place they attacked it as, this is Jeffersonian agrarianism and that's a, you know, it was lovely, it didn't actually work for Jefferson. He had slaves and plantations, but it was his vision. But it's just too woolly. Like how is a court supposed to decide whether or not to approve a merger or whether or not to find a company for anti-competitive practices based on this social thing? So maybe you could talk a little bit about how we recover that fuller notion of what antitrust is but still have law that can be applied. Right. The more time I also visited Chicago, as I might have mentioned, the longer I've been and I was a great experience in recovery, I've increasingly come to the conclusion that because something is squishy doesn't mean it's not important. I love that formulation, yes indeed. Freedom is very squishy, autonomy is squishy, so is democracy, these are very squishy ideals, yet somehow we manage in some parts of life to defend them. And I think that as a sort of a dangerous, the dangers, of course, of running over forgetting what really matters, I guess. And that's been a sort of a rough division. This is an interesting way you put it because we kind of accept, as my prologue suggests, that we accept a lot of squishiness in an area like constitutional law. You'll read these long First Amendment about truth and autonomy and justice. And we don't, no one can, you don't have a First Amendment case you're being censored and the person being censored has to prove to a mathematical certainty that their censorship is harming public discourse. In fact, they probably couldn't. Right? So the guy on the street corner gets thrown in prison and they're like, okay, we'll prove your speech was reaching anyone. It'd probably be hard. And so a Chicago school person might say, a little too squishy, let's put the guy, just leave him in prison. And I think we, that is the challenge. I think the real challenge for public policy is having done a 40 year experiment with the anti-squishy concept, witnessed the results, found it kind of a little uneasy. Wondered like how we got here to figure out if we could, and that's sort of what I'm trying to do in this book, figure out if we can get at things that really mattered and if possible describe them more empirically, but then not define empirical description as the end point of what matters to us. Yeah, this is kind of the recolonization of the economic sides of life, frankly. That I'm trying to engage in, I think other people are. And it's not like I haven't seen the attraction of the other side. I was a scientist, too, at one point, so I have a sense that what really should matter is our hard results and numbers, but maybe I've meddled or gotten older or something. So that's my response. And then let's talk about a specific category of bigness, and then we'll turn to the solution. So you list, you have a list of current concentrations of power and it's really quite frightening when you go through it. So AT&T, obviously. And again, you describe, we broke up AT&T, we got all the baby bells, and now we have allowed them to re-concentrate into Verizon and... Mainly Verizon and AT&T. And AT&T, right. So, and then the airlines, which again, big deregulation, lots of different airlines. Anybody traveled recently? We know customer service is not exactly the top of their concern. Cable, all of the companies we love to hate. Pharma, again, you talked about that. Some surprising ones. Ticketmaster, which I hadn't really thought of. Ticketmaster buying live nation. I'm not a big consumer of concert tickets, so I didn't think about this, but I thought that was interesting. Bayer, Monsanto, again, so in agriculture. And Global Beer, and that's often disguised because there's so many craft beers. A lot of craft beers are actually being bought up by the big players. So those are traditional, I mean, you're showing concentration in many different parts of the economy. But you have a whole special section on tech. And we have to talk about the curse of bigness in tech because in the first place, it doesn't, if you use the consumer welfare arguments, it doesn't work, right? Higher prices, no, most of this is free. Customer service, they're constantly providing new services. So that part doesn't work as well. Then you go to innovation and you say, and you document the case of Microsoft buying up Netscape and supplanting its server or substituting its server. But on the other hand, lots of tech folks would say, no, no, no, we don't, there's plenty of innovation in Silicon Valley. We create the incentives for all these companies to innovate and then we buy them, which is what they do. But they would argue there's plenty of innovation. It's just, then when they prove a case, they buy them. So talk about the problems specifically of concentration in tech, given that it doesn't quite fit the railroad model or the telephone model. I'm very pleased to do that. Although I also like talking about beer. Happy to talk about beer. Beer industry is fascinating, but I spent a lot of time in the White House focused on beer because it's actually something, I will talk about tech. Yes, I was good at tech. But it is a case where it's an unusual thing where you have an American, the craft beer is mainly an American movement. And the sort of bad guys in this case with a big mean Belgian and Brazilian monopolist, very different dynamic anyway. So, so, everyone always wants to hear about tech. I've always wanted to talk about pharmacy. Everyone's talking about tech. No, but so I have a view of tech industries. Worked at Silicon Valley obviously, wrote several books on tech. And I have a strong, I think all industries are cyclical, but it's very obvious you can see the cycles in tech and the innovation cycles and how they develop. I believe that they go through periods of great openness and closeness and we've moved from a period in the early 2000s, late 90s, where there was obviously a thousand new ideas to one where increasingly the industry is dominated by a small number of companies and that that game has become much less about are you gonna displace somebody or something, or who are you gonna be bought by? And even that may be drying up to some extent as well as we try to block the mergers. So there is a, so I wouldn't have, for example, I think it's all about timing. And that is a key matter. I think I had maybe different feelings about this 10 years ago, but I believe we've reached a point where the antitrust law should take action against one of the tech monopolies or dominant players. I would probably choose Facebook if I were gonna choose a target. And the reason is something, let me give it a historic case and I'll give it a specific case against a company like Facebook. So historically I think that, as I suggested these cycles, I think that tech has tended, maybe it's network effects, maybe it's the newness of the cycle, tends to become consolidated into monopolies. You have IBM, you have AT&T, you have Microsoft as antecedents. And having studied the history of those companies carefully, I think antitrust played a very critical role in each of those companies, when it challenged each of those companies in spurring on, inspiring and opening up a new field of innovation that was very important for the growth of the American economy. So if you think about telecom, I don't want to make this whole talk about, maybe I could talk about IBM instead. You think about IBM. Yeah, IBM is very interesting. IBM is very interesting. So IBM was the monopolist of computing. They were a great company, a great company that an amazing thing, System 360 was an incredible advance. The mainframe, they were the world leader in the mainframe technology. And lo and behold, the antitrust department challenged them for anti-competitive practices. They were concerned particularly about bundling of hardware and software and a few other practices. So some people said, well, why did you, why is America's greatest company under attack? Terrible, and people even at the time said, tech industries are different. You can't really apply the old business models. You can't use antitrust. That's meant for the oil company. So there was, there's always this kind of like, there's always this like, well, we can't, this is new and you don't want to understand it. And they're actually, the IBM investigation was had some downsides. It went on for 13 years. There was like hundreds of thousands. An entire decade of law school associates. Straight into that case. It was a hassle for a lot of lawyers and so forth. But when you look at the bra, and at the time it was, I was a big fiasco to it, but you look in retrospect, a couple of really important things happened during that case. Now first, in direct response to the lawsuit, IBM said, we have to stop bundling. Their general counsel said, we gotta stop bundling software and hardware. They're gonna break us into pieces over that. And so they did. And it was at the top. Watson said, okay, we'll do it. So they launched, you know, they separated and most observers believe that was the catalyst that started software as an industry. And software, it's not a trivial development. They have this idea of software as an industry. And you can, so that happened. And you know, first it was kind of small firms. Later firms like Microsoft and Lotus 123 were perfect. You remember them, big, important firms. But then later, in the late 70s, there came this kind of key moment that people started thinking about, maybe the mainframe's not gonna be the end state of computing or supercomputer, but there's this, these guys in California, the idea of personal computers. There was, you know, times that was crazy. And then IBM's entry into that market. So they realized eventually personal computers are gonna be important. But they entered the market incredibly timidly. They had this, the PC, it was a very good product. But to make the product, they licensed all the components from Intel, from Microsoft. They could have, but didn't buy the companies. There's this key moment where they could have bought Microsoft. So how's history different if IBM buys Microsoft in 1982 or 1981, but as lawyers say, we're just gonna get that antitrust case after us again. They're gonna accuse us of bundling software, trying to dominate. And so they built the PC in a way which is very, very antitrust kind of sensitive. And so next thing you know, the market becomes incredibly competitive. Everyone makes PCs. So there you have two industries. You have software, you have PCs. And those two industries are worth now what, trillions of dollars? So people complaining about a couple thousand pages of litigation documents are kidding themselves. This was an incredibly important catalyst. So is the AT&T breakup. Telecom was a dead industry, stagnant, completely dominated by AT&T, broke it up. You had CompuServe, you have AOL, you have all these guys come in, try this, all these new competitors, MCI, other firms, Sprint. And eventually they start selling modems to people. Eventually you start having this thing called the popular online. Eventually the internet, and eventually America starts leading in the mass internet. So I'm suggesting, I don't wanna say it's like, all that's responsible, but there's this kind of relationship between challenging the monopoly and giving enough room for the next generation to kind of get their start. It's not like the antitrust department started Apple or Microsoft, but they gave them room so they wouldn't get crushed by the big guys. And I am wondering whether you have that room right now. Whether you can create a technology that is not like a compliment or friendly to Facebook or Google, but is an existential challenge to them, the way the personal computer was to IBM, right? And whether you'll have any room or whether you'll end up in the kill zone. So that's what I'm concerned about. And just to push that, that would be, so let's say you could separate out WhatsApp or Instagram or you could take that case. But if I'm hearing you, you're saying that would create enough space for new industries then to be created that wouldn't then get bought up because you'd also know that the antitrust folks were there. In other words, it's a kind of, it's not just the actual case, it's then legal advice changes and you change your own business. That's right, that's right. Now, you know, somebody would say, well, you'll lose some buyouts that might have been important. I think some of the buyouts have been fine, but some have been anti-competitive. So I think, I'll focus on Facebook is the one case at a time. I think Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp in the 2010s was anti-competitive and we made a mistake in allowing it to happen in the Obama administration. I think Instagram was a natural competitor to Facebook. They were gaining users at a speed, speed actually greater than Facebook's at the time and had everything there to become a natural sort of successor the way Facebook had replaced MySpace or at least a major challenger. So you have two kind of entities and the key moment is bottom. And WhatsApp was similar. And in fact, WhatsApp, you had a big $18 billion price tag which two economists suggest, why is that number so big? Maybe they're splitting them and maybe they're buying off competition. You know, they don't have to compete. You pay more to avoid competition. But you know, the alarm spells were supposed to ring and for a series of reasons. And some of them were what you mentioned. So that I'm gonna ask you then. So tell us, those happened in the Obama administration. Tell us how and tell us how what you're proposing because now let's move to your solution. How would you change merger review so that you wouldn't get that? Because it passed within a decade under Obama. Obama comes in saying I'm gonna revive antitrust policy so it's not his administration doesn't recognize this. And yet, as you point out, it went through the Justice Department review and they allowed it. So why and what would you change? Actually, I must admit to our shame, it was the FTC review process. Well, you know. So you're towing. I did not work on that particular merger. Well, what went wrong is sort of what you described. It's a mixture of fear and certainty and doubt. You know, actually, the analysis of the merger does not look good in retrospect. The FTC is a secret, but the English Office of Fair Trading released their analysis of Instagram, Facebook. And they pointed out in the one hand that Facebook didn't have a phone app. So they understood Instagram was just like a phone app. So they, Facebook didn't have an important phone app. They didn't have one, it wasn't that important. And Instagram did not yet have advertising revenues even though I had 15 million users but they hadn't monetized it. So they concluded that the two firms are not competitors at all. Which seems to me is startling, in fact, absurd conclusion now, you know. Hindsight is 20-20, but kind of a shocking conclusion. But I think it is exactly what you're saying. We didn't, so you were asking me, what would I do better? Yeah, so this is New America, so I can get more technical. I think that, so I think that, I think there's several things that could, there's three ways you could fix that if you're in antitrust. One is to have a better understanding of potential competition in tech markets. I think everyone in the tech world thinks about companies, not necessarily for what they are, but what they're going to become. That's why they wanted to buy this in the first place. That's why they wanted to become, and they can see that, and the business press could see that, and Facebook could see that, and everyone could see that, everyone except for the Federal Trade Commission, who is in this very static, I mean, kind of what are they right now, right? And no kind of capacity. There is a doctrine called Potential Competition Doctrine Antitrust, but it's been on use since the 80s, and it comes back to this problem we talked about, is it requires these levels of proof that no one seems able to surround or feels any confidence in it. So that doctrine is a doctrinal matter, is a big problem. Something I wrote in a different paper, more technical, is that the mergers could be understood by understanding that these are companies that are competing in attention markets, so competing for human time and attention. Oh, interesting. So attention merchants. This comes from my second book, yeah. But I have a paper on, and I'm not the only one who is an economist, David Evans, who was also promoting this approach where you take seriously the idea of attentional competition, and you take time as the currency. You can also throw, you know, for some other mergers understood, and sometimes mergers are done for data, for big data, and right now we're just focused on cash markets. You could get focused on data markets and on attentional markets and have a better understanding of what's really going on the way the industry sees it, right? So you would change the standard of merger review in various ways? Those two efforts do not involve changing the standard. They just involve better- Better- Better empirics, better economics, and better understanding of the markets. Okay. Changing it, I would suggest, you could also change it. You could put the burden of proof on the companies, in some cases, for big mergers to say, you know, proof to us this isn't anti-competitive. That's been proposed by Klobuchar among others, I believe. And finally, you could change or have a different understanding of the underlying standard, consumer welfare versus a process of competition. We're getting a little weedy, what's that? Would you do that? Oh, absolutely. In fact, that I've advocated quite strongly. So I think the line consumer welfare has carried a lot of problems. And I think that's starting to move. I think people, maybe, we gotta get the courts on board, but I think even among sort of Obama-era economists are still thinking this welfare standard, I felt very vindicated when Carl Shapiro the other day, who was sort of, I don't know exactly, but he's an intellectual leader of early Obama. He said, consumer welfare has become too tainted. So protection of competition, and that allows for the woollier stuff, right? Protection of competition, you can bring other things under that that are harder to do on consumer welfare. It's still hard to bring in some of the political and social stuff. That, to my mind, should be back of head. I think every lawyer, when they bring a case, consider the indictment of Al Capone. Was that done because of concerns about the tax code and the foregone revenue, or was it with a certain other goals in mind, but the case made, you know? So it should guide enforcement policy, but the actual law still needs to be more precise. More economic. I think that's right, because you need something in the courts. You do need something to understand, but I think back of mind enforcement policy should be guided by the idea that what we have here is a check on private power of quasi-constitutional importance. And you also recommend that FTC review be public. And I want you, I was interested, New America does a ton with the FCC, our Open Technology Institute, spends an enormous amount of time on notice and comment proceedings providing comment. And you suggest that that should happen at the FTC also. Yeah, and one thing I noticed at the FTC is that, and this is true of justice too, is there are these very important decisions, namely the decision to pass on a merger, that get very little publicity and very little scrutiny. It's hard for journalists to cover because it just kind of happens that the documents filed are secret. The whole proceeding, frankly, is secret. Now, if a trial, if they sue, block a merger, then it becomes like something that people can follow and do follow. The press is good, but you can't be that you have to have like a investigative reporting for every single, and these are some of these very big mergers. Whatever. I love some of these mergers I was talking about. Really enormous consequential mergers that change people's lives. And they fall procedurally in this very secretive area because they're technically pre-complaint investigations, and so all the filings are secret. Nobody knows who's filing what. And even to participate in it, you kind of need to have a DC law firm involved. There's no way for like concerned people, you really need to know what you're doing to get even remotely involved in this, even though people might really care about something like two giant pharmaceutical companies combining or beer companies buying out craft beer. You know, there are people in the street care about this stuff, actually. They just aren't able to know about it. But it allows for what we might call public interest lobbying. In other words, where you have different groups lobbying. So doctrinal changes, changing possibly standards, democratization, you also recommend a return to big cases. Right, we have not seen, as I said when I came out of law school the IBM litigation was still ongoing. Then the Microsoft litigation, AT&T before that, going all the way back to standard oil. Talk about what you recommend that there be big cases again. Although there are a lot of people who say it just absorbs these huge resources and you comment, the other critique of big cases which you say you pay attention to is they're too random. In other words, some conglomerates get taken on and others don't and it's always the classic argument. You can't do all of them, so don't do any of them. But you think we should. I think we should. Actually, some of the reasons you suggested earlier is it does send a message. I think if you think about something like the Microsoft, so to the company itself and also to industry. So the big cases, and by that I mean ones not where you try to find a cute section two theory, sorry to be jargony, section two theory or like a nice little tidy, some barbershops in Oregon who are fixing their prices. But you figure out what are, what is the greatest monopoly of our time? Are they abusing their monopoly? Does it seem, and investigate, the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt and other trust busters, Thurman Arnold, Joel Klein, they went for it. Even though knowing it's gonna take a lot of resources a lot of time and might not go well. And I think the argument number one is that it sends a kind of message that Roosevelt was talking about. The government, especially if you own abusive monopoly, is there for, is willing to take on private power, is not cowed. And I think that's a very important message. I think that it also can be important for the firms themselves. When you think about Microsoft, in the 90s they were a very different company. Bill Gates kind of seems like this benevolent figure now, but he used to be this evil nerd, he had big glasses, very rapacious character, predatory, nasty, even a little scary. And something about that experience sort of chastened him and turned Microsoft into a better citizen, I think, as a corporation. Now it meant that they had to compete fairly, so it meant they kept losing in there when it came down to the products. But I think that is part of the public-private interaction that goes on. America is sort of like a family that sometimes only communicates through lawsuits, but it needs to communicate. And I think there's signs of some companies feeling that they have certain immunity. I don't mean to pick on Facebook, but... But you're picking on Facebook. The times investigations are a great concern to me. The sense that they feel they can hire the right groups, pay, hire the right former White House people and so forth, and kind of apologize a lot, but then skirt above the law and avoid any kind of serious consequences, what they've done, some really alarming privacy violations of privacy norms and so forth. Just kind of skirt it. That's a just affirm that's in the need of a good breakup to my thinking. And yeah. Although, I mean, Google's been in the same crosshairs. Amazon's certainly been in the same crosshairs. I mean, this is one of the questions, like which would you choose if you were... Well, right, and that's where it comes to the sort of wisdom of a good prosecutor. You know, you read about all these cases and spend a lot of time. And you know, the art of prosecutorial discretion is just that in art. And it, you know, when the agencies have gone bad is when they just reliant sort of economic criteria. In the 70s, the FTC thought the serial industry was the villain because they had... They had a very complicated analysis that they plugged in all the numbers on whatever mainframe computer and out came breakfast cereals. And they went after them. But no one had any theory of villainy or anything like that. And you're a lawyer, many of us are lawyers here. Law is really about the guilty mind and the guilt. So I think you need to tackle villains where the public understands what you're doing and why. I think you should also chase after cases, firms that have a certain sense of impunity or unaccountability. Part of this is politicals about bringing accountability. I think another sort of warning sign is a firm that seems to be able to ignore regulation or ignore and seems to have defeated Congress somehow. AT&T in the 70s, one of the reasons that just department decided to go after them is they concluded the FCC had lost the ability to control AT&T. That they weren't listening to the regulations that the government had the idea that we want more competition in telephony. And AT&T said, I'm sorry, that's not gonna happen. And so, you know, that's a threat to democracy if you can't have government do what it says. And so these are sort of the triggers. I don't have, I guess I have my own formulas is giving up Facebook, but it could be someone else and maybe there's more wisdom and you have to have a good case, you know, and you have to have malicious conduct and that all comes together. It's not random. All right, I'm gonna turn it over to you and just introduce yourself and ask a question. Don't give a speech right here in the front. And wait for the microphone, please. Nice to see you. Question, suppose Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos came to you and said, Tim, what should we do? What would you advise us to do? Can we, we wanna buy Instagram or with Amazon, we wanna go into this other new industry. We think we have innovative ideas. Do you have any thoughts on telling them we'll spin off a company or don't go there or how they would draw lines if they don't wanna exploit their market power but they do wanna take advantage of what they know and the money they have? That's an interesting question. So, you know, you didn't ask about Amazon. Amazon is in many ways the hardest case here. As with the history of chain stores, the retailers are all efficient retailers are always a kind of challenging economic case because they tend to save people money. So I think there's a good, can be a good side of these companies and a bad side. I like it when a firm like Amazon enters a market that could use a shake up itself. So, you know, if Amazon is gonna get in that healthcare or something like that, they said they were gonna have health insurance. The health insurance market, I may be picking on tech, but health insurance is a million times worse. Right, I mean, that's, actually I can't even bear to have anything to do with health insurance since the markets are so broke and it's so upsetting to work in those areas and it's like, it's stymied. So, you know, they're much, much worse. You know, it's a horrendous mixture of pretend competition and pretend regulation and, you know, we spend double in an industrialized country and get worse results in IUNI. Everyone knows the story. So, when a firm is going to make an entry into what I see as an industry that can use a shake up, I'm all for it. But yeah, if, you know, what would I advise Facebook to do now about Instagram? I mean, they're not gonna listen to me to say to divest them, but I, because it's not good particularly, it might be good for them. Sometimes firms kind of throw off, throw off, throw off actors and all, you know, like AOL and Time Warner dissolved by themselves. For their class and students. Right. Yeah, I don't think any of these firms will voluntarily break up. What I did say, someone asked what, you know, Facebook should do and I think they'll never do this either. But I suggested that if they really do believe that their real purpose is building a global community and bringing, there's a very noble values and they should become a public service corporation or a non-profit. If they actually believe that this is what they're interested in serving humanity, then let's see it. You know, why not? I think that would be, that would be great, but it's anyway, I think there's more. One goal, yes. Next. Hi, thank you so much for this conversation today. My name is Dennis Henry. I work at CSIS. I am Belgium, so I'm fine with ABNB for now. My question is actually on the European side, there's a lot of talk here around how much they want to stifle American tech companies. Anyway, you can debate the reason behind it. Is there anything you think we can learn on this side from what everything Margaret Brestinger has been doing? Good, bad, any kind of advice? So I like, this is what I like. I have a mixed relationship with European or competition enforcement. I like that it happens and there's an active enforcement culture. And what I don't like is with everything except for the beer industry, by the way. I think their allowance of those mergers was unacceptable. But what I don't like, what I don't like about Europe is the approach to remedies. I think the Europeans are very drawn to regulatory remedies. They're very drawn to, okay, here's this company, pay us fine, we're gonna put you in this sort of complicated, we're almost gonna invent an agency for you that oversees your life. And I'm not fond of that because I believe that there's an entrenching power. I think good regulation is hard to do well and that it can have an entrenching kind of effect. Many of Europe's remedies, let's take the Microsoft case. So I think Europe's remedies for the Microsoft monopoly situation were kind of ridiculous. And they created this weird regulatory scheme that I don't think was very effective. They forced, they're very much focused on Windows media players, the source of the problem. And you had to install like three versions of the media player and I don't think it went that well. I think Europe has gotta get into breakups. That's what I want Europe to do. It's like, understand the breakup. You know, we're talking about Google. They could, it's my controversial suggestion, but they could break Google Europe off if they wanted and have their own territorial thing. I think they should get more involved in breakup culture. But I think Americans, and you know, we do to some degree learn from the Europeans when I was in government, because they are bringing more cases and facts tend to leak out. And people say, well, something's going on here. Maybe we should look at it. So they often lead the way right now. And I think that's very important. I'll just say that as a former law professor that when I first started teaching international litigation in US courts, the US antitrust law, you know, we applied our antitrust law all over the world and you could sue for triple damages under US law. And everybody hated the Australians, the Europeans. And of course now the shoe is completely on the other foot. We are not enforcing antitrust laws in the Europeans. And they're applying their law extraterritorially. So I have been neglecting this side of the room there on the, right there. One here is the technologies and two of the companies you've been talking about. I have no problems with suing to break up very large corporations. Just introduce yourself, sorry. My name is James Tsang. I have no problems with the idea of suing large organizations. I do have problems evaluating mergers a priori. My experience is that mergers destroy value as much as create value. In some cases, technology mergers like can tell you that seem to have provided value to companies. The company had most of the technology. It was a way to signal to the organization that we should be worried about it. And sometimes they actually killed the organization that they bought. So I'm, it's very skeptical about one's ability to predict the value of a merger. Well, I can say something about that. You know, there is an argument, another argument I didn't make when you say what do you do about tech mergers, which is to say maybe some of these harder mergers should be done retroactively. In other words, you wait for the merger to happen. And, you know, say wait five years and then, or we'll just wait. So it used to be that all merger enforcement was retroactive. The part, yes, that's right, until about 1974. And so, Hart-Scott-Rodino acts. So it used to be all, and they still occasionally do retroactive mergers. Whole Foods bought a company called Wild Oats or something a couple years ago and they broke them up retroactively. So, you know, retroactively you have the facts. You know, was it harmless, meaningless, or a bad, or was it actually anti-competitive? One of the arguments in the book was you should, the Facebook action I called for is a retroactive, for the anti-trust people, Clayton Seven, retroactive act. Maybe section two mixed in there for variety. So way in the back there, on the left hand side, yep. I can't see the person, just the arm. Hi, I'm Sarri from the US Department of Education. This is a great talk. How do you feel about when you do break these mergers or break these organizations up? How does this money trickle down to the people who need jobs at the most basic level? And I'm thinking about Amazon and Northern Virginia and people who need jobs save East of the Anacostia, but they may not make $130,000 a year, which is what you need to survive in Washington, DC. Thank you. That's a great question. So, you know, is this all the, this isn't much theater. Well, I guess one slightly dodgy answer is that anti-trust is not the answer to everything. Right, and you know, I think if you talk about inequality and the greater challenges of inequality, the ant trust is not, as I said, the only answer. But it is part of the answer, and I think so for the following reasons. I think that a concentrated economy also tends to concentrate wealth and income. And that, you know, if you look at the long term trends, now economists are studying this right now, and this is what the White House was so concerned about, is the idea that if you have industries primarily dominated by oligopolies that throw off big profits, you know, that usually ends up in stock market increases, and it generally moves all that money to, say, about a 10% of the population. So some of these trends, concentration equality, are linked, and I think that when you, ant trust is not the only thing that can block concentration, but if you have a sort of de-concentration program, just trying to prevent these concentrations, your result is more money, more distributed. I'll say that the highest period of income, equality in the United States was the 60s and 70s, which coincidentally was the highest period of ant trust enforcement, most intense scrutiny of mergers. And, you know, a lot of other policies too, so it's, you know, federal policy is complicated, and there's a lot going on, but it is at least correlated. You're in the front, right here. Hi, my name's Jared. I'm an artificial intelligence researcher. I'm really interested in what you talk about in terms of the art of prosecutorial discretion. You advance the notion that we need to change doctrinal application efforts to be more economic-based and more empirical, and yet, you're asked as much more value-based. It's about, you know, how do we think about the woolly application of these antitrust cases? And so I'm interested in, you know, really what's your ask? Are we asking for a different type of education around prosecutors in the United States in terms of making them think about these social implications of major corporations? I mean, and to what degree can that same value-based ask be contorted by, you know, a different normative framework? Yeah, it's a- And can we write an algorithm for prosecutorial discretion? We'll get on it because he's an AI guy. Yeah, it's a, I think there's no getting away from the idea that the virtue and character of your senior government officials has a lot to do with what kind of country you live in, and there's, you know, does that mean education? It doesn't mean it's more an education. It means an entire nation devoted to the idea that the best people should be in government with virtue, honesty, courage, attributes, which, and it starts at the top, as we're seeing right now. And I think there's no, like, no one in the history of government has ever, I think, gotten around from that. Think about the framers. Sometimes in the United States, we can be too focused on the idea that we solved all these things with separation of powers. But someone like John Adams believed there's no replacement for virtue in leadership. And that's basically what I'm calling for is a series of, you know, the prosecutors, and it's not like this is unheard of. This is, in some sense, their own tradition. And I believe, you know, you go into these, this is about the health of institutions. It's about the individuals, it's also about institutions that inculcate good values, high ethics, certain independence, courage. This is really important in non-corruptibility. A sense that you cannot do your job as prosecutor or law enforcement official with an eye towards what your next job is. I think that's the most, I think, the most corrupting thing in this city is that idea that if you bring this case, it might be great, but then maybe you'll be considered a little bit wackier, strong, and maybe you won't get the general counsel position at Facebook that you wanted or whatever it was. So that, and then you'll be a person who instead of making a million dollars a year makes $100,000 a year and how would that be? I think that's common concern among people in this town. So yeah, that's, I don't know if that exactly answered your question, but I've always wrote this book to remind prosecutors and law enforcement and government officials of who they are and who they can be. And, you know, and at best you can be heroic in these jobs and you can stand for the public and represent it and fight villains. And so that's what I have to say. Just sort of a point on that. It's again why the, even if it's the apocryphal, Teddy Roosevelt, JP Morgan meeting is important because, and when you describe Joel Klein going after Microsoft, these folks know each other or they know people who know each other. It is, these circle, they went to law school in the same place and you really are standing up and saying, in this case to Bill Gates or to whoever the person is, nope, we're coming after your company and there will be social repercussions. There'll be, in ways that is not just institutional, it is personal, so it does require the willingness to say, people are gonna think differently than me, people will ostracize me or people will sever terms and yet I'm going to do it. So that person courage element is quite important and the Joel Klein story brings that out. I do notice that ever since I started getting excited about antitrust, I know I'll get it longer, get invited to the Google White House, White House Correspondence Party. But I have friends who go, so I hang along with them. Andres, then I'll come to you. Thanks, I'm Andres Martinez with New American Future Tense and Tim, it's such a pleasure to have you here and it's bringing back a lot of great memories. I wanted to ask you about whether you feel that one aspect of antitrust has worked and whether it needs to be revisited and this has to do with the fact that I think we often forget that the traditional antitrust approach in the U.S. and how it linked to sort of a Brandeis' vision of our politics did create a tremendous amount of local wealth as we created these bulwarks between national power and myself. So we have in every town you have broadcasters who own their license simply because we decided as a society we didn't want to have national broadcasters owning their own distribution. We have beer distributors and most frustrating for me we have car dealers and I have not always had the best experience with car dealers and I wish I could buy my cars directly from Honda say or Ford or whomever and this is the issue that Elon Musk has run into with Tesla. Why does he have to, why can't he sell his cars directly to us? It's because of traditional antitrust. Doctrines say there has to be a third party dealership. To me that's been a hugely influential wealth creation at the local level, the way political powers distributed. Was that, has that been effective and are there some of those ideas of traditional antitrust that maybe now can be revisited? I mean should, I guess to put the question bluntly in the case of Elon Musk and cars, should he be allowed to sell you a car directly or is this intermediary dealer still something that needs to be part of that transaction in order to further the sort of political aspect of antitrust that you've been talking about? That's a terrific question and it pits two of my instincts against each other which is always painful but worthwhile. So what you're referring to is less antitrust but more of the brandycy and localism programs mostly in the 1930s, the second new deal. But they're in the same spirit which is, we don't wanna have a country where everything is national, everything, all power is concentrated and we're gonna create, using government frameworks, measures to, for example, protect local retailers to give broadcasters local power. As you said, local banking was big, local car dealerships, a whole bunch of things to try to keep the country sort of economically de-concentrated or at least on a geographic basis. And there's, I guess I have unsurprisingly mixed feelings about it. I think I've come to swing, so an earlier version myself I think was much more critical of those ideas for the reasons you might suggest. They tend to become government programs that subsidize local business which isn't necessarily the best or the, and what's great about that, like the car dealerships. I think I've become more sympathetic or wondering whether we've ripped up too much of that over the last 40 years and accepted a country that is primarily ruled from a couple, primarily a very centralized couple giant cities where all the wealth is in the rest of the country unless they haven't have oil so long, so much for you and you have some of the scraps or so forth. Yeah, it's one of those things where you realize this thing that doesn't look very attractive might be doing something important and you only notice that when you rip it off like a scab. Even though it was ugly, it might have been doing something really important about trying to keep this kind of big continent, right? And it's something to sort of consign much of it just to economic servitude. Yeah, and I've actually even more over time come more towards the other states should be more economically important units and so on. I just think it leads to more likely, let's go back to Brandeis. I was reading these books about Brandeis and there he is in Louisville and it's like this sort of flourishing regional capital and people do stuff. And the idea of that, there's some areas in the United States like that but a lot of it's like, okay, if you wanna sort of make it you come to New York or LA or otherwise you sort of stay at home and there's no real opportunity but you're loyal or something like that. And I don't know, that doesn't seem to strike me as what America can be, it can do better. I agree, yes, wait for the microphone if you will. Hold on, it's coming this way. My name is Jim Case. Earlier in your talk you mentioned a la Monopoly and as a sort of an afterthought you said or tight Monopoly. I mean tight a la Monopoly, yes. And hasn't the law kind of discriminated but differentiated between Monopoly and a la Monopoly? Hasn't a la Monopoly been almost a carte blanche protection against Monopoly and your trust litigation? Yeah, so thanks for the question. The economic effects of, the bad economic effects of Monopoly and tighter oligopolies are relatively similar. There's a little more difficulty in coordinating but if you think about let's say three airlines they've been fairly successful in kind of coordinating. You notice the change fees are always the same. The tickets are about the same. You know, with the exception of Southwest the three majors in particular which had a lot of business traffic. You know they sort of in unison raised their baggage fees they in unison. So they were able to act like a Monopoly more or less. They've all kind of moved to this basic seat model. Sorry I can go on about the airlines for a while. We all can. And the law however is as you suggest has this sort of technical formal difference between Monopoly and which is potentially a violation of Section Two of the Sherman Act of Monopolization maintenance and oligopoly which you have to come up with a different kind of theory. So in some ways it's a loophole in the law. Everyone knows about it. No one's been able to do anything about it. I know I've got one more question here. Okay, your next and then I think that you're the last question in the back and we'll close it up. Hi my name is James and I'm a media researcher for the Baha'is of the United States. And my question is I'm curious what your thoughts are the unique social problems that are posed by over-concentration in these new tech industries which seem their business seems to rely on the creation and exploitation of public spheres. And it's from the public sphere that you know the soul of a nation and its ideals are derived and maintained. That's a very broad, I missed the question part. I'm sorry, I know it's maybe, and where you seem to have gotten something. No, I got the point, I mean the point is this mixture of private companies creating public spaces and that we, you and I were talking about earlier but I'm not sure. I have feelings about that. They're not necessarily related to this book so much but they are I think a question for our times. Yeah, I think we're in the midst of a very interesting conversation about as to whether there will be something called, if not journalistic ethics, social media ethics that the major platforms start to grope their way towards and sort of figure out. I think we've had a, this is sort of a different topic. We first sort of have a 10 year or 20 year experiment with like okay, what happens when anything goes. And I think inside the company people are like, I don't know if this has been so great. Not only has it turned the public on us. Our users are starting to hate it. I think Twitter is probably a very strong example where there's been a big change inside the company and the interest in health and what do we do? And I think that's very important. I think it's one of the most important conversations out there. It's largely outside of the legal conversation, sort of an internal conversation but I think it's one that almost should become more of a public conversation. Great, yeah. Last question there was a hand in the back. Hi, Tim. I'm Alex Brenner. I work with a strategic advisory firm that focuses on advising American companies and organizations on China. And last I saw you, Tim, you were sitting at the front of a room next to- You're better known as my drinking buddy in Beijing. That would be- Long ago. So in February you were working on this book. You were sitting next to Reid Hoffman discussing this very topic. And one of his arguments against breaking up the big tech firm as was Chinese competition. That there's no way that Beijing is planning on breaking up Alibaba in 10 cent. Did you end up covering this in the book? And if so, what did you say? And if not, why not? And you do thank Reid in the acknowledgments for reading the manuscript. Yes, I have this in a forthcoming op-ed in the New York Times. I kind of mentioned it, but let me just give the answer. Which is, I think, so this argument has been made actually by Mark Zuckerberg among others, which you made as well, which is, listen, we're in this kind of global competition with China. If we- It's unilateral of this armament. Cripple our own tech, heard our own tech companies, then, you know, yes, exactly. China takes no prisoners and we'll lose the contest for global supremacy and it'll be ruled by our, since I'm Chinese, I feel like I can say things, but we'll be ruled by our new masters in the East. How's that? And so, I think that, I can understand the appeal of that argument, but I think it's a superficial argument that betrays the best of American industrial policy over the last hundred years, which has been to subject the companies in the United States to the rigors of competition at home and the idea that makes them better in the future. And it actually comes back to my point about AT&T and Microsoft and IBM. If we were to take on national champions policy, which is, you know, we gotta support American firms to win the world over, we would have said, well, call off the antitrust case against IBM, double down on AT&T, and let's leave Microsoft alone. We would have done what Japan did in the 80s. And you remember there's a time where Japan was like the looming superpower of tech that was gonna beat in America and they were, and unlike America, which was beating up on its firm, Japan was supporting their firms. So how did that go for Japan? Well, in the case of computing, they put all their bets on supercomputing, because everyone knew that was the future, right? And, you know, NEC, the giant Japanese version of IBM was gonna take the future, and supercomputing wasn't the future, they chose wrong. They never broke up NTT, which is AT&T equivalent. So Japan's mobile firms, they had an initial advantage, but they never did anything to challenge the mother's ship. And so in all these areas, three areas, personal computers, personal computers, the internet and mobile, Japan missed the boat because they never developed a kind of startup entrepreneurial industry and now no one even talks about them. And I think if we put the big bet on, okay, these guys have got it, Facebook, Google, these guys are great, they are great, 10 years from now, they might not be great, that they might be more like the great IBM was. And so I think our bet has worked over and over again and trying to sort of mimic beat China by being China is a really bad idea. And I think eventually China will, if unless they allow, China does have a good startup culture on like Japan, but if they don't let their main dominant firms be beat in a fair competition, they will also suffer the curse of ignorance. That is the perfect note on which to end. I want you to join me. Thank you. Thank you Tim Wu. Also our future tense team, this is a future tense event. It's a wonderful partnership with Arizona State University and you've come to many future tense events and our own events team and the production team who are in the back, you don't see them, but they helped make this work. So thanks to everyone. Come back.