Why Trump is an antitrust wild card for Big Tech

On today’s episode of Decoder, 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 and a leading expert on this subject, to come on the show and help break it all down. 

If you’re a Decoder listener, you know that the basic frameworks of antitrust in the US were more or less the same since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, all the way through President Barack Obama and the first Trump administration.

But in the Biden administration, FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter have taken a big, bold, aggressive approach to antitrust not really seen in this country in many of our lifetimes. Kanter 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 facing major antitrust suits, and Microsoft is now under investigation, too. And then there’s Google, which is potentially staring down a breakup after already losing one major antitrust suit, with a ruling in a second one about advertising due basically any day now. 

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, but as we know, they didn’t. For pretty much the entire 2010s, the tech industry grew and consolidated through mergers and acquisitions at breakneck pace, and that’s how you ended up with a Biden administration agenda to do whatever possible to slow this down and perhaps even unwind some of it.  

Some of this enforcement has been so intense that companies have even devised creative end runs around the very nature of the acquisition. Look at Inflection AI: Microsoft didn’t acquire it; rather, it hired most of the company, licensed its tech, and installed the cofounder, Mustafa Suleyman, as the CEO of its new AI division. You can’t get blocked for an acquisition deal if, on paper, you don’t really acquire anything.

But now, President-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House in a month, and he’s already named his picks to replace Khan and Kanter. 

Trump’s next pick to head the FTC, current Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, pitched himself for the chairperson’s seat with a bunch of platforms like “mergers are good,” and he’s extremely supportive of big business interests — except when it comes to big tech. Both Trump and his incoming vice president, JD Vance, have spent years railing against the big tech companies for alleged political censorship and want to punish those companies, especially Google, and Ferguson’s all in.

And Trump’s pick to run antitrust at the DOJ is Gail Slater, who seems poised to keep some of the big antitrust cases alive.

That leads to a couple of deeply strange tensions, as you’ll hear Leah really get into. 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 Google behaved anticompetitively, but because Google’s position as a monopolist gives it the power to enforce limits on speech in a way conservatives don’t like. 

There is a lot going on here, and there are a ton of open questions. All the big tech companies would love to believe we’re heading into an era of less enforcement, a blind eye to big deals, and back to business as usual. But are we really going to see a big reversal of the last four years, one that means big tech gets to breathe a sigh of relief and spin up the acquisition machine again? 

Or could we see a world where a weird kind of bipartisan antitrust effort lives on into Trump’s second term? Leah’s one of the sharpest people I know to ask these questions — but as you’ll hear her say, there are a lot of wild cards here.

If you’d like to read more about what we talked about in this episode, start here:

• 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