Episode 166 — Fence-building vs. Axe-wielding

Hi, James. Ben, how are you? Revved up and ready to go. How are you? I must confess I am a little nervous. This feels like five years of conversations has finally hit the front page of the policy making world, and it's all coming home to be discussed. It is. It has certainly been a sort of thematic week. I haven't written my daily update for Thursday, but it's gonna be on the same topic the rest of the week, which is sort of antitrust. Last week, senator Elizabeth Warren, who's running for president, announced proposal about breaking up the big tech companies and the entitled, here's how we can break up big tech. And, you know, obviously, that is something that is pertinent to the things that we discuss on multiple levels. I wrote about it on Tuesday. I wrote a very long article, potentially the longest article ever in the sector's history. I'll actually explain why it was so long in a moment. But then, of interest is a few hours before we recorded this, Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission about Apple and antitrust, which is certainly very interesting and I think ties into this discussion in some interesting ways that may not be entirely flattering to this proposal, to be honest, but we can sort of get into that. Yep. Sounds like a plan. Yeah. I do wanna make a sort of a big point about why was my article so long. And the reason it was so long is that this point, this question of antitrust, this question of the effects of aggregation sort of in the long run and the way that the returns to scale that result from that is been something that I've been writing about for literally years. This is something that is very important to me. I spent a lot of time thinking about what problems might there be, what harms might there be, what benefits are there, how should people think about regulation in this space. And to that end, to have it introduced at such a high level, such a prominent sort of position as a presidential candidate is certainly something that, of course, I'm gonna write about it for one. The other thing, though, is I just really fundamentally disagreed with the way this proposal was put together with the framing that went to this proposal. And so I kinda felt I had no choice but to criticize it pretty harshly. But at the same time, it's easy to sit around and sort of snipe. Right? It's easy to sit there and say what's wrong with something. And given how important I think this topic has been to me, I thought it was only right to spend time weighing out where I think we should go instead. Right? I don't wanna be that guy sitting on the sidelines saying, oh, this is bad. This is bad. This is wrong. To someone who's actually pushing …