Today we’re talking about antitrust policy 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 of them all — the pendulum has swung back and forth on antitrust policy pretty wildly over the past few years, and it’s about to swing again under Trump. So I asked Leah Nylen, an antitrust reporter for Bloomberg News and a leading expert on this subject, to come on the show and help break it all down. Links: Trump’s antitrust trio heralds Big Tech crackdown to continue | Bloomberg Trump picks FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency | Politico Trump picks Gail Slater to head Justice Department's antitrust division | Reuters Trump names Brendan Carr as his FCC leader | The Verge Trump’s FTC pick promises to go after ‘censorship’ from tech companies | The Verge Breaking down the DOJ’s plan to end Google’s search monopoly | The Verge US v. Google redux: all the news from the ad tech trial | The Verge Tech leaders kiss the ring | The Verge DOJ antitrust chief is ‘overjoyed’ after Google monopoly verdict | Decoder This is Big Tech’s playbook for swallowing the AI industry | Command Line Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apatow, 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 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 Leah Nyland, 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 Decoder 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 Kahn 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. And they've been pretty public about it. Cantor has been on Decoder twice in the past year to talk about this approach and what it means.
After all, Amazon, Apple, and Meta are all currently facing major antitrust lawsuits, with Microsoft now under investigation as well. And then there's Google, which is potentially staring down a full breakup after already losing one major antitrust suit. with a ruling in a second case about advertising due basically any day now.
And a lot of this regulatory pressure has been designed to avoid what I like to call the Instagram problem, where everyone wishes the governments of the world had prevented Facebook from buying Instagram in 2012, which might have allowed Instagram to turn into a real competitor to Facebook. But that didn't happen.
For pretty much the entire 2010s, the tech industry grew and consolidated through mergers and acquisitions of startups at a breakneck pace, which is how you ended up with what some founders and venture capitalists called a kill zone around the big companies. If they saw a startup that might compete with them, they would just buy it, and that would be that.
The situation led to a lot of hearings, a lot of press releases, a lot of lawsuits, a lot of podcast episodes, and ultimately ended up with a Biden administration that wanted to do something to slow it down and perhaps even unwind some of it.
And some of this enforcement has been so intense that the big companies have started to devise creative strategies to avoid the very appearance of acquiring another company. Just look at Inflection AI. Microsoft didn't acquire it, but rather it hired most of the people at the company, licensed the technology, and installed its co-founder, Mustafa Suleiman, as the CEO of its new AI division.
You can't really have your acquisition blocked if, on paper, you haven't acquired anything at all. But now Donald Trump is returning to the White House in a month, and he's already named his picks to replace Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor.
Trump's pick to head the Federal Trade Commission is current Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, who pitched himself for the job by promising to unwind Lena Kahn's agenda. Overall, he's extremely supportive of big business, except when it comes to big tech.
Ferguson is all in on using the power of the Federal Trade Commission to somehow rein in big tech, especially for perceived political censorship, which is something that Donald Trump cares about very much. And Trump's pick to run antitrust to the Department of Justice is Gail Slater, whose background makes her seem poised to keep some of these big antitrust cases alive.
This all leads to some deeply strange tension, which you'll hear Leah really talk about. On the one hand, the incoming administration is fine with letting big companies become huge ones, but it might also support a potential Google breakup.
Not because it believes Google has behaved anti-competitively, but to punish Google for its perceived control over speech, which is something conservatives truly hate. There's a lot going on here and a lot of open questions. Big tech companies would love to believe that we're heading into an era of less antitrust enforcement, a blind eye to big deals and back to business as usual.
But are we really going to see a reversal of the last four years that means big tech gets to breathe a sigh of relief and spin up the acquisition machine? Or are we headed to a world where there's a weird kind of tech-only bipartisan antitrust effort? Leah is one of the sharpest people I know on this issue, and you'll hear her say there are a lot of wild cards here.
But if anyone can help us figure it out, it's her. Okay, the uncertain state of antitrust in the United States and what it means for big tech. Here we go. Leon Island, you're an antitrust reporter at Bloomberg News. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me. I am very excited to talk to you. It feels like the antitrust beat has been going through some wild pendulum swings.
That's one way to put it.
There's a weirdness that I would almost put in the category of political realignment, right? Through the 80s, basically, everyone was like, we should not have companies that are too big. They will take over society, and then that will be bad. And then in the 80s, you're like, what if companies took over society?
That's like the classic sort of Gordon Gekko deal-making merger and acquisition world that we had back then. That was largely, I think, most people's experience of the economy until recently. And now you just have this moment where historically Republicans, you know, very favorable to business, Democrats perhaps less favorable to particularly big business.
And now there's just this weird realignment where Republicans are like, except those businesses, we're going to blow those up because we want to control something about them. And then it, to me at least, feels like what they're talking about is a bunch of totally irrelevant culture war stuff. We think Google is censoring us, so we're going to make sure Google can't do stuff.
And the tool we're going to use is antitrust law. And I just haven't seen a very direct connection between those ideas. Have you?
There are some threads that make sense, right? Republicans, particularly the libertarian strain of Republicans, are very opposed to big government because they say the government can get so big and it can force you to do things and impinge on freedom. Andrew Ferguson was giving some really interesting remarks about the problem with consolidation. Tell people who Andrew Ferguson is.
What's his background?
What's he like?
Andrew Ferguson is a Republican commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. Donald Trump has picked him to be the chair. He joined the commission actually only earlier this year after working as a solicitor general for Virginia for a couple of years. He brought a bunch of lawsuits against Biden administration policies that Republicans were particularly opposed to.
Before that, he worked in Congress for Mitch McConnell, and he was very involved in the confirmation of some of the Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett. He has lots of connections on Capitol Hill and among the sort of like new Republican set, but also to some of like the old guard. He was a Clarence Thomas clerk early in his career.
And so he's like a dyed in the wool Federalist Society member.
Andrew Ferguson is on the FTC now. He's Trump's nominee to be the chair.
Yes. He was making the connection that when you have a very consolidated industry, it's really easy for the government to go to those companies and and sort of push them to make choices that the government wants. He used the word collusion for it's easy for the government to collude with big business to sort of disfavor particular viewpoints, etc.
You can quibble with that, I think, about whether they're really censoring conservatives or whatever. But I think the point that when there are only a few companies that the government has to go to to sort of like influence policy, it's very true. They only have to go to like three or four and then they can sort of impact everyone.
It is very interesting because traditionally Republicans have been like the party of big business. And so this is really turning it on its head.
to have all of these folks like Andrew Ferguson, like Mark Mader, the other FTC commissioner nominee, and Gail Slater, who's going to be taking over at the Justice Department under Trump, who are very, at least anti-big tech, and proposing to make all of these changes to some of America's most successful companies.
Why do you think it's tech in particular that they're focused on? I was reading Andrew Ferguson's pitch to Trump, which is a remarkable document.
Yes.
It is a pure culture war document, right? He's in there being like, I will use the power of the Federal Trade Commission to stop the trans agenda. And I could not even tell you what that means.
I sometimes call it Fox News Mad Libs. They're just using words like woke and trans agenda, and they're not using them in the way that you might use normal words. You're sort of using them as signifiers. Like, I know that these are things that, like, conservatives are concerned about. So I'm going to put this word in there so I can signal to you that I know that this is an issue.
Inside of that is a distinct split between how he wants to treat one set of big companies and then all the rest. So, you know, for most American businesses, he says he wants to reverse Lena Khan's anti-business agenda. And he says mergers are good for consumers, which I'm guessing most decoder listeners are already primed to argue with.
And then he's like, we got to stop big tech from censoring everyone. And I'm going to pursue challenges to big tech for my purchase, the FTC. And I can't quite draw the line. Is it just he hates these five companies and so he's going to yell at them the most? Is there something they do or make? What is it about those companies that has drawn this level of scrutiny?
There's been this longtime issue with alleged censorship of conservative voices. If you talk to some of the Republicans who've become interested in antitrust, a lot of them point to sort of two things that happened around the 2020 election as sort of like their instigating moments.
One was the deplatforming of Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook and all of the social media platforms in the wake of the January 6th Capitol riots. And the other one they point to is the whole issue with Rumble and when Rumble was removed from Apple and Google's app stores, also sort of in the wake of the
That is sort of like this defining moment for them, you know, where they sort of realize that, wow, these companies really do have way too much power over free speech and the ability of Americans to express themselves. For a long time, everyone said, well, if you don't like the policies of Twitter or Facebook, go create your own.
So they tried to create their own with like Rumble and True Social and some of these other ones. And then the big tech companies just like didn't let people download them. And I think that sort of does help explain a little bit why big tech is sort of the focus it has. The other thing I'll say is some people have described it.
the Republican sort of hatred of big tech is like big tech is the gateway drug. It's sort of like the way that they get interested in antitrust. Because here are these companies that are having such an impact on the economy. And from there, they sort of get more interested sometimes in the power of other companies.
It feels to me like the specific thing that the Republican Party in particular can point to is the big tech companies have control over information. So by attacking them over and over again and saying they're woke or they're censoring you, they have a thing they can show people that is bad.
And that allows them to use state power in a way that a bunch of libertarians and conservatives are not prone to wanting to use state power. The government is not supposed to do stuff in that particular worldview. And here they're actively talking about doing a lot of stuff because there's speech on the other side of it.
In order to protect the First Amendment, the government must go and smash men into a thousand pieces. It doesn't feel like they have the same argument for the healthcare industry is consolidating or Kroger is going to buy Albertsons and now there's going to be fewer grocery stores.
Like it just hasn't connected even though in many ways the arguments are exactly the same or even simpler in the case of the grocery stores. Like prices will go up if there are fewer grocery stores. You don't need to be a hipster antitrust person. Yeah. You don't need to be radicalized by whether Rumble's in the app store. You're just like, well, prices will go up if there's less competition.
And it doesn't seem like that is connecting on the Republican side at all.
I think that's very true, at least for now. We'll sort of see. But I think maybe, you know, as I was saying, the Fox News mad libs, like Fox News, you know, viewers really don't like the big tech companies. This has been like true for a very long time.
So to hear all of these Donald Trump appointees say that they're finally going to go after them and do something and maybe even break them up, I sort of think is probably appealing.
Can you do that in a legally coherent way? Can you come up with a legal philosophy for the DOJ or the FTC that allows you to break up Google but not have those laws apply to other companies? Because that feels like the hardest road. I just don't know how you do it.
That was an objection that a lot of people had to the antitrust bills that were being considered in 2021 and 2022 and then died, is that we were making these rules that were only going to apply to one sector of the economy, where generally we have rules, at least in antitrust, that apply broadly. That isn't true. When antitrust isn't working, people come up with regulations.
And I mean, that was the entire creation of the FCC and telecom regulation in the late 1990s. So... I think part of the thing is we've just done no regulation whatsoever, really, of the internet economy up to this point.
We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with Bloomberg antitrust reporter Leah Nyland. Before the break, you heard us discussing the inherent contradictions of trying to consistently apply tech regulation, in particular antitrust regulation, in a way that doesn't also spill over into every other part of the economy. But we do have one good example of where this political disconnect has sprung up in the past, net neutrality.
And I think that tells us a bit about what these next four years are going to look like. The most regulation we ever pointed at the internet in any kind of like widespread way was net neutrality, which the Republicans fully opposed.
And that argument was we shouldn't let the ISPs control what products and services you have access to, what information you get, how fast the videos load on one service or another. And you just take that one layer up the stack to Apple blocked Rumble and you have massive regulatory effort. And yet they still all oppose net neutrality.
Brendan Carr, who is currently on the FCC, Trump's nominee to be the new chair of the FCC, hates net neutrality. He thinks it's the stupidest idea in the world. And then he's like, I will use the power of the FCC to stop censorship. And it's like, there's one thing you can definitely do, which is tell ISPs not to block content on their pipes. And you hate that idea.
I just keep coming back to where is this disconnect? Is it just they're easy targets and they have a lot of money? Mark Zuckerberg will fly to Mar-a-Lago and give Donald Trump literally a million dollars for his inauguration? Or is there something else at play?
They don't yet have, in the way that the neo-Brandeisians or the Lina Khan sort of school has now sort of developed a coherent philosophy. You haven't really seen that yet on what they're calling the new right sort of They have this dislike of big business. You heard J.D. Vance talking at the convention about how the days of Wall Street were going to be over.
Yet at the same time, they're relying on Wall Street for a lot of money and support for their party. And so I think that they haven't truly come up with a coherent philosophy yet, aside from we don't like big tech.
I want to talk about Vance for a second. Vance is... He is radicalized into antitrust. He's appeared at events saying he sees the problem of big tech. I've heard him say he thinks Lena Kahn is doing a good job, mostly because I think he likes that she's screwing with Google. There appears to be a very clear line between those two ideas.
One of his allies, Gail Slater, is in line to be the head of antitrust at the Department of Justice. She's going to replace Jonathan Cantor. She's going to inherit the big antitrust case against Apple. She's going to inherit the antitrust cases against Google. What do you what do you make of her and what do you think she's going to do with those cases?
Gail is a very interesting individual. She worked at the FTC for 10 years. One of her last jobs while she was there was as an attorney advisor to Julie Brill, who is a Democrat. She is a Republican longtime. Her husband was a longtime chief of staff to Mike Simpson from Idaho. But she is Irish, an Irish-American. She grew up in Dublin.
So she has a little bit of a different perspective on the world, I think. Right after she left the FTC, she actually worked for the Internet Association, which was at the time, you know, the biggest lobbyist for Google and Facebook and all of the big tech companies. And then, you know, so from there went to work in the Trump White House. Yeah.
But after leaving the Trump administration, she worked for a lot of anti-Google companies, Fox Corp and then Roku. So she's very well steeped in the anti-Google arguments and the problems that I guess sort of like mid to small tech companies have. with the tech giants. She's actually a great pick from that perspective.
She knows the technology world and the problems that have arisen from the big tech companies. It's a question of whether they're actually going to empower her to do what they say that they want her to do.
The Google case has come to a conclusion, right? Google was found to be a monopolist as it relates to search. The Justice Department has put forth its proposed remedies, which involves selling Chrome, not allowing these default placements. Do you think she's likely to pursue those remedies?
You have to remember that this case is not just the Justice Department. It is also 48 states. And that includes a lot of Republican attorneys general. So there have been sort of Republican side input into this entire process, both the lawsuit and now the remedy phase. If they want to make some changes to the remedy, they can in March before we go into the trial.
But they've made a pretty coherent argument in the papers so far for why they think Chrome needs to be sold, for why they think the various things that they're proposing, like Google being required to turn over some of its data to other search engines, needs to happen.
So if they don't want the judge to move forward with what has already been proposed, they're going to need a pretty convincing legal argument for why what the Biden folks said is wrong.
I keep relating that case to the Microsoft case of the 90s, which was started under the Clinton administration and settled under the Bush administration. The Clinton administration wanted to break up Microsoft, and the Bush administration said, we're just going to annoy you for 25 years until Google appears. That was basically how that played out.
Do you think that same sort of shape is likely, where you had the much more aggressive posture and now you might wind it down to a bunch of compliance measures or a court-ordered monitor or something like that?
In this situation, we have Judge Mehta, who's going to be making the decision. He is a little bit more, we'll say, sort of like conservative. He's very careful. So, I mean, it's entirely possible that he's not going to, you know, agree to a current breakup or some of the bigger asks of the Biden team. But I don't really think that the Trump administration wants to water this down. You know, like,
They have long had problems with Google. It's sort of a rallying cry among, you know, conservatives that the big tech companies need to be broken up. So I think if they were to come up with like a Microsoft like settlement, it would certainly like be a disappointment to their base.
There's also the Google Ads case, which to me has always felt like much more of a slam dunk because you can just see the money moving and then you can see a bunch of companies that say we can't access those markets because Google is effectively a monopoly in every layer of the ad stack. That's not closer yet, right? That's still just like puttering along. It hasn't hit a ruling.
Do you think that one's likely to stay on track?
Yes, definitely. I mean, the judge in that case is a firecracker. She's pretty great, actually. She has said she's going to rule by the end of the year. And I believe it. She has moved everything along very quickly. There are people who are saying that, you know, if she finds that Google has a monopoly in those markets, she could try and move for a remedy decision by next summer.
So we could have both of these sort of wrapped up, you know, by next summer, ready for their appeals.
There's a theme here, right, which is the social media companies, the companies that distribute information on the internet, they are drawing a ton of scrutiny because they're too woke, right? Because they have some content moderation policy and the government should find a way to – to make sure they don't have those. They should all just be like X, which is whatever X is.
Whatever experiences people are having in X, they should all be like that. Isn't the idea that there should be massive competition in these markets and that people should just choose the experience they're having instead of the government telling these platforms what experiences to deliver?
That is the ideal that any trust enforcers talk about. If there were all of these other social media platforms, if we really did have like 10,000 of them, it wouldn't matter if the government was trying to go around and get somebody banned off of Facebook. one or censor a particular view about viruses because those people could just go to the other one.
But the problem is we only have a few of them. These are the gateways to the internet. And so if the, you know, government or if the company itself makes a decision, it can have a massive impact. That's sort of the entire premise of a lot of these cases is, you know, we should have lots of competition for all these things, but we don't.
Do we think the courts are aligned with all of this? It feels like the regulators got there on different paths, right? Lena Kahn and the rest of the neo-Brandeisians got there on one path. The Republicans, I don't know, Rumble got banned and they got radicalized on a different path.
And they've all arrived at we should have more competition in different ways and we're going to yell at different companies in different ways and we're ready to go. And the courts are still – they're still just doing the old analysis, right? It doesn't seem like they're quite ready to make the leap into a new version of antitrust. How is that playing out?
How do you think that's going to play out with Trump?
I think you definitely saw that for a long time. I mean, I think you even really saw that with the Epic Apple case, right? The judge wasn't really ready to go there and find that what Apple does violates antitrust laws, although she found that they do violate California's antitrust laws.
Actually, I have a theory about that.
Oh, yeah?
It's a silly theory, but I think it's – she didn't want to reinterpret federal law. She felt constrained by that body of precedent. So she built the mountain of evidence and sent it to the appeals court and said, if you want to reinterpret the federal law, here's everything you might need to do that. I am very comfortable interpreting California state law.
And so she handed Epic the big win on the California state law. And then Apple, you know, Apple, I think, won through the appeals process. But I don't think she was going to go way out on the limb on the federal law. And that's kind of what I'm getting at, right, is like there's not a big body of precedent for a bunch of trial court judges to reinterpret the law to favor Lena Kahn or J.D.
Vance or whoever you might want to align with because there's 40 years of Reagan and Bork in the background that you have to overcome.
You can definitely see that in Judge Mehta's opinion, right? And that was part of the reason that they went with the Google search case first, is the way that they pled that case and the way that they brought it to trial is so closely used to how they brought the Microsoft case and the Microsoft decision forward. all he had to do is be like, oh, apply Microsoft, DOJ wins.
And so they were like laying out for him, here is the way to do it. And he took the bait. He found that Google is an illegal monopolist. Now, some of the other cases are a little bit harder. And that's part of the reason they were brought later. They were hoping that they would have a little bit more development in the law.
And, you know, now a lot of these judges can at least look to Mehta's decision for how he applied it to Google as they're thinking about it. I don't know if that's actually going to, you know, cause them to find, for example, that Apple's a monopoly or, you know, Amazon.
But at least, you know, by the time that gets to trial in 2027 or eight or whatever it is, you know, by then Google search will be old hat.
We need to take another break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with Bloomberg antitrust reporter Leah Nyland. Before the break, Leah and I were discussing where the courts stand in all of this antitrust weirdness. At the end of the day, the Trump administration's approach to antitrust might just depend on how Trump feels about social media companies and his personal relationships with their CEOs, as it does on legal precedent.
A lot of Decoder listeners listening to us right now, they're running businesses. They have been told by their VCs like there's no exits anymore, right? These companies can't buy you. Like you can't just start a company, ship one button that turns something blue and then sell it to Google for $10 million.
Like that was basically done for over the past four years because there was so much scrutiny on the big tech companies. Do you think that's going to go away? Is it just the Trump administration does not want social media to be consolidated and all this other dealmaking is back on the table?
That is the big question. I mean, you saw immediately after Donald Trump was elected that Wall Street was thrilled. They were like, we're going to have a roaring tide of deals again. It's going to be wonderful.
And then if you noticed, the ones that took the longest for the transition to name were the economic policy people, because there is this huge split in the Republican Party between the pro-business Wall Street type folks in the JD Vance's of the world. And in some cases, like for Treasury Secretary, the Wall Street types won.
But on the antitrust front, it was actually, you know, the JD Vance knew right folks. And, you know, so they have a lot of pressure on them. Are they really going to sort of continue with the way that the neo-Brandeisians have done things, or are they going to go back to the old way? And I don't know that anyone really knows. I mean, you mentioned the Ferguson memo. It's
It's a little bit weird in and of itself. It says that it's going to stop the Lena Kahn's war on mergers, but that we shouldn't allow the tech companies to buy anything. I'm like, well, those are sort of a little bit at odds.
Yeah, they have all the money. Just to be 100% clear, Amazon in the past has been like, screw it, we're buying Whole Foods. And now the government is telling literal grocery store change not to merge to compete with Amazon owning Whole Foods. Like, that's a weird outcome. Yeah. It's the tech companies that have all the excess capital.
Yes. I mean, they're the ones who are sitting on loads of cash. They're the only ones who really have all of this money, aside from maybe like, you know, private investment and venture capital to be spending. That's part of the argument of the neo-Brandeisians is, you know, we have concentrated not just so much capital,
power in the tech companies but so much wealth if you look back in the 1980s and 90s like you didn't have these one or two runaway companies at the top of the you know stock exchange indexes you had you know lots of big companies that could be investing but now we have like one or two trillion dollar companies and everybody else is really lagging behind
Do you think Donald Trump recognizes that that is a problem? Ultimately, a lot of these policy questions come down to whether Jensen Wong is friends with Donald Trump, right, or whether Tim Cook can make a court case go away.
I think I can see there's an ecosystem of thinkers around Donald Trump that maybe haven't coalesced into a totally coherent worldview, but recognize that their power is threatened by the existence of Google, which is a big company that controls a lot of things. But I'm not sure if Trump understands a worldview that is slowly coalescing around him.
And that seems like the most destabilizing piece of all of this.
Yeah.
I mean, it was funny when Bloomberg did an interview with Donald Trump and they had mentioned that they wanted in any trust questions. They came to me and they were like, what should we ask Donald Trump? And I was like, well, ask him about the Google breakup. And what did he say when they asked him about the Google breakup? I don't know if we should break up Google. I was like, you know...
I was like, I don't think you're actually going to get a coherent answer out of him on antitrust policy because he doesn't really concern himself with the intricacies of particular policies. Someone once described to me his philosophy is like he finds someone he trusts on a particular issue and he sort of delegates it to him. And that is true to an extent.
He like delegates it until he like wants to stop delegating it. That's, I think, the conundrum of all Donald Trump policies is antitrust.
And like, you know, for advisors or people in the government is like they can do their job and like do what they think is, you know, the best, you know, for a while until he sort of gets interested in an issue and then sort of he's going to try and take it over and they sort of have to do what he says. Yeah.
So I want to end by calling back to where we started, which was under the Biden administration, Lena Kahn, the rest of them, basically said, stop buying all this stuff. We're going to pay more attention to it. We saw a flurry of just extraordinarily creative dealmaking, particularly around AI. The Trump administration is like, all bets are off. Like, go buy stuff. Do economy. Rah, rah, economy.
Whatever you got to do, just make number go up. And that implies that we're going to see it return to traditional dealmaking. A good way to think about a career is to start a company and sell it and be a serial entrepreneur, particularly in the Valley. But it still seems like the big companies are going to be constrained.
The big tech companies have done most of the acquisitions that, quite frankly, have driven most of the venture capital profits over the past two decades. They're still constrained. So what do you think happens now? What kinds of deals are on the table? Are we going to see companies start in order to be acquired the way that we saw for a while there?
Or is it still going to be this weird kind of creative magic wand deal-making where you hope no one notices what happened behind the curtain?
I think it's still going to be a little bit of that. I mean, they obviously don't want Google to get bigger. They don't want Facebook to get bigger. Maybe they probably would have less problems with Amazon getting bigger. I can't really see the Trump administration having had problems with the iRobot deal, for example.
I mean, that was a little bit of a novel theory that, you know, Lena Kahn's folks were pursuing. So I think that kind of dealmaking, particularly vertical type dealmaking, if you can make the argument that this is something that the tech giants are not doing, it's moving into another area of the economy. Yeah, maybe that's what we'll see happening.
But there are certainly lots of people who have started talking about dealmaking again.
So it seems like your prediction is, at least for some class of companies, the era of big deals is going to be back, right? Because Donald Trump just likes big deals. How do you think that's going to play out for the littler companies? Are they going to be targets? Is it they should all merge together?
I mean, that's true. We've seen from Kroger Albertsons. I mean, it's not like they're small companies. They are the number one and the number two grocers in the U.S., but This argument that like the smaller guys should combine so that they can better compete against the big guys isn't particularly popular among the antitrust set.
But then again, you know, this is going to be a sort of more Republican antitrust set. They have said that they want to bring dealmaking back. So we'll see how it goes.
Well, Leah, it's been great having you on. It feels like we're going to have to have you on several times, particularly as Google and Apple head to trial and resolution just to figure out what's going on. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
I'd like to thank Leah Nyland for taking the time to speak with me, and thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok.
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