Solved, cushy, plush, cozy, soft, smooth, buttery, marshmallow-y, warm, soft, socks, underwear, tees, and more. Bombels, everyday comfort, worth obsessing over. Visit bombus.com.audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash audio.
One purchase equals one donated. Always. Hello, and welcome to CUTTER. I'm the laptop editor in chief of the Verge, and CUTTER is my show about big ideas and other problems.
Biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. Researchers at the Big AI Labs, including in Dropbox and Google DeepMind, have recently quit in noisy ways, saying the models of companies are developing pose real threats, and safety isn't being taken seriously across the industry. A lot of researchers have agreed, saying the chances of AI killing us all is greater than 10%, and the CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation, including asking for antitrust exemptions so they can all coordinate on safety issues. That is a lot of ideas, and I've been especially curious about the ask for an antitrust exemption, which has led to accusations that these companies are seeking regulatory capture, attempting to form a cartel, and even somehow find a way out from investor pressure ahead of their IPOs.
So, to make sense of all, I call Jonathan Cantor, the former antitrust chief of the United States Department of Justice under the Biden administration. The United States is both a professor of law at WashU and a professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. During his time as the DOJ's antitrust chief, Cantor brought huge cases against Google Apple and Ticketmaster, and along with LeanCon led what amounted to a full reboot of American antitrust policy. He won those cases against Google and Ticketmaster, and that case against Apple is still alive in the Trump administration, surprising many.
That antitrust reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI safety debate. Without libertarian and former Trump AI's art, David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lena Kahn, saying there's no need for an antitrust exemption. Again, this is a lot of ideas, and you're going to hear Jonathan really get into the weeds of how all this regulation might work, how am I interacting with antitrust law, competition policy, and a relationship with China? Okay, Jonathan Cantor, former DOJ antitrust chief on AI safety and regulation.
Here we go. Jonathan Cantor, the former head of the DOJ antitrust division and the Biden administration and a current professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. Welcome back to the coder. Always a pleasure to be back.
This is great. You're a private citizen now. You don't have to give me the politician answer. I can say whatever I want.
I feel so free. I'm very excited about this. I plan to as well. I have a million questions about the state of AI regulation in America right now.
There is a swirl of ideas about how we should or should not regulate these companies. There is the Trump administration whose posture seems to be no, which is fascinating. You rarely see the federal government just decline to participate in the way that the Trump administration appears to be declining to participate. And then there's an incredible backbone of antitrust concern floating throughout all of this.
Are these companies trying to form a cartel? Are they aware that maybe their IPOs are going to go the way they want to? So they're seeking regulatory capture in some way that is good or bad. Are they trying to foreclose cheaper competition from open weight Chinese models?
Give me your sense of just the state of things right now, and then I want to dive into the specifics with you. One of the world right now is it's like we've invented cars and trucks, but we have no lines on the road, no traffic lights, and no stop signs, and no speed limits. We've invented this incredibly powerful technology that's transforming how we live our lives, how we conduct business, how we socialize, how we seek and generate and consume information. And we need some basic rules of the road.
And I think about it in two fronts. What are the things the companies should be doing and what are things the government should be doing? And I think their responsibilities on both ends. And so happy to dive into both.
Well, let's just start with the very notion that asking for regulation necessarily forms a cartel. All the big frontier AI companies, open AI and public Google, D-Mind. These are companies that do not necessarily like each other, people that do not necessarily like each other. And they are saying in concert that they should slow down the phrase that Dario Amadeh from Entropic is using is to pace the frontier.
My read of this is that they simply do not trust each other, but they are in a prisoner's dilemma and they need an outside force, most likely the government, to enforce some kind of policy framework on them that they have to agree with. Is that a fair read of just the basics here? Kind of. So let me give you my interpretation from the most generous to the most cynical, neither of which TLDR should result in any sort of antitrust exemption.
So the most generous is they are afraid of the pace of innovation and the lack of regulation means they do not see any lines on the road. They do not know where to drive and they are worried about driving off the road or hitting somebody else. And so they are begging for the government to step in and do something. That is probably there is a monochrome of truth to that.
I think they certainly, people, I believe they believe it could destroy humanity. I am not sure that that seems as scenario is accurate, but I believe they believe that. That is the more generous. The more cynical is they are spending so much money, they are hemorrhaging cash and they can't keep this up.
They pull back, it is going to affect their valuation as part of the IPO. So they would like somebody to give them all permission to stop spending so much money and sell the pace of innovation so that they don't have to compete as hard so they can figure out their economics before they go public. Does an agreement among all the top players and I feel like this automatically form a cartel? This is the, on that cynical side of the interpretation, there is a lot of you just want regulatory capture.
You want to make a cartel. You want to forklift competition. That is a risk, certainly of that kind of arrangement. So let's walk through what is necessary and what is not.
Let me just be very clear. These companies do not need to coordinate in order to deliver safe and secure products to society. Think about this. Imagine Boeing and Airbus.
Boeing's, Boeing, you know, if yours got doors falling off the plane, it wasn't Airbus's fault and they didn't need to slow down innovation with Airbus in order to prevent those doors from flying off the plane. They needed to figure out how to build planes that were safer. If you build cars that explode while you're driving, it's not the other car company's fault and you don't need to come together and figure out how to solve those problems. You need to figure out what you're not in your manufacturing process.
If you create products that create agents that break into somebody else's and hack somebody else's technology, it is no different in my mind than having an employee go do that. You need to, you have a responsibility to build safe and secure products and companies should be held liable when they're agents, whether those agents are digital and binary or whether those agents are AI or whether those agents are humans. If they start doing bad things, the company that employs them can and should be held responsible. So those are the basic rules of the road.
There are areas where there is legitimate collaboration in the context of safety and security. So for example, having a clearing house to properly share threats, you know, malicious bots or other things that you can create a repository so that everyone can build safer products. Those are the kinds of collaboration that happen in other industries and you don't need an antitrust exemption because the antitrust laws don't prohibit that kind of work. If two companies say we're competing too hard and we need to slow down, yes, that could implicate the antitrust laws, but that's not what we should be doing here.
We should be innovating, but companies should have the responsibility to build safe and secure products and the government should be responsible for putting lines on the road that say, if you don't build a safe and secure product, here's what the consequences are. If you don't build a safe and secure product, here's what my liability might look like. If you don't build a safe and secure product, then perhaps there should be robot jail for your agents and they should be taken off the market. All right.
Let me, I want to dig into robot jail specifically and the amount of pressure we're putting on what feels like product liability law. There's something there that I want to talk about more specifically, but you know, my wife's a lawyer, I told her I was talking to you this morning and I tried to explain this fault lines here and she just shot me that look and said, this is just a nightmare law school hypo, right? Like what you're describing is does tort law create a regulatory framework for these companies and somewhere in there is, well, is, is if my agent goes and hacks you, it might direct it, is that entropics fault, right? Are we going to create some kind of passive liability?
Does that happen already or not? Like do we need another law or clarification law? What's your view on this? Like if I direct my meta muse agent to go attack you and it does it, is that meta fault?
Both ends, right? And so companies employ people and they build technology. And when those people and others technologies do things that are problematic, including stealing or breaking into someone else's property, on behalf of their employer, there's liability and that could be product liability, but it could be more than product liability. Because you're just people doing bad things or companies creating technology that's doing bad things.
And the product's liability framework actually did work most recently in the case against a meta for Facebook and Instagram and child safety and security and mental health. Wait, hold on. That is really fascinating. This is a thing I'm like really interested in how you know because it took a decade for it to work.
That's the problem. This is where the government needs to step in, right? And so companies have an obligation today to build safe and secure products and the pace of innovation isn't an excuse not to go do that. So let's be very clear about that.
At the same time, we've invented cars and trucks and trains and we have no crossings, we have no lights, we have no lines on the road. And Congress is completely incapable of pretty much doing anything. And while these tech companies are out there saying that they want regulation, they're actively lobbying against it and have been for a very long time. And so the whole thing is a complete mess.
And it's a symptom of our system, which is a complete mess. And frankly, if the political scientist in me would trace that back to things like gerrymandering and Citizens United, where our process has gone out of control and Congress, which should be doing its basic job of putting basic safety standards and responsibilities in place, hasn't done that. That having been said, the lack of action by Congress is not an excuse to deliver dangerous products. If you believe your product is going to destroy humanity, then don't build it.
If you believe your product is going to break into someone else's stuff, then go back to the drawing board and figure out how you build it in a way that's safer. And guess what? That's innovation. These are innovation problems, not just regulatory problems.
We need to do a better job incentivizing our companies to build safe and secure products. And when they do that, those products will perform better. And we will see better innovation. Right now, innovation is asymmetric because it's done without the proper regard for safety and security, just like we saw in social media.
And as a result, now we have products that are good and really, really good and really effective at letting people communicate, but really bad when it comes to childhood addiction and mental health. And so perhaps we should learn our lesson and encourage people to build safe and secure products from the get go at the outset of this technology. Well, let me make the comparison to social regulation just a little more tightly. We just had the big meta case that is a product liability case, right?
Your products were designed in a way that caused harm to teenagers, meta settled the case, because I think Mark would prefer to build AI didn't care about. We lost, but they did lose one to a jury. They literally lose one to a jury. In this case, wasn't going well, but fundamentally they settled.
They gave up. And there's a view that if they had fought and appealed, they would have won on some first amount of grants. The product liability case maybe wasn't as strong as we all thought it was. Another reason I'm saying that is meta gave in to the regulator.
Their posture at the end was a settlement. They gave in and they accepted some regulation. It took a long time for the product liability version of this to get a company like meta to concede some regulation, to concede some controls. If we're saying today, opening AI, you are probably liable for what chat GPT does.
Isn't this the moment to actually tighten the street and pass the regulation and says, you are definitely liable? Yes. This is the job of Congress, which is to clarify the law. But I think the environment today is noticeably different than the environment was 15, 20 years ago.
15, 20 years ago, we had Section 230, which actually granted massive amounts of immunity to online companies, which actually made it harder to sue them and gave them more flexibility to innovate without regard for consequences. We had a, and this is not partisan because they can go back to the Obama administration. The very hands off, oh my goodness, our economy depends on these wonderful companies from Silicon Valley. Let's let them do whatever they want and essentially allow them to set up camp at the White House and in Congress and tell us how to write or not write our rules.
I think the results of that have eroded or destroyed any trust the public has in these technology companies. I think one of the reasons we're having this conversation a lot earlier in the process now is because people are like, well, you know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. And so I think the good news is I think there's greater public awareness and appreciation for the problems and a desire to do something meaningful. The problem is we have a system in Congress because of things like Citizens United, because of things like gerrymandering that have a government that is not responsive to the needs of the people.
And that is the impasse that we're all confronting. So we're going to have to in the meantime rely on things like products liability or others to help get us some semblance of structure. But the other piece of states, states have actually done a better job than the federal government. And you can rely on back six months or year.
We have people in Congress without imposing any affirmative rules saying we should put a 10 years moratorium on the ability of states to impose their own rules and regulations at a time when Congress had no affirmative solutions of its own. So hopefully that moment has passed. And I think the public is saying, and the companies are saying, let's sit down and figure out something sensible. The polling data is clear that the American public does not trust these companies, does not like these products and is afraid of the consequences.
Even if those consequences are hazy in the long term, they seem not so hazy in the short term. Right. And some of this is, listen, the companies have done a terrible job at messaging. They have effectively said, we're going to destroy all your jobs and potentially destroy humanity, but we're going to IPO for a massive valuation and we're going to set up camp in your local communities or data centers, which by the way, don't employ people and drive up the cost of power, but it's okay.
China. US voters abroad. Have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters.
So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click request my ballot. Ask the receiver by email questions. Ask our support team directly.
Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote from abroad.org. I want to come to China in one second because that feels like another very important piece of money.
But you mentioned a cast of characters here. You mentioned Obama. There's a political realignment inside this debate that I found confounding. David Sax, who is Trump's AISR, is retweeting your former counterpart at the FTC, Lina Khan, saying the existing NHS laws are fine.
You don't need an exemption. The existing laws, like you're saying, will cover you. They will make it so you can coordinate on security things and you'll be liable for what you're doing. And if you want to stop, just stop.
That is an absolutely shocking kind of political alignment to me. Where do you think that's coming from? So it's actually a realignment of the realignment. Coming back to Trump 1, we started seeing the ends of the horseshoe starting to meet where folks left right and center were all concerned about the power of Big Tech.
When people like Lina and I came into office, we had a mandate and a lot of public support, frankly, to be aggressive in enforcing a law against Big Tech. And then came inevitable backlash and the Trump administration in the second incarnation was a lot more friendly with those companies rather than the first. And then it became cozy again. And now I think we're seeing that damn break once more.
But if I was to describe to you a day in which David Sax is approvingly retweeting Lina Con while Bloomberg columnist Joe Wiesenthal is saying, all these people are just saying Lina Con was right about the power of cartels. And at hours later, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are sharing a stage in DC calling for a dead stop of AI development. That doesn't look like anything that we've seen before. No, no.
Although again, I will say this, when I went up before Congress, I had support from Senator Mike Lee and Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley. And Matt Gates asked me if I was tired of winning at one of my oversight hearings. And then I had a bunch of Democrats, many of whom supported me, some of whom were very adherent to the big tech companies who criticized me. These signs of this stuff being all over the map have been around for a while.
The fight between little tech and big tech, and this is the part that I think a lot of folks don't see from the outside. But the biggest antagonists of the big tech companies are the other tech companies. I did a speech before the Chamber of Commerce when I was in office, and I brought a whole box of fake mustache and glasses. And I said, I want to hear a say, thank you, because all your members are coming in and helping us figure out how to bring our cases.
And I know you don't like the reputational head of that. So here are some disguises. You can put them on next time you come in. But the truth of the matter is most people hate the monopolist unless you're the monopolist, and companies want the opportunity to compete on the merits and win or lose on the success on the merits of their own innovations and their own business acumen.
So I think a lot of this stuff actually has wide range appeal. The politics of it get kind of weird and funky like you're describing. But I think the data center issue, for example, I mean, it's not left or right. It's all the above.
And part of this is, to me, it's a suggestion that we're actually more in a healthier place as healthy as the whole thing is, than we were during the internet and social media revolution where even criticizing those companies were saying we needed something was seen as like a very fringe position. The truth of them is people want some root lines on the road. They don't want to stop innovation. They don't want to stop progress.
They're not saying we have to burn the whole thing down. Although Bernie wants a complete stoppage. I don't think that is realistic. We don't want to stop innovation.
We just want to have innovation result in safe and secure products that make us better as a society. And I think that requires some correction in terms of the course as opposed to the path around right now. And the difference between now and what happens to social media companies is that the people who ran Twitter and Facebook and YouTube did not run around saying they might kill everyone. Like they ran around with the banner of the righteous.
They were going to bring democracy to the Middle East with the power of social media. And these companies obviously think that they're going to do something great. They're going to cure all diseases, they're going to make life better, we're going to live in luxury communism or whatever that thing is. But they're also very clear that under strain competition might lead to really enormous negative outcomes.
And one of the things they're constantly talking about is China. They can all coordinate the United States. The United States needs to win because there's the specter that Chinese models might overtake them. And then the Chinese government will be in control of Asia or whatever thing that is scary on the horizon.
What do you make of that? Is that just a convenient boogeyman? Is that real? Is that something competition law can address?
It's largely a convenient boogeyman. So we've been dealing with these kinds of issues. I was thinking back to the breakup of AT&T. At the time, AT&T made the argument to the Reagan administration that it should not be broken up because in order to win the Cold War, we needed a national telecommunications network that was nice and strong.
And the Reagan administration rejected that argument. The fact of the matter is the way to compete against China is to lean into what makes us great as a country, what makes us the greatest countries we care about our people. Also, just let's be very clear. China is not doing what we're doing.
China limits the way in which kids can interact with technology. China sensors what people see in its borders. China actually manages, essentially controls a lot of its corporations through state-owned enterprises and influence enterprises. So this idea that the only way to compete against China is to let us deliver unsafe products is kind of ridiculous.
The way we win, whatever that means against China, is to make sure that we are delivering great innovations and products that benefit society, that we are protecting people from harmful uses of those products, and then we're allowing a free market to function within those constraints. That's how we beat China. And as I was saying before, with social media, the lack of rules, the lack of accountability resulted in a lack of innovation in how to build these products at the outset in a way that's more safe and that's more secure and better for, let's say, mental health of people. It is not a bad thing and is not bad for innovation to require people to deliver safe and secure products.
It is the responsibility of the country to make sure that our companies are innovating within the constraints of a free within the boundaries of a free market, but doing so in a way that's beneficial. Let me try to split the difference between your former role as an interest chief and your current role as a law professor. Give people a framework to understand how competition law domestically should interact with foreign policy. We are in some sort of national competition, which I know across a number of dimensions.
There is a fear that if Chinese tech companies flood America with cheap to run open weight models that all this collapses and the United States of Columbia collapses, there's a lot there, right, between how we might deal with China as a foreign adversary or a geopolitical rival and our competition policy here. What's the best framework to understand? So the best framework is we should promote dynamic aggressive competition inside the borders of the United States, right? And so we want companies, including foreign companies usually, but certainly domestic companies to compete hard because our system is a market-based system.
It's one where people innovate and the opportunity to be successful encourages people to try new things, invest money in capital and make great products. All that is good. We don't want to, the idea that we need monopolies at home in order to compete abroad is antithetical to our way of life, right? What we were founded in rejecting the, you know, the Tea Party was founded as a revolution against the British monopoly over the necessities of life.
I mean, this goes back to the founding of our country. Our freedom is in part in economic freedom and we need to make sure we promote that. So saying that we should tolerate monopolies domestically in order to compete abroad is wrong. There are legitimate questions, some of which this administration is raising about how do we deal with foreign nations that try to dump cheap products below cost and things like that.
I was reading with my law students the other day, a case from the 80s where the allegations were that Japan, companies in Japan were cartilizing television sets in Japan to sell them at a higher price so they can cross subsidize below-cost pricing in the United States in order to drive out the domestic U.S. manufacturers. That was the height of the Chicago school libertarian movement. The Supreme Court actually used some just cockamamie version of economics, suggests that was an anti-trust violation and set the stage for what happened next.
There are legitimate questions about what we need to do to make sure that there is fair competition in a fair playing field that we're protecting the ability of people domestically to compete successfully. But the way to deal with that question is not to allow monopolization of our markets domestically in order to compete abroad. That's just an excuse and that is leaning away from rather than into a really specialized nation. The sports calendar is on fire and the score bet has you covered with breaking news and betting seamlessly connected.
Every play, every stat, every score, giving you the tools you need to bet confidently. Born in the north, built for you. The score bet. Canada sports book.
19 years old or old are Ontario only. If you or someone you know has given concerns called Connects Ontario 24-7 at 1-86-531-2600. Text us at 24-7-247 or chat with us at www.connects Ontario.ca. It's the inner message and it rates to me apply.
So I can already hear what our most skeptical members of the audience are saying. They are screaming, probably in their cars, that it's already a monopoly. That Nvidia is circular, financed, all of these companies. They're already coordinated.
That product liability theories of harm will just fall in their face because there's no way open AI would ever do hugging face because Nvidia just bought hugging face and Nvidia is the biggest investor in open AI. Do you need to go break that up? You need to go? Well, somebody should be looking at these issues.
Like this is what we were starting to do when we were in office is we were saying, okay, there are some lines on the road now and you can't go buy any company, you can't go invest in any company you want. We want competition to mean competition and that might be a little frustrating on some ends, but as long as you're within those boundaries, go for it. Go compete as hard as you can. This administration has sort of taken a position that we're going to allow a small number of companies to reach a level of dominance or oligopoly or monopoly so that we can beat China, whatever beating China means.
And that's the piece that I don't quite understand. What does beating China mean? I get the issue of if China has these advanced bots that are violating and infiltrating our companies and our government servers and the like, we'll find that's a national security issue, right? And we should deal with that and that's a geopolitical issue.
We should deal with that. That's an international relations issue. We should deal with that. But the way to deal with that is not having monopolies domestically, especially when those monopolies are not adherent to shareholders rather than the best interest of the public.
This is a big debate across the United States government right now. The Trump administration has taken direct investment in a bunch of American companies. They've talked about setting up a sovereign wealth fund based in crypto. There's more coordination between the government and private industry in a Republican administration than you would ever expect in history.
Owning the means of production. What does that sound like to you? It is. And then they call everyone else.
Which is great. Yes. And the realignment is wild stuff. Right.
Compare a grocery store, a couple of grocery stores in New York to actually investing in some of the most significant technological infrastructure of our nation. But it, well, the grocery stores are a huge threat to the American life life. There's a piece of the puzzle here where the Trump administration's approach is national champions. They're just not saying it maybe as explicitly as you are.
Do you think that approach can be unwound? Do you think competition is compatible with that approach? It is harder to unwind it than it is to build it the right way from the get-go. And so that is exactly, you know, you hit the nail on the head, national champions.
China is a country of national champions. United States is not a country of national champions. United States is a company of anyone could grow up to be a champion. Right.
That's the American dream. And it's a business. Our way of life is based on a fundamentally different idea and ideal. And the more we diverge and deviate from that, the more stuff we are.
So I do think that is a bad policy. And it will be harder to undo the more it calcifies. And I hope, you know, we, and again, this is not anti-business, just to be very clear, we're anti-market. I'm a capitalist.
I'm a card-carrying capitalist. I'm proud to say I am. And what the world that I want is one where everyone can be investing. Everyone can be building a company.
And that there are rules around the edges in terms of monopolizing markets. But within that, everyone should compete as hard as they can and build and grow and do all sorts of amazing things. I think that is a better version of our country, one that got us to the place of economic power and dominance globally. And I think we are more vulnerable when we have central points of failure and we are less free when we have a small number of companies that are telling us how to live our lives.
So I am for the thousand flowers blooming inside the borders of the United States. It is just remarkable to me, you know, where weeks away from mid-term elections, that is something a traditional conservative from the 90s would have said about the power of the free markets. What do you make of this moment? Do you get to try the politicians of the medium Republican and the medium Democrat headed into the midterms around this issue?
Are they compatible? Or is it a total scramble? It is a total scramble. I will take one issue.
I don't think what I articulated is a conservative from the 90s. I think the conservative of the 90s were antitrust and competition policy and all of these ideas that were very central to the development and growth of our country from the 40s to the 70s should be thrown away. And we should let industry consolidate. And we did.
We signed a stream consolidated. And I think that is part of the reason why we have a lot of the problems that we have today, including the case shaped economy and the sense of opportunity not being widely available. In terms of your question, it is a scramble. I think the plates are shifting.
And I think where everything ends up is still unclear. We are living through the transformation of our politics and our ideals and Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and progressives and all these other different flavors will not mean in 15 years what they meant 15 years ago. And I think it's a little bit unclear how that's all going to play out, but we're living, we're literally living through that transformation right now, which is kind of remarkable. It's an interesting thing to observe as somebody who likes to study markets and technology and policy.
And it's not all this is bad. I think we do need some realignment. We need to take a inward look at the way we're governing our society, the way we're encouraging our markets to structure and think about whether the things we should do differently. But what we are living through is kind of, there are two things that are happening.
One is from the 80s to probably the 2010s, we're kind of living through the Reagan era of neoliberal politics and policy. I think that the left and right have both rebelled against that. And so I think that nail on the coffin is being hammered in as we speak. The other thing that's happening that I think is even more fascinating is we have been living in the New Deal era for nearly 100 years.
That era is over. And what comes next is a jump ball, but it's over in terms of the role of government, the role of policy, the role of our international relations, all of that is being rebuilt or stripped down to the studs and including our government agencies themselves, a regulatory structure. The way this AI issue would have been handled 50 years ago is we would have created a department for AI safety or something or AI. And they would have promulgated rules and they would have had folks looking at it.
And that might not have been the right approach, but that's what would have been the approach. That this print court essentially threw that out the window. That's no longer what we have. Now we have an executive branch that basically decides on its whims, what it wants to do on a daily basis.
So the whole thing is just completely a mess. It's what you say, essentially, Trump's approach to this is you don't need a regulator, you need a great president, that's me. I saw that and I was like, what you would do is regulate them. So you should just hire some people to do it.
You should just delegate. Well, this is the irony. A good friend of mine, Dave Lawrence, wrote a piece in New York Times a few weeks ago, kind of saying just this, which is the Supreme Court has said, oh, we don't want agencies and regulators promulgating rules and answering major questions, which is supposed to be the purview of Congress. But instead, they've essentially allowed the executive branch to do it without any process, without any input and essentially with very little structure, which does lead to regulatory capture, which does lead to inadequate or inequitable outcomes.
And I think that's what we're confronting right now. And so again, I think this is all consistent with what I was saying a few moments ago, which is kind of ripping down to the studs, the New Deal era. The infrastructure, the government infrastructure that we relied on to figure out how to deal with all these things has essentially been destroyed. And so now we don't really have the resources or the structure in place to deal with these kinds of existential problems.
Instead, we have Congress and Congress is largely ineffective because of things like Citizens United and gerrymandering that has essentially made all politics national and all politics tribal. Let me ask you two questions to wrap this up. I mentioned some eras, you along with Lina Khan brought forth a new era in antitrust. Some people call it hipster antitrust, the academics called it Neo-Brendis.
Just look at my hairline. I'm far from hipster. You're much cooler than I would be. We bring back aggressive antitrust enforcement on theories of the law that weren't simply related to consumer prices going up or down.
That was something you brought forth. You brought a lot of cases against a big gap. We won our cases. Our cases on the law one, we beat Google and court twice.
We survived a motion to dismiss on Apple. We put together a ticket master case that even when the Trump administration tried to settle it, actually won for a majority in court. The stuff we did worked and we brought cases on algorithmic pricing and health care. We fought for the public because the public wanted someone to fight for them.
The settlements in the Google cases did not achieve the results. The remedies, which I did not preside over. I presided over the victories. We handed the baton over to the next administration.
The remedies were admittedly disappointing. Could we have achieved a different outcome? I don't know. I would have liked the opportunity to try, but we didn't.
That's disappointing. But it doesn't change the fact that we changed the game. We changed the approach. The state of antitrust law and the state of competition policy was a heck of a lot better when we left it than when we started.
Do you think that that error persists? There are some people, especially tech policy, who would say this was all a failure. We should call this what it was. It was a failure.
It did not result in structural change. We should move on. Not at all. It's not a failure.
In fact, there were things that did we finish the job. No. There's a lot more to go. It relates to the challenge that we were talking about earlier, which is it's harder to address something after it calcifies.
We were coming in after these markets had hardened, trying to figure out how to create competition. I've always been fond of saying that what you really want to do is you want to protect the next inflection point. Especially in technology and platforms, what comes next is likely to be highly disruptive. Competition has its greatest promise at that moment.
That's when incumbents tend to be most aggressive in trying to prevent upstarts and others from competing. I do think the conversation we're having around competition, this conversation today, the fact that folks on left and right are saying we are concerned about, already concerned about monopolies, oligopolies, is a sign that these issues are more easily discussed today than they were six or seven years ago. It's probably the last time I believe we're talking about the case regarding Sable. We made the same point.
Right before everything changes, that's when the monopolist gets the most aggressive. With Apple, it's the App Store, with Google, it's tying all of its products together in various different ways. Here you are again, and we're talking about what would be the challengers. We're talking about the AI companies that might disrupt Apple's interface.
Johnny Ives is going to make hardware devices and open AI, and Apple's suing them. There's a lot going on here, but what strikes me is the conversation we're having today is about the challengers, not the monopolist. Well, the challengers of yesterday are often monopolists today. What you want is, I'm not against the challengers.
Let me be very clear. This is why I'm against the antitrust exemption. I want them to keep pushing hard. I want them to keep competing.
But I also would love to see a thriving domestic open source or open weights models to compete. I think we want to promote more competition, not less. That's really what we should be focused on, is making sure that the lessons we learned from the last go around don't translate to this one. Competition is not about weakening the large player.
It's about making sure that the smaller players have an opportunity to compete as well. Do you think the surprise that the administration hasn't settled the Apple case? That is the one that's ongoing. Every day, it's weird that they can't buy the way out of that one.
It is surprising. The guy showed up with gold bars to the White House. If that doesn't do it, what will? Do you think it's just because they still think there's something there or is it just leverage in the background?
I have no idea. It's a strong case. It's a good case. You're not a politician anymore.
You can just say it. No, I told you the guy showed up with gold bars. I think it goes to this, which is, I'm interested for every monopolist you have dozens of other companies, if not hundreds, that are upset with the monopolist. No longer becomes, unless we fully have embraced national champions, there are a lot of companies that are frustrated with putting our complaint with the tactics of Apple to control that market and exploit that market.
There are countervailing forces on the other side, if I had a guess. I want to wrap this up with a big sweep. We've talked about a lot of issues. There's just a lot of directions at which you can come at how should we regulate AI in this moment.
If you had to make your list of prescriptions, if you were the policymaker, how would you organize them and what would you say? I would start with clarity around consequences for bad things. If you build dangerous products, if your door flies off, your plane while it's in the air. If AI breaks into someone else's company, you should be held responsible and you have an obligation to build products that don't do that.
I think that is a very good logical place to start and an extension of the product's liability style framework. That is a good place. I think we need to enumerate and Congress should step in and say, okay, here are the things we value as a society. We value mental health, we value competition, we value authenticity of information, we value intellectual property and copy rate of content owners.
These are the kinds of things we value and we need to make sure that those values are embedded in the lines on the road and the stop signs and traffic lights so that everyone has clarity at the outset, what's okay and what's not. Maybe we'll get a Congress that can do that in this next time. I hope so. We're going to have to have you back soon, Professor Cantor.
Thank you so much for being under coder. My pleasure. I'd like to thank Johnathan Cantor for taking time to join me under coder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
To be continued, we thought about this episode, really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can have it directly on threads or blue sky.
We're also on YouTube, you can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have TikTok and Instagram, but also at DecoderPod and they're a lot of fun. If you'd like to coder, please share with your friends and subscribe every year at Podcasts. And coder is a part of the version, part of the Boxing and Podcast Network.
Shush researchers at Greg Ott, Kate Cox, Nick Statt, this episode is edited by Ursa Wright, or editor of the director is Kevin McShane. The decoder music is right back, Master Sender. We'll see you next time. Insurance operations today are fragmented, and policy holders expect more.
That's why leading insurers run on Adian. From premium collection to claims payout, Adian supports the entire insurance value chain, giving insurers full control over how money moves. A single platform to reduce fragmentation, complexity, and risk. Drive revenue, control claims cost, and power your next move with Adian.
Learn more at adian.com.