This is the catered daily podcast for Monday, November 4th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A lot of criticism has been leveled at the Biden administration for the policy preferences

of its Federal Trade Commission and its leader, Lena Kahn.

But Kahn's problems with and challenges to big companies, tech and otherwise,

might fit in pretty well in a Trump-Vance administration. Kato's Jennifer Huddleston comments.

Joe Biden's FTC head, Lena Kahn, is sort of well known for broadly being more suspicious

of the activities of large tech companies.

Is that fair to say?

I would say it goes farther than just large tech companies.

While she kind of made her name on criticizing Amazon in a Yale Law Review article when she was still a student,

her approach to antitrust has been incredibly

critical of large companies in general. So while this may have started focused on tech

companies, we've seen under her leadership and under this emergence of what's been called

the Neo-Brandician or hipster antitrust movement, a return to a big as bad mindset that's

impacting everything from tech companies to grocery stores. And let's just understand what the

the quick version of why that is. Scale gives these companies some pricing power that they don't otherwise have. Is that about it?

I would say it's more than that. It's the presumption that large companies are automatically

something to be suspicious of. There should already automatically kind of be a presumption that

maybe they didn't actually earn that success. And it shifts the focus away from are large

company successful because consumers like them to this idea that there should be a certain number

of players in different markets and that those markets can be defined by the government and the

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