Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn't kill everyone????

0:00Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and awareable. So your vitals app now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Here are the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later require based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026. Visit Apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12. Other researchers have agreed saying the chances of AI killing us all is greater than 10 percent.

1:02And 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 it all I call Jonathan Cantor the former antitrust chief of the United States Department of Justice under the Biden administration. These days he's both a professor of law at Wash You 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 Lena Khan 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 live in the Trump administration surprising many. That antitrust reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI safety debate. A vowed libertarian and former

2:04Trump AI's are David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lena Khan saying there's no need for an antitrust exemption. Again this is a lot of ideas and you're going to hear Jonathan Cantor really get into the weeds of how all this regulation might work, how it might interact 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, you know the former head of the DOJ antitrust division and the Biden administration and a current professor of law at Wash You 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 to this one. I can see 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,

3:07which is fascinating. It's 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 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 aren't 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. So the state 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.

4:10What are the things that companies should be doing and what are things that 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 opening eye and throttpick Google deep mind, even Elon Musk, these are companies that do not necessarily like each other, these are people that do not necessarily like each other and they are saying in concert that they should slow down the phrase that Daria Amade from Anthropic is using is to paste the frontier. My read of this is that they simply do not trust each other. 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

5:12they're afraid of the pace of innovation and the lack of regulation means they don't see any lines on the road. They don't know where to drive and they're worried about driving off the road or hitting somebody else. And so they're begging for the government to step in and do something. That's probably there's a monochrome of truth to that. I think they certainly people I believe they believe it could destroy humanity. I'm not sure that that Doomsday scenario is accurate, but but I believe they believe that. That's the more generous. The more cynical is they're spending so much money, they're hemorrhaging cash and they can't keep this up. But if they pull back, it's 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 slow 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's a lot of you just want regulatory

6:18capture. You want to make a cartel. You want a foreclose competition. That is a risk certainly of that kind of arrangement. So let's walk through what's necessary and what's 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 like Boeing and Airbus. Boeing's Boeing, you know, fear has got doors falling off the plane. It wasn't Airbus's fault and they didn't 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 companies fault and you don't need to come together and figure out how to solve those problems. You need to figure out where wrong in your manufacturing process. If you create products that create AI 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

7:19you have a responsibility to build safe and secure products. And companies should be held libel when they're agents, whether those agents are digital and binary or whether those agents or 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 clearinghouse to properly share threats, 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.

8:19We 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 is 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 then it should be taken off the market. All right, let me, I want to dig into robot jail specifically in 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 that this reflect 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 if my agent goes and hacks you, at my directive is that enthropics fault, right? Are we

9:25going to create some kind of past reliability? 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's fault? Both and, right? And so companies employ people and they build technology and when those people and there's 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's, can be products liability, but it's can be more than products liability. It's, it's, you're just people doing bad things or companies creating technology that's doing bad things and the products liability framework actually did work most recently in the case against Meta for Facebook and Instagram and child safety and security and and mental health. Wait, hold on, I want to hold, that is really fascinating to me. Like 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

10:29where 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 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, the political scientist and me would trace that back to things like Jerry Mandering and Citizens United where our process has gotten 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,

11:32the 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 safer 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 at 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 safer and more secure products from the get go at the outset of this technology. Well, let me make the comparison to social media regulation just a

12:37little more tightly. Okay. We just had the big med case. That is a product's liability case. Right. Your products were designed in a way that caused harm to teenagers, met a settle the case because I think Mark would prefer to build AI then care about. They lost, but they did lose one to a jury, right? They did lose one to a jury. And in this case wasn't going well, but fundamentally, they settled. They gave up. And there's a view that if they had fought an appeal, they would have won on some first amendment grants. Right. The product liability case maybe wasn't as strong as we all thought it was. And the only reason I'm saying that is meta gave in to the regulator, right? And 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, open AI, you are probably liable for what chat GPT does. And through our pick, you are probably liable for what cloud does. Isn't this the moment to actually tighten the screw and pass the regulation that says, you are

13:39definitely liable? Yes, this is the job of Congress, which is to clarify the law. And 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 and gave them more flexibility to innovate without regard for consequences. We had a, and this is not partisan because you 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 that the results of that have eroded or destroyed any trust the public has in these technology companies. And I think one of the reasons we're having this conversation a lot

14:42earlier 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 you citizens United because of things like Jerry Mandering 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 assemblance of structure. But you know, the other piece is states states have actually done a better job than the federal government. And you can rewind back six months or year. We had people in Congress without any imposing any affirmative rules saying we should put a 10 years more auditorium 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

15:46hopefully 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 to come. Even other 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 we're going to destroy all your jobs and potentially destroy humanity. But we're going to IPO for massive valuation. And we're going to set up camp in your local communities with data centers, which by the way don't employ people and drive up the cost of power, but it's okay. China. At T-Mobile the new iPhone 18 Pro is here with a big leap in battery life and you can get it on us with so many reasons to choose T-Mobile you'll want to talk

16:47about it. A T-Mobile you can get iPhone 18 Pro on them. Pass it on. My friends said you can get it on T-Mobile. Pass it on. They got the best network with the fastest speeds. Hey Mickey, pass it on. iPhone 18 Pro has the most advanced iPhone camera ever. Pass it on. I heard a T-Mobile. You can get it on them. Pass it on. For a limited time at T-Mobile give the amazing iPhone 18 Pro on us. With up to 36 monthy build credits and you're trading in the eligible device example iPhone 16 on a qualified plan example $100 plus a month climb without a pay plus taxes and fees for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 of vice connection charge credits and in balance do if you pay over a near cancel finance agreement 1199 99 iPhone 18 Pro 256 gigabyte to acquire the best and fastest mobile network in the US based on analysis by Uclips P-test Intelligence data 1 8 to 2026 is a T-Mobile.com I want to come to China in one second because that feels like another very important piece of the

17:47puzzle but you you mentioned a cast of characters here you mentioned Obama there's a political realignment inside this debate that I find confounding David Sacks who is Trump's AI's R is retweeting your former counterpart at the FTC Lena Khan saying the existing ant trust laws are fine you don't need an exemption the existing laws like you're saying we'll cover you they will make it so you can coordinate on security things and you will be liable for what you're doing and if you want to stop just stop that is a absolutely shocking kind of political alignment to me where do you think that's coming from so it's actually it's a realignment of the realignment you know going back to Trump one we started seeing the kind of ends of the horseshoe starting to meet where folks you know left right in center were all concerned about the power of big tech and when people like Lena and I came into office we had a mandate and a lot of public support frankly to be aggressive in forcing the law against big tech and then you

18:50know came being inevitable backlash in 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 and and 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 Sacks is approvingly retweeting Lena Khan while Bloomberg communist Joe weasanthal is saying all these people are just saying Lena Khan 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 you know I will say this when when I went up before congress I had support from Senator Mike Lee and Chuck Grassley and Josh Holly and Matt Gates asked me if I was tired of winning at one of my oversight hearings and then I had a bunch of you know Democrats many of whom supported me some of whom were very adhering to the big

19:54tech companies who would criticize me these signs of these 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 like fake mustache and glasses and I said I wanted I'm here to 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 the reputational head of that so here are some you know 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 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

20:56like you're describing but I you know I think the if you look at the data center issue for example I mean it's it's it's not left or right it's it's all the above and and part of this is it to me a it's a sensation that we're actually more in a healthier place as high and healthy as the whole thing is then we were during the you know kind of internet and social media revolution where you know even criticizing those companies were saying we needed something was seen as like a very fringe position the truth of the matter 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 kind of 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 the path around right now I do think one notable difference between now and what

22:00what happens 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 right 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 right they're going to cure all diseases are 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 unrestrained competition might lead to really enormous negative outcomes and one of the things they're constantly talking about is China right they can all coordinate the United States but 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 bogeyman is that real is that something competition law can address it's largely a convenient bogeyman so we've been you know in we've been dealing with

23:01these 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 the 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 a great as 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 in its borders China actually manages centrally 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

24:05is 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 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 is 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 it's 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 is an interest chief and your current role is law professor give people a framework to understand how competition law domestically should interact with foreign policy right we are in

25:12some sort of national competition which China 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 in the United States economy collapses there's a lot there right between how we might deal with China as a foreign adversary or at least 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 but certainly domestic companies to compete hard because our system is 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 and capital and and 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 we were founded in in rejecting the you know the

26:21the I mean the tea party was founded as a a revolution against the British monopoly over the necessities of life I mean this is goes back to the founding of our country our freedom is is in part in economic freedom and we need to make sure we promote that so you know 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 you know try to dump cheap products below cost and and things like that I was reading with my lawsuit and see other day a case from the 80s where the allegations were that Japan companies in Japan were cardalizing 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 US manufacturers and that was the height of the Chicago school libertarian movement and the Supreme Court actually

27:23used some just you know kind of cockamimi version of economics suggests that wasn't an I trust violation and sort of set the stage for what happened next there are legitimate questions about what we need to do to make sure that you know there is fair competition and 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 special as a nation college football is back so Hilton called him me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality need a room to match your lucky number we got you want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey oh that smells lucky Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition even a marching band wake up call it 55 and 55 seconds hit it when you need a

28:27team that will do whatever it takes on game day it matters where you stay Hilton for this day so I can already hear what are most skeptical members the audience are saying they are screaming probably in their cars that it's already a monopoly right 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 whatever to hugging face because Nvidia just bought hugging face and it is the biggest investor in open at yeah do you need to go break that up do you need to go well somebody should be looking at these issues right like this is 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 by 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 so long as you're

29:31within those boundaries go for it go compete as hard as you can this administration has sort of taken the position that we're going to allow a small number of companies to reach a level of dominance or all agonpally or monopoly so that we can beat China whatever beating China means and that's the piece that I don't quite understand what is beating China mean I get the issue of if you know China has these advanced bots that are that are violating and infiltrating our our companies and our government servers and the like well fine 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 we don't the way to deal with that is not having monopolies domestically especially in those monopolies are not adherent to they're adherent to shareholders rather than the best interests of the public this is a big debate across the United

30:33States government right now right the 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 and Republican administration than you would ever expect in history owning the means of production what does that sound like to you it is it is and then they call everyone else communist which is great yes again the realignment is wild stuff right compare Grona 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 way of 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 law is compatible with that approach it is harder to unwind it than it is

31:35to 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 but 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 our our promise our way of life is based on a fundamentally different idea and ideal and the more we diverge and deviate from that the worse off 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 anti-market I'm a capitalist carcaring 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

32:36in 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 and we have central points of failure and 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 I'm for the thousand flowers blooming inside the borders of the United States it is just remarkable to me you know we're weeks away from the midterm 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 if you had to describe the policy positions of the median Republican and the in the medium Democrat headed into the midterms around this issue are they compatible are they at war is it a total scramble it's a total scramble I'll take one issue I don't think what I articulated is is a conservative from the 90s I think the

33:40conservative of the 90s were you know antitrust and and competition policy and all of these you know these ideas that were kind of very central to the development and growth of our country from you know the the 40s to the to the 70s should be thrown away and we should let industry consolidate and we did we signed a street consolidate I mean and 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 in 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 in 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

34:41play out but we're living we're literally living through that transformation right now which is which is kind of remarkable it's an interesting thing to observe as somebody who likes to study markets and technology and policy and and it's not again not all of 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 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 the Reagan era of neoliberal politics and policy and I think that they're the left and right have both rebelled against that and so I think that 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

35:46a hundred 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 you know international relations all of that is being rebuilt or stripped down to the studs and including our government agencies themselves are regulatory structure right the the way this AI issue would have been handled 50 years ago is we would have created you know department for AI safety or something or AI and we would have 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 Supreme Court essentially threw that thrown 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 and I I saw that and I was like

36:50what you would do is regulate them so you should just hire some people to do it you should delegate well this is this is the irony a good friend of mine Dave Lawrence or the piece in New York Times a few weeks ago kind of saying just this 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 the executive branch to do it without any process without any input and essentially with 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 the 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 and new deal you know 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

37:56resources or the 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 in gerrymandering that has essentially made all politics national and all politics tribal let me ask you two questions to wrap this up you mentioned some eras you along with Lena Khan brought forth a new era in antitrust some people called it hipster antitrust the academics called it neo-brandies just look at my hairline I'm from a hipster you're much the idea that we would bring back aggressive antitrust enforcement on theories of the law that weren't simply related to consumer prices going up or down that was new that was that was something you brought forth you brought a lot of cases against the public and we won our cases we our cases on the law one we beat google and court twice we 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 in front of a jury

38:57in court like we we the stuff we did worked and we brought cases on alchemy pricing and health care we fought for the public because the public wanted someone to fight for them the settlements the google cases did not achieve the results you know the settlement the remedies which which I did not I did not preside over I presided over the victories we handed the baton over to the next administration the remedies were admittedly disappointing you know could we have achieved a different outcome I don't know I would have liked the opportunity to try but we didn't so that's disappointing but but it it doesn't change the fact that we change the game we changed the approach and the state of anitrust law and the state of competition policy was a heck of a lot better when we left it then when we started do you think that error persists there there are some people essentially tech policy you would say this was all a failure we should call this what it was it was a failure did not result in structural change and we should move on not at all it's it's not a failure in fact I mean there are things did we finish the job no there's a lot more to go

40:04it kind of relates to the the challenge that we're talking about earlier which is it's harder to address something after calcifies we were coming in after these markets had hardened trying to figure out how to how to create competition and I've always been fond of saying that what you really want to do is you want to protect the net protect the next inflection point and so especially in technology and platforms what comes next is is likely to be highly disruptive and competition has its greatest promise at that moment and that's when incumbents tend to be most aggressive in trying to prevent upstarts and others from competing and so I do think you know the conversation we're having around competition this conversation today the the fact that you know folks on left and right are we should are concerned about already concerned about monopolies or all of gopolis is a sign that these issues are more easily discussed today than they were you know six or seven years ago it's funny the last time that you were on I believe we're talking about the case you brought against Apple

41:05and you made the same point right right before everything changes that's when the monopolist gets the most aggressive and 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 right Johnny I have has gone to go make hardware devices and open AI and Apple 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 monopolists well the the challengers of yesterday are often the monopolists of today and so what what you want is I'm not against the challengers let me be very clear I think this is why I'm against the anti-trust 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 right I think we want to promote more competition not less and so the that's really what what we should be focused

42:13on is making sure that the lessons we learned from the last go around don't translate to this one so competition is not about weakening the large player it's about making sure that the smaller players have an opportunity to compete as well doing a surprise in the Trump administration hasn't settled the Apple case that is the one that's ongoing they're just every day I'm like it's weird that they can't buy their way out of that one it is surprising I mean the guy showed up with gold bars to the White House you know if that doesn't do it what will do you think it's just because they're they still think there's something there or is it just leverage in the background I have no idea 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 say what you think no I told you the guy showed up with gold bars I think I think it goes to this if I had a if I had a which is I'm injured for that that for every monopolist you have dozens of other companies if not hundreds that are upset with a monopolist and it no longer becomes and if you're you know unless we fully have embraced national champions you know there are a lot

43:15of companies that are frustrated with as we you know put in our complaint with the tactics of Apple to control that market and exploit that market and so you know there are there are counter valiant forces on the other side if I had a guess all right 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 are the policymaker how would you organize them and what would you say I would start with clarity around consequences for bad things so if you build dangerous products if you're door flies off your plane while it's in the air if your 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 in the extension of the product's liability style framework that is a good place I think we need to enumerate and Congress should

44:18step in and say okay here are the things we value as a society we value mental health we have value competition we value authenticity of information we value intellectual property and copyright 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 in the 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 term we'll see we're going to have to have you back soon professor canter thank you so much for being on decoder my pleasure i'd like to thank john if you can't have taken time to join me on decoder and thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed it take that as you know what you thought about this episode or 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 print directly on threads or blue sky we're also on youtube you can watch full episodes at decoder pod we also have a tiktok and an instagram they're also at decoder pod and they're a lot of fun if you'd like to decoder please share with your friends and subscribe over here podcast

45:21decoder is a fraction of the virgin part of the boxing and podcast network shows producers are Greg ought cake cocks next step this episode was edited by urser right our editorial director is Kevin McShane the decoder music is by break master cylinder we'll see you next time booking dot com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a state surrounded by nature that's nice go on book it it's easy booking dot com booking dot yeah