Today, I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. Alongside FTC chair Lina Khan, Jonathan is one of the most prominent figures in the big shift happening in competition and antitrust in the United States. This is a fun episode: we taped this conversation live on stage at the Digital Content Next conference in Charleston, South Carolina a few days ago, so you’ll hear the audience, which was a group of fancy media company executives. 

You’ll also hear me joke about Google a few times; fancy media execs are very interested in the cases the DOJ has brought against Google for monopolizing search and advertising tech — and Jonathan was very good at not commenting about pending litigation. But he did have a lot to say about the state of tech regulation, he and Khan’s track record so far, and why he thinks the concepts they’re pushing forward are more accessible than they’ve ever been.

Links: 

• The top Biden lawyer with his sights on Apple and Google — Politico
• Judge blocks a merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — NYT
• FTC’s Khan and DOJ’s Kanter beat back deals at fastest clip in decades — Bloomberg
• Google will face another antitrust trial September 9th, this time over ad tech — The Verge
• In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing — The Verge
• Google Search, Chrome, and Android are all changing thanks to EU antitrust law — The Verge
• Aggregation Theory — Stratechery
• Adobe explains why it abandoned the Figma deal — The Verge
• How the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech — The Verge
• Epic Games CEO calls out Apple’s DMA rules as ‘malicious compliance’ — TechCrunch

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23831914

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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