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And she serves as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights. It's in that role that Senator Klobuchar held a hearing last week focused on the power and control that Apple and Google, but especially Apple, wield with their app stores. A number of companies testified about hearing about the threats they faced from Apple and Google. Notably, Match Group Chief Legal Officer Jared Sine told the committee that his company was scared of Apple.
There are many, many ways they can hurt our businesses. We're all afraid it's the reality Senator. Spotify's Chief Legal Officer, Horacio Gutierrez, was forceful denouncing Apple's app store policies. We're not successful because of what Apple has done.
We have been successful despite Apple's interference. And of course, Apple just released its own air-tag item tracking device, which is directly competitive with the popular Tile Trackers. Tiles, Kirsten, Daru testify that Apple gives itself tons of advantages that make it almost impossible to compete. Apple made changes to its operating system that denigrated our user experience and made it really hard for our customers to activate their tiles, but they left fine my streamlined and on by default.
There were lots of moments like this throughout the hearing. Here's Match Group's sign, recounting a story during which Apple's head app store lawyer said Apple could just take all of his company's revenue. I was told in no uncertain terms that he disagreed with our assessment of how to keep our users safe. He added that we should just be glad that Apple is not taking all of Match's revenue, telling me you owe us every dime you've made.
But what was most striking to me is how bipartisan this hearing was compared to the chaos of previous tech hearings. The Republicans on the committee were just as focused on the power wielded by Apple and Google through their app stores and willing to dive into the fuzziness of those policies without hesitation. Here's GOP ranking member Mike Lee pushing Apple Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Endier on why Match is charged at 30% cut for premium features in Tinder, but Uber is not. I'm not grasping the differentiation point between meeting a stranger for transportation and meeting a stranger to go to dinner.
I don't get it. I'm just a small country lawyer from Provo, Utah, but I'm not. Oh yeah, right. For his part, Endier defended Apple's position by saying the app store offered users a safe place to buy apps reviewed for security and performance issues.
In each week, we review about 100,000 submissions and we reject about 40% of them because they don't meet those standards. And we know that our approach works. Study after study shows that the iPhone has fewer malware infections than any other device in the marketplace. These are all becoming familiar arguments.
Last year, there was a similar set of hearings in the house shared by Representative David Sisolini, the Democrat from Rhode Island. I actually interviewed him on the verchast about those hearings. Unfortunately, we have seen many, many examples of this where because of the market power that Apple has, it is charging exorbitant, really exorbitant ransing a highway robbery. But several things have changed since.
One, Joe Biden was elected president and he in turn has put some prominent critics of big tech and positions of power, most notably nominating Lena Kahn to the federal trade commission. Two, it appears there's far more bipartisan support for changing antitrust law than before. In particular, changing a key component of antitrust law called the consumer welfare standard, which has been around since the 80s and basically says anything goes unless regulators can prove consumer prices will go up. That standard is basically impossible to meet, which is why most mergers get approved and why it's been so hard to regulate the various tech platforms.
In her book, Senator Klobuchar offers a sweeping review of antitrust history, starting from the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party all the way up to now. Her argument is that antitrust enforcement comes and goes and waves, but it is an essential check on a functional capitalistic economy. And right now, it's needed more than ever. I asked her about all this and about where she thinks her form is actually headed because she want the government to set apples, rates in the app store.
That doesn't seem workable. I also asked how she thinks antitrust enforcement will help make better products, since it's not like any of these big tech companies are sitting still. And I tried to push on where she thinks the limits of antitrust reform might be and how the senator is thinking about future innovations, not just the products and markets we have today. One thing before we start, you're going to hear us talk about something called law and economics and a guy called Robert Bork.
I could talk about this forever, but basically Bork was the federal judge who pushed the consumer welfare standard in the 70s and 80s that was refined by legal theory called law and economics, which is how we got to the focus on prices. To make this a lot simpler, Bork's famous book was called the antitrust paradox. Lena Kahn's book, refuting Bork that propelled her to fame and potentially a seat on the FTC, is called Amazon's antitrust paradox. You see how this works.
Okay, Senator Amy Klobuchar, here we go. Senator Amy Klobuchar, welcome to decoder. Well, thanks, Neewai. It is wonderful to be on.
And it's actually a great timing. You have a new book called antitrust taking on monopoly power from the Gilded Age to the digital age, which is coming out the day this interview goes out. So excellent timing. You also just had a very pointed hearing in the antitrust subcommittee about the power that mostly Apple wields in its app store.
That's a lot of antitrust action. Where do you think we are in the antitrust reform conversation right now? Okay, we are in a place of mounting political interests, which is where you want to be when you want to have momentum, but where we're not is actually getting things done yet. And I thought the app hearing was such a perfect example, because it was about Google and Apple.
And out of it, a lot of members who, you know, we got a lot going on, right, the pandemic, or camp, please reform, all these things. We found out that Google had called one of our witnesses, not him himself, but his company, match.com the night before the hearing and threatened them. This isn't look like what you said in your report to your shareholders. That pretty interesting.
That came out. We found out how Apple they've been charging 30% to companies like Spotify, but not to Uber. And the reason given to Mike Lee was, well, that's because that's cars and rides. So I think there's some real problems.
And it's because of an awfully power. And the reason I wrote this book is because we have a serious competition problem in our economy right now. And you've got to look at it. I tried to make it really direct using my own story of my grandpa working in the iron r mines to support the Gilded Age, Robert Barrens, and seeing that big house and seeing the little house, my grandma and grandpa, you know, lived in their whole life with a, they didn't even have a shower bathtub on them.
First floor, they had to have an basement to the work that I did representing MCI when AT&T, after they broke up and what it's like to try to get a competitive provider on the side of consumers actually to get in the market. It's not easy. I have over 100 cartoons. So even if you get bored of reading the book, you can look at the great cartoons that are pretty funny.
I personally enjoy the cartoons. Yeah, exactly. I used some antitrust humor, which is very hard to find. And so I make the case that when you go through history, America's always gotten exact together and taken on monopolies because it's drowning out small competitors and better prices and innovation, hurts you on wages, non-compete agreements, make it so you can't go to places, especially.
I mean, there's just this unbelievable number of things that have been going on that have stacked the decks against regular people. And so that means action. And as I said, throughout time, we have acted farmers with the pitchforks, unions organizing in Chicago against monopolies. And it's time to do it again.
So the book has this incredible historical seat. I mean, it literally starts at the founding and the Boston Tea Party. Because they were mad they were buying from Monopoly Tea Company. Yeah.
And it runs up to now. And there's a big focus on big tech and pharma in the modern context. Those two sectors, to me, have kind of different harms that are occurring. So in the pharma context, the drug makers buy each other, they find a drug that a lot of people need.
There's a drug that's used to treat infants in your book. And the price goes up by 400%. In the tech context, it's something else that's happening. Consumers are not seeing higher prices over and over again.
Consumers actually see free to lower prices. And then it's monetized in some other way. Can you solve both of those problems with the same kind of legislation? I think you can.
And you can do it a different way too. You could have special app store legislation. I mean, I'm open. This isn't like one way Monopoly way.
We've got it. We're gonna have to figure out what we can get done. But when you take on exclusionary conduct, which is basically limiting other predatory pricing, price gouging, like you see with pharma or Facebook buying up companies, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, these businesses are nascent, but the networks established, the brands are already meaningful. And if they grow to a large scale, they could be very disruptive to us.
Oh boy, he didn't buy WhatsApp and Instagram just because he thought, cool, he bought him because he was afraid they were gonna be disruptive to him. So those are two different scenarios. You are right. But the end result is that they make one company bigger and bigger.
And I think the same, the reason I did sweeping legislation to cover all is because if you just do tech and you disregard what's happening with pharma and ag and everything, it's like, whack them all. You're gonna change where the problem is. And so I'm open to doing special stuff on tech. I really am.
But I think that the best way, if I could wave a wand, and I think if a lot of people that's looked at this, consumer groups could wave a wand, they would look at, let's do something to make it easier to take on merger cases because the courts have really messed that up, the conservative courts and the board theories. Let's go. If we just get to the simple way it was done before, we'd be better when they looked at mergers. Let's be more sophisticated about how we look back when we're dealing with tech and other things so that we basically have remedies which we already could use that were used in the breakup of AT&T to break off some of these companies, not destroying Facebook or Google.
No, no, no, I think that'd be pretty big. But just basically figure out in each case, what do we have to stop them from doing, whether it's self-preferencing on search engines or directly competing with their own products or making very clear that you can't charge 30% to Spotify and Tile and to Match.com when in fact you don't need that much to pay for the security of the internet, you're just messing around with it. Are you specifically thinking about setting rates? This is one of the bigger fears in the tech industry that the government's going to come in and actually set rates.
There's two ways. One is passing legislation just to make the defined exclusionary conduct so it's easier for the government to do it. Two, the government should be doing this now. They should be looking at apps stores.
They probably are looking at app stores. They're starting to be investigations and states and Feds all across the place. And then the third way is to, as you said, do legislation. But you could do it without actual numbers.
You could do other things to say things they can't do and keep the standard so that the government would then enforce the standard. So it has to be actual stuff that they're paying for instead of just an arbitrary price without putting the price on it yourself, which might be very hard to determine. The reason I started with the difference between the harm's consumer size from Big Tech and Farma is you mentioned the Borg theories. You went to the University of Chicago Law School.
I was an undergrad at the University of Chicago. The dominant theory in the law is law and economics. It still is to this day. That is very much from the university.
That's very much Robert Borg. And that is in the 80s saying antitrust should be measured by the price of consumer pay. And that was called a consumer welfare standard. It is at the heart of this whole debate.
It is. Do you think we should change the consumer welfare standard? Well, yeah, I think my legislation helps to do that. So we always in the old days, during the Gilded Age, they just say, basically antitrust and competitive behavior, they use pretty straightforward standards to eventually with Teddy Roosevelt, who was the first successful case after making very clear the courts were they were in the hands of the monopolist for a while.
So when things started moving, and now then the Borg theory comes up as many corporations were getting tired of getting questioned about their mergers. And he develops this consumer welfare standard, which is, you know, includes things like, oh, it's just about efficiency and we've got to protect some corporations. It's kind of crazy when you really look at it. And then now it's almost like we've gone full circle where you're starting to have some conservatives, some Republicans, even major, major companies, right?
That starts to say, this is a mess, man. These gatekeepers are basically making this hard for everyone. So you start having big companies and small companies, question where the law has been. And you also start to have obviously regular people question.
And so I just think that it is time to change the laws themselves. Because if you think we can just wait, when you've got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in the court, Kavanaugh did one decision that was with the liberals on a tech issue. But for the most part, their cast would lead you, and Gorsuch is already there, to the most conservative interpretations of the antitrust laws. We could wait literally 25 years.
And meanwhile, we can't have these gatekeepers donating every decision and telling my favorite one, whole governments like Australia, I'm sorry, you want to have to pay for content? No way, we're just going to leave. And then you'll have no search engines since we're 90%. Now, world pressure, they backed up.
But that's literally what monopolies do. So I'm not, I don't think we can wait for the courts to change. So we must change the laws. We can also change the people enforcing laws, Lena Khan getting on the FTC.
That's the nominated commissioner from the Biden administration. She's very aggressive and smart on these issues, Kim Wu getting in the White House. There's a bunch of things that the Biden administration can do outside of Congress to really up the stakes here. The last time there was a set of hearings about tech antitrust, it was in the House, it was last year that was representative Sislini.
That was very bipartisan. You're hearing is very bipartisan. One shift that I noticed though, the Republicans were very clear that they did not want to change the consumer welfare standard around the time of the House hearings. And I watched these hearings and I saw Senator Mike Lee, who's the ranking Republican member, and he was like, yeah, maybe we should change it.
Like he was strikingly bipartisan in this hearing. He was just as frustrated with Apple as everybody else. At the same time, that's very dicey. It's not usually the Republicans have been saying, are you seeing movement there?
Yes. I mean, you see it in Holly's bill and have all kinds of issues with him in other ways, but you see it with that bill, you see it with Marsha Blackburn, who is really with me on the Grassley bill, the Grassley adds tons of money to the two agencies by changing the way the fees are assessed, which by the way is the most straightforward first thing we could do before we even change standards. And I think that what you're seeing is they believe, Grassley really believes in small businesses. That's what he has in Iowa, right?
But a lot of small, he has big business presence, but he's got a lot of small farmers, a lot of small businesses, and he's always been a kind of maverick on those issues. And so this is just crushing what's going on. And so, and many of them see it beyond tech. And so that's why I think in our Senate hearing, which I was like a model of how you can do a hearing.
People were actually asking real questions and were kind of having fun doing it without being just complete jerks. I thought, you know, they were actually asking intellectual smart questions. My favorite was when Mike Lee is trying to get the bottom of why it's different to get an order of car through Uber and then getting music off of Spotify. And he's trying to ask, I don't understand why one gets charged in one dozen.
And they say, well, it's a car. And then he says, well, maybe I'm just a caveman country boy. But I thought, okay, that's a very interesting description. But I think that you're seeing evolution as we speak now, let me not be a polyanibutist, because there are problems for me moving forward on this on both sides, right?
I can't even ever figure out where they're coming from. At the end of last year, I almost got the grassy clobishart thing through based on the 1035 million to FTC and DOJ antitrust. I got Mike Lee to agree with it with some minor changes. I got him from McConnell, Shelby, and then of course our site, then it floats over to the house.
We're going to put it in the and that metals was behind at the White House, why they want to they wanted to continue the legacy of the two suits they brought on Google and Facebook. Get over there McCarthy and Jordan just stop it in his tracks. And so it always feels like every time we move on antitrust, someone stops it. And so that leads me to being one of the reasons I wrote this book is just getting it all out there.
So the public, and I hope at least parts of the book, the beginnings, especially that that people see the history, which is somewhat interesting with the muck rakers taking on standard oil, and you get to the present with some policy ideas, including things that people can do as individuals. I try to write it that way because I need help. I mean, I can't everywhere. I want people to start calling out electeds on this, basically.
I want them Democrats, Republicans, whatever. What are you doing on antitrust? Because just me trying to do it every day, it's really hard because there's so much under lobbying and money going out there from companies. It makes it really hard.
And then I also think that we've just got to capture this moment where there's growing support for it. Even since Josh Hawley, there's a razor thin democratic majority in the Senate. Hawley has proposed just a flurry of bills and ideas for regulating big companies. He's also a character in the insurrection.
Are you open to working with him? Are you? Well, no, I am. He's on the committee.
I listen to him. I'm looking at his bill right now, but I need support for my bill, basically, is where it's going. He said he has said that some of the things in my bill are good. And that's kind of where it is.
I've got to be able to get support of everyone. Mark Warner is on my bill right now, and he's pretty much of a moderate and came out of business. So I'm just working on building support for my legislation. And I think that's the best way to go.
We do, you know, Democrats control the House and Senate. And one of my key allies is Siselini because they did this great work over there in the House and we're working together on it. We have to take a short break, but when we come back, I want to talk to Senator Klobuchar about how antitrust enforcement could impact the way we use products. And if it will make them better.
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All right, we're back with Senator Amy Klobuchar. You talked about releasing the book to get the public on your side. Let me channel what I hear from my listeners and verge readers. I hear this a lot actually.
The tech companies are not sitting still, right? Like Facebook is terrified of TikTok and clubhouse and they are racing to copy those features. Apple just released a whole flurry of new products. People like them, right?
The average consumer of an Apple iPhone, they get new stuff all the time, they get features. Monoples are usually a lot lazier, right? Like, yeah, the center just waves an iPhone. The classic tech monopoly I think about is like a cable company, right?
Comcast, old AT&T. They provide you service. Everybody hates them, but you got nowhere else to go. People write to me and they say, stop trying to ruin my Apple stuff.
I want Apple to be in control of this ecosystem because I trust them and I pay it premium for it. Do you think that this kind of antitrust enforcement will harm that? Do you think it will help it? What is the mechanism by which will actually make the products better?
I don't think it'll harm it one bit. You're still holding them accountable for all kinds of things on the iPhone and the product to make sure it works. They're making a lot of money off of all their stuff and they're always adding different things to it. Okay, that's all good.
But the point is that we have gotten to this point when they control this whole app market. So basically, you used to go to websites for everything. Everyone has a website. They mostly do now.
But as the match people described, the app stores have basically taken over the internet in a lot of ways. That's how people are spending an average of four hours a day on the app stores. You can still have a successful Apple, but still demand some more consumer protections to make it easier for people to compete. You can still have successful companies and I was in the private sector for 14 years.
I think it's great they've introduced these products. I think it's great that they employ a lot of people. That there's no reason they had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp because in Mark Zuckerberg's where they might be disruptive to us. Well, that's what tech is supposed to do.
They're supposed to disrupt things. That's a good thing and add new things. So my concern is when you look back in time, standard oils and of course, everyone's glad they have gas for their cars and everything else. And then all of a sudden, we realized, wait a minute, there's no competition.
So they broke them up. They were still successful in their own ways, but it helped. AT&T was successful. They broke them up.
That actually led to the cell phone industry. It led to lower long distance rates. It didn't mean that they didn't do great things and that people liked them. Some people liked Mabelle.
That was their name. Mabelle. But pretty soon, people realized we can still have them, but we can also have many of them or other of them that are going to develop new bells and whistles. And I would say not everything is great and cozy right now.
It's not great when we don't have all these privacy violations. And maybe if they wouldn't have bought Instagram, maybe they could have developed some new privacy things that we would have liked. We'll never know. It's not great that we have all this misinformation out there that won 4th Americans that they'd refused the vaccine.
That 65% of Facebook and Twitter disinformation has been attributed to basically 12 individuals on different accounts and that they're still out there. And I've been leading on that and I just got to say that there's a lot of things that are causing trouble when a guy in a cafe told me is aging mother-in-law still will not get the vaccine because she read a thing on Facebook that she still believes that it would implant a microchip in her eye. Right. But you could break up Facebook.
Sure. It's not going to stop people from finding information on Facebook. Right. Like antitrust enforcement is just a means to an end.
And the end is better competition. Right. You're going to break up the firms are going to reduce the power in the market that's concentrated in a handful of firms. But there's all these other interrelated tech regulation issues.
There's privacy, there's misinformation, there's whatever chaos is happening around Section 230 at any minute of the day. There's the gig economy and unionization of Amazon where like there's this whole interrelated set of issues. There's antitrust just the hammer and you know, you've got a lot of nails or it does have a limit to what it can accomplish. Well, I think it's one part of competition policy.
But you know, I would argue it's a combo. We haven't had any regulation on privacy, right? The states are starting to do it. Now all the companies are going, whoa, stop.
We need a federal policy. And that's true, but it better be a strong one. So you can regulate things, but you can also at the same time hope that that through capitalism, consumers are offered new bells and whistles. And I know we get them on our phone all the time for the record.
I'm holding up my iPhone. We know we get them. But what if you had more competition in say the social media platform, like I said, where a company had been able to develop better privacy policies or misinformation policies? And that pretty soon, because they had those people were gravitating over there, right?
We don't know that because there's Facebook's the only thing in town in a big, big way. People gravitate over there. Then Facebook's forced through the competitive market to do something else. We just don't have that right now.
So it doesn't mean that it's bad. They've developed this. It just means that we need a chuck and balance that's been lacking. And that's all I think if you believe in capitalism and you believe in tech, and you actually want to keep those small companies going and not just all be purchased and kind of squashed out in some ways of their entrepreneurship, then you better apply the antitrust laws.
You mentioned that you thought the searing went really well. I thought the searing went really well. One of the reasons I thought this hearing went well is that you didn't have Twitter and Facebook there. And just the presence of Zuckerberg and Dorsey tends to just send things.
I mean, honestly, if you gave me the opportunity to generate a video clip of me yelling at Chuck Dorsey, I would probably take the shot, right? And it seems like no one can stop reframing from taking the shot when they get it. But that's a different set of problems, right? Parlor competing with Twitter does not rise to the level in my mind of an antitrust enforcement problem.
But it does feel related to what Parlor got kicked off all the stores and they don't have a recourse. Okay. So first of all, just these hearings in general, just they're like one night sound bites, right? Or people if they're lucky, where people are throwing popcorn at the screen at the CEOs.
And I think they're important to hold them accountable to happen there. But I just don't think that anything could really equal what happened at that app store hearing where we actually were searching for answers. And we had a lot of the testimony was from people that were affected, but there was one really good consumer expert that spoke with the rest of our companies. And there was kind of a back and forth.
And then they had some expert people from Apple and Google and Apple almost wasn't going to send anyone until Lee and I had to explain that they were claiming they didn't have they couldn't send anyone because of their lawsuit with Epic Games. And then we explained that so interesting because the day that we you told us you wouldn't send anyone was the same day that Tim Cook was on Car Switcher's blog podcast and talking about this issue that doesn't really work for us. And so then they did supply witness, but we deliberately tried to get these subject matter experts on this because we felt it was important to have actually a back and forth. Why are we doing this hearing?
Clearly, like some antitrust subcommittee hearing might not get all attention. You know, why did I write this book on antitrust? Because I believe we need to get to solutions. That's why I ended my book with 25 ideas for solutions.
That's why Mike Lee and I came out of that saying, okay, we can do a sweeping thing, we can maybe do app store thing. States can do it, but we've got to start moving. And so out of that comes action. We're not just going to have these hearings just to have hearings.
We're going to take another break and we're going to come back. I want to ask about a future product idea to see how legislation today could have repercussions down the road. We're back and I want to ask a let's call it a more expansive question. One of the products that I dream about all the time in the industry is actively and energetically trying to make is augmented reality glasses.
And the reason I think about it is every now and again, I talk to someone like you, I should run for office and then I realize I'm horrible at faces and names. And that is just definitely a blocker trying for office. So I had these glasses from Apple or Facebook and I could walk in the room, I could just see everybody's name, but maybe I could like achieve my dream. Here on your glasses is what you're talking about.
Yeah, you wear the AR glasses and they would just put people's names on it. People are trying to make this like today, I know they are. We hear about it all the time. Then I think about the technology that you would have to invent and supply to make that work.
You'd have to build a lot of facial recognition. You would have to have a database of faces and names. You'd have to know where everybody is all the time. Then I think about you would literally augmenting reality.
So if you have the Facebook AR glasses, what happens when you look at the Capitol building, right? Then you need this like massive investment into content moderation. So Facebook is not literally augmenting the reality of the Capitol building. They're definitely building these glasses.
Like Facebook has a division that is actively building it. I've interviewed their executives. Apple is room to be building it. Some of their schematics have leaked.
When you think about writing this legislation and you think about competition and what tech should do, are you thinking to the next term? Because I think about those glasses as there's so much demand for them. Like that is the next breakthrough product in the world. If we get the legislation right, those glasses will be an enormous benefit to society in a real way.
And we get them wrong, maybe it's all over. Privacy disaster. Do you think to that level, to that term? Yeah.
So I think this issue, actually with the glasses and what you're talking about is much of privacy issue as an antitrust issue, actually. And I've done some work in the health data issue with Fitbit. Again, here I am. I'm seeing you.
I'm like, not some Neanderthal about these things. You're not in the Apple ecosystem. You've got an Apple phone. You got a Google Fitbit.
Other product, Amazon products. When I think about those, we don't have rules of the road in place to govern that. And that's why Lisa Murkowski and I came up with a bill to say it's got to be your own private info. And you've got to have a way that actually the HHS, because that's health data, right?
Can you imagine if you walked in and it said everyone's health problems do and somehow got into what their records were? So that's a clear, what we call a HIPAA violation. So that's something that has not been done, crying out for help. Then you have what you're talking about, additional privacy problems.
So for me, you have to write these. It's always the problem with legislation. You have to write things in a broad way that sort of encompasses what might happen in the future. The best way I think to do that is to allow agencies to write rules and change rules instead of just putting, dotting every guy and crossing every tee.
Like you asked about the rates with app stores in the legislation and that it is better to put the broad stroke what the rules should be and have the agencies do it because they can be more facile to change with the times and have experts look at it. That's why I say the Biden administration can do so much, some on their own. In a lot of places, our laws have not been updated, as you know, on privacy or on antitrust for so long, they were created long before whoever, but there's been some server or whatever, inventing the internet and long before any of this. And so we have to update the laws to make it easier for the administrative branch to implement them and anticipating what you're talking about, which is a whole lot's of new stuff coming our way.
Well, you talk about capitalism and one of the features of American capitalism is you don't need permission from the government to introduce new products. This is a product category that it I mean, it's so close and it feels like this is one where it gets introduced, but if it doesn't have a set of rules, then there's very bad things can quickly happen. But you also don't want to make every you don't want Apple and Facebook to come to you hat and hands and can be introduced in your product. No, but you can have them well, you do that with safety things right medical device those kinds of things, pharma, they do have to go this is outside antitrust, they have to get permission for new products.
So you could look at some framework if it starts invading privacy or things like that. You know, there's all those issues with drones and where they can be used with the FAA. And so they've had to clarify that based on privacy and those are, you know, a few years back, new things. So that happens all the time.
But these guys have said basically it's the internet, it's okay. So we have to have some framework in place that they can just throw this out there and then afterwards we're going, Oh my God, what just happened? You brought up this is all the internet. There's still huge monopolies on wires in the ground on broadband in this country on telecom.
You've talked a lot about big tech when we talk about big tech, we almost always talk about the consumer companies at the edge. It feels like the internet providers, which are monopolies from us people, are not receiving this level of scrutiny. You did used to be a telephum lawyer, you were a trampci. Do you think that scrutiny is coming for the Comcast and the AT&T's and spectrum cables of the world as well?
I think that you have seen Comcast when you look at the cable rates, they've gone up every year after year after year. Now we finally, especially during the pandemic, are starting to see more streaming is coming alive as a concept in a big way. And there is some competition, but they still dominated. They're kind of the textbook case of years of dominating what's happened.
So again, that's why I just keep going to putting the right people in place, demanding more of elected officials and making changes to the law that aren't just about tech. With broadband in particular, you'll be very costly to put more fiber on the ground and run a competitor, a Comcast or whatever in Chicago. And so instead, kind of the, at least on the Democratic side, the approach has been net neutrality. We're going to just regulate what Comcast can do with its network.
That kind of feels like what Facebook would like to. Just let us be a monopoly, and we'll, everyone can yell and scream about 230, and we'll implement your moderation rules to make one side of the aisle happy, and we'll just be the regulated monopoly for social media in America. It's either the sort of regulated broadband monopoly direction that we're going in with net neutrality, or it's the we're going to break you up and make you compete. I think it's both.
I think that you've got to look at each policy. The problem right now is we're just stymied. We have to be able to do both and figure out it's not one size fits all about the new rules for things like privacy as well as doing something to promote competition. So that's why I'm able to work with Republicans on this and agree that we need to do something when it comes to regulatory enforcement.
If you could wave the magic wand and make sweeping changes to the structure of the tech industry, what would be the first two things you do? Okay, well, first I would pass my bill. No, you have to tell me what you would actually. That's what, no, you said wave magic wand?
No, no, it really does. It gets the money to the agencies, including the change to the fee structure that we need so they can take on the cases. It's not me taking on the cases. It says that the big fat mega mergers, they've got to at least show they don't hurt competition and that you've got to be able to examine some of the exclusionary conduct with a new win behind your sales in terms of what the standard is.
I think that would be really, really key. And then that would help the private sector to start doing some cool new things for the consumers. Then I would look at privacy rules. I think that would be very important because we really don't have those in place on a federal basis.
And then the third thing I do is kind of more specialized things in different areas that we just talked about health data. Looking at some limited, some changes to 230 when it comes to liability is the bill that I have with Maisie Hironal, who just passed that really important agent hate crimes bill. And look at certain types of conduct under Section 230 to lift the immunity like civil rights and stalking and things like that. Notably on your list is not breakup Facebook.
No, no, no, no, no, no, it's not split up Google and YouTube. That is so unfair. Yeah. Because if you pass my law, I can tell you right now with the government already looking at that as a remedy in the in the FTC case that they have brought that that would be right on the table into me.
I don't mean break it into little pieces so it doesn't exist. I mean, just as we did with the AT&T breakup take off, which happens all the time. Oh, when companies merge, a lot of times they die of something because it's this isn't radical. Oh, so you want me to just be like wait the magic wand and just cut everyone in half.
I actually, I want to I want the tools to be in place so that when the government regulators, because I still do have faith in government, when they look at this, when Merrick Garland looks at these and he's super smart. And when the FTC looks at this, they say, well, this thing is really a problem. And this thing isn't, right? I don't want to just wait the magic wand when I don't really have the data to do that.
But I so badly wanted to happen. Yes. You mentioned the Epic Apple lawsuit, it's starting the trial starting very soon in the background of this. That is a private cause of action.
That's just one company suing another. Do you think that is a rich vein of actual reform and change? Well, actually, throughout time, there's been a huge number of these private lawsuits, but they've gotten really slapped around by the Supreme Court in a bad way. It's become very hard to win their tech.
It's probably a new opening. If you look at the Kavanaugh's citing with the liberals, although that was before Connie Barrett came on, I think that of course you want to have plaintiff's lawsuits, but they've become very hard to bring because of the court at the same time you want the government to be able to do it. And you come through there. There's just, I think it was Bill Baer who was head of antitrust under Obama who said, you know, there are deals coming to them that never should have gotten out of the board room because they're so clearly anti-competitive.
So you do it on both grounds and certainly suits on exclusionary conduct and the like are really important. When I heard those witnesses that are hearing Spotify, Tyle and Matt, you know, just talking about how they've been pushed around every time they try to do stuff and threaten to be pulled off the app store, it's just classic monopoly conduct. So for people who are paying attention to this, a lot of tech executives, policy people listen to the show, what should they be looking for next? What's the next term?
I think they should start, okay, well, should I become a psychiatrist? Look inside yourself. You should just break off YouTube on your own, Sundar. Realize what's coming here and that, you know, boy, maybe they can adjust their app store terms.
Would that stop it? This is a real thing. People say even the threat of regulation causes better conduct. Would that stop it?
If Apple said it's 15%. I just would like to point out they've been super arrogant about some of this stuff, right? You can see it in the emails, you can see it on how they treat companies, they're calling them the night before, like hearing and like, come on. And so I think that they should start looking at making some changes themselves, not just the, you know, as you point out, they've been doing some things on misinformation and content and the like, but they should really look at some of the physical terms and what they're doing.
So that's what I would suggest. And then secondly, take it seriously here. You know, maybe you think you can hire every lobbyist and you can be people up and try to, you know, go after them for whatever you do by hiring to finders, which they did a while back against the lobbying firm, right, to take us on personally, you know, they can keep doing that or maybe think, you know, that's just making us matter or when you don't, and maybe, do not rule out or refuse to give a witness. And then Mike Lee and I spend three days learning all about this because we've got to write a letter to Tim Cook.
That didn't work very well for them. So maybe, and this isn't vindictiveness. This is just people in their banking that we're not going to learn enough to be able to do this. And I think if you saw that subcommittee, they are learning a lot.
I think that I would get ahead of this by actually doing stuff instead of trying to go after the people and the maybe some of their companies and customers that they think are taking them on. That's what I would do. And then I would imagine that the administration is going to be really serious. They're going to put some serious thinkers in that Joe Biden and Merrick Garland aren't just going to let this go and that take it seriously and don't just do surface things that sound good.
Start making some major changes to how you deal with the world. And that'll make a big difference. Senator Klobuchar, thank you so much for being on Decoder. Tell people where they can get your money.
Well, you can get my book online anywhere from your nearest monopoly. You can get my book in stores. But mostly, I hope you get my book. It's called Antitrust.
And I like to tease people to judge who even though we were rivals on the debate today, they're actually friends, that in the fall he came out with his book called Trust and my book is called Antitrust. So our rivalries continue. But if you care about this issue at all, I think you'll have fun looking at the cartoons at least, but you'll really enjoy kind of reading the history and seeing where we are and also seeing solutions. That's what this book is about.
Terrific. What's under Klobuchar? Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you.
Thanks again to Senator Amy Klobuchar for taking the time to talk today. And thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I'd love to hear what you think of a show.
You can email us at decoderattheverge.com or hit me up directly. I'm at Reckless on Twitter. If you like decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Virgin of the Virgin, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today's episode was produced by Sophie Ericsson, Andrew Marillo, and Alexander Charles Adams. Our music is by Breakmaster Sullen. We'll see you next time.