9/8/23: Krystal And Kyle Debate Briahna Joy Gray On Green Party And Biden, Twitter Accused Of Aiding Saudi Human Rights Abuse, Trump Floats Debating Meghan Markle, Historic Antitrust Movement, And New Push For AI Regulation

et cetera. It's going to be available on Crystal Confront substack if you guys want to subscribe there, you can get the whole thing on Friday this evening. Otherwise, we are going to post this clip now that you can watch and enjoy and take from it whatever you will.

will he eventually? I don't know, you know, it's up to him. Balls in his court.

So we're going to discuss his campaign a little bit here, and so I want to lay out what my position is and then bringy. I'll turn it over to you and you can respond to it, and Crystally you can jump in at some point and tell say what you're feeling.

like to help out in that process. But if I'm in a swing state and it's Biden versus Trump, I'm at the point now where I don't even think.

then vote for Cornell Lesson in the general. And I know there are a lot of people in my audience who are frustrated by that plan because they think that it takes something away from Cornell West's run, or it affirms the Democratic Party in some way to vote for Mary and Williamson running as a Democrat. I don't feel that way. I feel it's a little hypocritical to have that position, given that we all just enthusiastically voted for

Bernie twice in the primary the last two rounds. You can make a distinction saying that Bernie was an independent and he always identified as an independent, and Maryon Williamson doesn't have that kind of cloak of distance from the Democratic Party. You can say what you want. I don't see those things as mutually exclusive in the least, so that is also my plan. I differ from you only in so far as that I would say it's a more difficult choice in a swing state to decide what

you're going to do. But I frankly respect people who feel comfortable. It has not been something that I have to contend with, but I respect people who feel comfortable voting third party, even in swing states. The reason is this, and it goes back to that early bad faith viral Noom Chomsky interview and which I asked him about a month before the twenty twenty race. Look, I said, I take your point. Let's say Trump is an existential threat.

Let's say that he's a unique threat among all Republican candidates. My concern is that every year, because we all vote for blue no matter who, because most Democrats vote blue no matter who, are most left leaning people do, the message that gets sent out is that Democrats don't have a bar. You can go as low as you want, as close to the Democratic Party as you have Republican Party as you want, and there's a ratchet to the right effect. And Republicans know that they can keep being

more and more extreme. And so I want you to explain to me what you predict to be the stopping point, which we're no longer to. We're no longer saying this new Republican is the worst that has ever happened. This new Republican is the worst that has ever happened. Tell me you're not going to be saying the same thing about Ron DeSantis or a big Ramaswami or whatever other person comes down the pike. And he was unable, in

my subjective view, to respond credibly to that claim. So if somebody could could tell me strategically what the stopping point is going to be of making this argument of the lesser of two evils, I would be open to the idea that, Okay, this is the last one Donald Trump, Fine, he'd tried to steal the election. Fine, that is a

new line that he has crossed. But absent and acknowledgement that we are creating our own destiny by lowering the bar in these ways, I'm not comfortable coming out and criticizing anybody who no longer wants to be complicit in that kind of a system that's enabled the Democratic Party to not have a primary, treat Mary and Williamson as bad as badly as they've treated her, treat Bernie Sanders as badly as they treated him, and openly come out and say and say they don't have to hold a free,

fair election, the DNC argue that in court.

something I said publicly at the time. But I said something very similar to you, which is like, listen, this was not easy for me. If you wherever you live, swing state, not swing state, et cetera, you do whatever

you analyze is the right thing to do. And the reason that I voted for him, primarily at that time, even though I thought he had an atrocious record in the Senate, even though you know, complicit in the Iraq War, complicit and bad trade deals, complicit, like terrible things on crime, all that stuff, right, the primary reason I voted for him was because of the National Labor Relations Board and because labor politics and building out union power in this country,

to me is one of the most important goals and something that I think we all share and leftists generally believe. Now in retrospect, not only do I feel good about that vote, he's actually surprised me. Now, I've got all kinds of issues right on the National Labor Relations Board though specifically, they just issued a ruling which could be a complete game changer for unions, And just to explain to people a little bit, basically, in the past, bosses

could union bust with impunity, no accountability. Now the process going forward is completely changed. If bosses are caught union busting, then that's it. There's no more election, it's canceled. They have to recognize the union and start bargaining with them. That's the biggest shift in labor relations we've had in our lifetime. So that's why at this point I'm not only you know it's likely to I'm a Merryan supporter as well, but we can all see the most likely

outcome is it's going to be Trump versus Biden. Not only would I say that protecting the Biden National Labor Relations Board isn't important enough for me to vote for Joe Biden, but it is important enough that I would actively encourage.

actually that if your priority, if you believe the path to meaningful change is going to primarily come through a kind of I don't say this dismissively, but a kind of labor incrementalism, meaning there are meaningful labor gains that happen, but are not the type of which would radically transform the system the way that some people want to happen in a shorter term, and the way that some people might argue Bernie Sanders represented his movements as the goal

of being Then that's a defensible position. But I also I have to hold space for the reality that there are people for whom, even as significant as those labor gains are, it's simply insufficient. And what they see when they look at the trajectory of the last fifty sixty years of Democratic Party politics, when they look when they read Listen Liberal and see the longer game, the Democratic Party making a concerted choice to back away from labor

in a way that has gone on for decades. It isn't necessarily turning around as a consequence of Joe Biden having some good NLRB appointments.

Biden ministry. I mean, there's a million of them right on foreign policy, I've got problems, But my biggest issue economically with the Biden administration is the way they've allowed the pandemic relief, the short term panic demic relief programs to fall away and leave a lot of ordinary Americans more in a more precarious financial position now than they were at the beginning of the administration.

neoliberal attack on any sort of trust busting. I feel like none of those improvements that have made Biden on that front way better than Obama, way better than Clinton. I just feel like there's no willingness to acknowledge any of that whatsoever.

the project that you're on. And I think that what some people are frustrated by is that this went from feeling like, in both left media and left politics, a bigger revolutionary project that was going to the core of our capitalist system and wanting to radically change the way that human lives are valued, what we consider to be the nature of our social safety net, what we believe to be the nature of what we consider to be

human rights. And they wanted to join a movement that validated what many of us felt intrinsically emotionally for most of our lives, that something in the milk very much wasn't clean. And Bernie came along and articulated that we were it was legitimate for us to be asking for something more, and so at this point it does feel as though there has been a kind of a bait and switch. It's not that what you're describing isn't true

or legitimate. And I said this on my podcast. If your priorities are what you have kind of articulated your priorities as being I think it's a perfectly legitimate argument, but I have to hold space for the fact that for many people it simply is inadequate.

like the main purity tester guy. And I didn't vote for Biden in twenty twenty because I didn't think he would pass my purity test. Now at the time people could go back and watch the video. My purity test

was super fucking lenient. It was like, if I'm convinced you're gonna do like two or three of the things that I value highly, then I would vote for you, because I know it's basically down to just the Democrat and the Republican no matter how much we want to wish the Green Party or libertarians want to wish the Libertarian Party into existence. And so when I look at the record again, I could list all the bad things.

But you just mentioned the NLRB raising overtime pay, or you mentioned the thing where you know they automatically recognize the union if the bosses try to bust it up. There's also the overtime pay rule, where now it's not thirty three one thousand dollars, it's about fifty five thousand dollars a year where now you get overtime pay. That's

a huge, huge change, student loan debt reduction. And even Biden, even coming back after the Supreme Court tried to slap it down and he said, no, I'm gonna try to do it through the Higher Education Act. Now there's little things we could go after. Oh the interest, right, yes, that's bad. I agree with you on that, but we got to recognize that that is all things considered a step in the right direction. Pulling out of Afghanistan. He actually had the balls to do it, even when the

media was shitting on them relentlessly. And I didn't see anybody on the left coming into his defense.

I'm not saying that that's what you're doing. But if you bring up something like student debt, when the consensus of all the students experts that I've talked to on my podcast, people from the Debt Collective, the Astra tailors of the world, the legal experts I brought on, is that there was a path toward doing this, to canceling all student debt that would not have been steinied by

the Supreme Court. The same authority that Donald Trump used to enact the student debt moratorium, which has been ongoing until the beginning of this month for the last three years, was the same authority that he could have canceled all student debt with the stroke of a pin. He chose not to do that because he decided to means test the program. He circulated those documents. I got one of my inbox last August I believe it was to see if you qualify for student debt. It was a very

easy form. But when he did that, that sorted the clock for people to be able to challenge it in court, which what six states did. Two of them were successful, and now here we are today. Not only did he decline to do the unstoppable mechanism to actually cancel all student debt, he additionally chose to use a legal authority, which when many legal experts said, was the most vulnerable one. So you're now saying, no, no, no, he could have used the Higher Education Act.

political aims are ultimately very similar. But I do think the student loan debt example is instructive because it shows what has been effective in terms of securing real gains versus what has been ineffective. Jill Stein running in twenty sixteen, I don't think she was a spoiler, but the Democratic Party thinks she was a spoiler. They put that out to the public.

then they prop up Joe Biden, so that definitely didn't work. However, the fact that Joe Biden had to be on a primary debate stage versus Bernie and Marianne and a whole lot of Elizabeth Warren, a whole lot of other people who were pushing him on student loan debt cancelation forced him into a position of doing something when he one

hundred percent would have done nothing otherwise. And we can see that now because you know the fact that they've basically like blocked any sort of real democratic price process within the democratic price, Mary has made it possible for him to literally promise nothing for this next term thus far.

So you can see how the third party effort was not successful in bringing about whatever revolutionary change people want to see, and the process that Bernie engaged in and that Mary and Williamson is engaging and now was far more effective in actually delivering results. And that's what I'm focused on.

graduates of HBC used. And he went down to Georgia, I state that he not only needed to win for the presidency, but needed to win for the Senate, and where there are three of the major hbc us in the United States of America, made that promise, and people knocked doors and turned people out to the polls. The basis of that promise, which he immediately stopped talking about the second he got elected and renegged upon. He also knew, he knew the authority that he had to cancel law

student debt. And I know because all of these student debt advocates have been talking about how they were directly liaising with his office and communicating these points, and they chose to ignore them and do a plan that he knew could be abstracted. You can say it's it's not a conspiracy theory, that's conspiracytorial thinking. But it's either a conspiracy or as an idiot. Those are the options, and

I'm not especially comfortable and validating either of those things. Now, you you were saying that you are looking through the prism of your own perspective.

overly personalized. But Biden made a choice to tell forty four million Americans who have student debt that he was not only going to not fulfill his promise to them, but that in the middle of the debt ceiling argument of a couple of months ago, the one thing that he was going to bargain away to get the debt

ceiling pass was ending the student loan moratorium. So now it's not me, I'm not I'm not the one in control of whoever votes he has to make the case of those forty four million Americans, who's who's he's starting their student debta?

Donald Trump? And so when you're in this binary choice where let's not pretend like Cornell West is going to be president of the United States, it is worth making the choice in that situation to reelect Joe Biden and get the NLRB, and get the antitrust stuff and get what is at hand to be gotten in this moment and live to fight another day.

They have nothing to do with each other. You can you can vote for Marianna in a primary. You can be happy that she's on the debate stage, which obviously aren't allowing, which is material to this argument. I've got to say, some people are You're saying, what is the Green.

angry Bernie bros. A very small number, by the way, because we all know sitting here that more Bernie Sanders voters in twenty sixteen benthony and vote for Hillary Clinton than Hillary Clinton voters in two thousand and eight benthony and voted for Brock Obama. We all know these statistics. We've been saying them back at neo liberals for the last five six whatever years. That being said, there was no argument to control the media narrative and present an

opportunity for actual leverage and change. So there wasn't like a group. There was no spokesperson, there was no politician. There was no left media that was saying here, I have an organized movement, an organized group of people who are willing to actually change their mind and vote for the Democratic nominee and exchange of various concessions that didn't exist.

And I'm, by the way, not advocating for it. I know that some of my friends, like Nathan Robinson, have said that Cornell West should do exactly that, say that he'd be willing to drop out and exchange your various concessions. I think that's better than nothing, and that's more than Frankly, I love Marianne and I hope she's successful, but that's more than Marianne is likely to get out of this. However, that is not even my plant, that my perspective.

position now running in a general election. Every time he goes on TV to say, if you're upset at meet at being a spoiler, you need to look at the Democratic Party, who across the country for the last decades, has been purposefully undermining any ballot measures that effectively put into effect rank choice voting in Maine, in North Carolina, the way they attacked Matthew Hoe. I am not the enemy they are. And that's the burden shifting, the narrative

burden shifting. I think the left should be engaged in right now to the extent that you think that Cornell West can ruin Biden's chances. Isn't it Biden's responsibility to find those votes not among disaffected third partiers who he doesn't who don't owe him anything anyway, but the tens of thousands of millions of disaffected Democrats who aren't going to vote for him. We've all talked about this together.

In Wisconsin in twenty and sixteen, there were eighty eight thousand registered black voters who voted in twenty twelve who declined to vote in twenty and sixteen. That's like two or three times the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost and Matt stayed alone. And you know, we're sitting here talking about whether or not Cornell West is going to pull some third party voters away, but I can the Democratic Party.

to actually grow. Whereas if Trump gets re elected, which is listen, it's the fact, based on how the Democratic Party is going to respond to Cornell West's election bid, it is more likely that Donald Trump gets elected with Cornell West in the race, And that to me is a massive lust because we know what his record is, we know what his National Labor Relations Board we was, we know who his labor secretaries were and how they were engaged in all this union busting, and so I

see a much more direct connection between that moving the ball in our direction. Then you know, Cornell West getting five percent and either his candidacy not really mattering at all or being used once again to you know, smear the left and marginalize the left and say these are just the people that are interested in getting Trump elected, so.

party happens to be. But right now all we have is the Green Party, for obvious reasons, getting them more money to do the work across the country to advance third parties ranchoice voting rather is exactly the goal that you're articulating. So yes, I do see a direct connection between your goal, your stated goal of getting rankedchoice voting and voting for the Green Party. You know who's not going to fight for rank choice voting, the Democratic Party.

And clearly we have a disagreement in terms of how good of a job Joe Biden is doing, because, like I said, I expected nothing of him, Brianna, I expected this is the guy who brought the Iraq War and the Patriot Act in NAFTA, and he's like the poster child of the conservative, Democrat and the neoliberal. But then he gets in office and he does all these things which shock me. He massively reduced the drone war by over ninety percent. He like I said, pulled out of Afghanistan.

The Supreme Court overturned the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and the Democrats slipped into the ira A provision that redefines carbon as a pollutant, which then allows the EPA to start protect in the environment again. If we didn't get that, and yes, that was brought to us by Democrats, we would be beyond fucked on the issue of climate change. We still are, but we'd be even more fucked if the EPA couldn't do basic EPA stuff.

We have project labor agreements for hundreds of thousands of construction workers that came to us from Biden. Fifteen dollar minimum wage for federal contractors and employees that's from Biden. Gun and reform with red flag laws, and closing the Boyfriend LOOPOL those are definitely good things. Katanji Brown Jackson on the Court, a George Floyd executive order to create a Registry of abusive cops. We have the Pack Act, which is healthcare for veterans exposed to toxic burn pitch,

which every single Republican voted against. He added eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs. I didn't expect any of these things. So when I talk about Biden, the way I do is because none of these things were on the menu and we got them. So now when I look at the fact it's either going to be Trump or Biden, a standard generic Republican or standard generic Democrat, the way I feel now versus the way I felt in the

past is like, oh, this is definitely way better. If you asked me in twenty nineteen or twenty twenty, I'd be like, I don't know, man, flip a coin fifty two percent. Maybe a Democrat's a little bit better than a Republican. Now I'm looking at it like it's not even close. One blows the other out of the water. And all I care about is the policy. And when we have all these policies, I mean, we have a fifteen percent corporate minimum tax rate. Now that is not

something we had previously. You'd have corporations paying nothing in taxes, or they'd even get a negative tax rate, which is a subsidy effectively from the taxpayers. These things are not nothing. We have a one percent tax on stock buybacks. They're cracking down a wealthy tax cheese. Like, all these things are very good. They're objectively good. So do you agree that Biden is better than what we expected on the left?

and or Canada. The lawsuit was actually brought last May by arij Al Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi worker who has forcibly disappeared and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Surrounds the surrounding infiltration of a California company by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as employees in twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, and led to the erec of the brother and the exposure of the quote identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government's crackdown

on dissent. They have now updated their claim last week to include new allegations how Twitter willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government's campaign to ferret out critics, but because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, which is a top investor in the company, provided assistance to the Kingdom. Now clearly what they actually said is that this was under the

leadership of them chief executive Jack Dorsey. The question though, is how Twitter the company will be actually handling this as we go forward, and especially important in the light of what's currently happening right now. Let's put this place up there on the screen. A Saudi man has just been sentenced to death after his tweets were criticizing the

country's leadership. Saudi activists say that his tweets and his retweets were presented as the evidence of his so called crime of insulting the case or the Crown Prince and then supporting a terrorist ideology. So what you can see here, Crystal is the analysis of the case is the guy had ten followers and he mostly retweeted posts critical of MBS, and now he is being literally sentenced to death. He

is the father of seven and a retired teacher. There's also a question here about how they got his user information because he ran two anonymous accounts on the site. On x he was not a public account. So all of this is really important around how Elon is going to be handling not only such requests, but is he going to speak out against what's happening here, against this man getting sentenced to death for something he did on your platforms completely insane Jesus Christ.

it makes it even more difficult. There's actually a lot of layers to this because, first of all, Jack Dorsey, one of the areas where he has been critical of Elon Musk, including on our show when we interviewed him, was about Musk's approach to government requests with regard to the platform, and Dorsey had to have tried to have more of a consistent at that level sort of free speech principle where it wasn't just about okay, what are what areever the laws of the land are, That's what

I'm going to abide by. Elon has explicitly stated he has a different view, which is that whatever is legal in that country, whether they have a dictator or whatever the situation is, that's what they're going to abide by. That's what he used to justify, you know, censorship of I Believe, as a BBC documentary about India, about the Indian Prime minister. That's what he used to justify the

censoring of an investigative journalist in Turkey. That's been his sort of like Okay, this is my guidelines, this is how I operate. So number one, since this happened under Jack Dorsey, you can see how even with his stated principles, clearly he wasn't always living up to what he was claiming he was doing. And number two, you see in the case of this man who's being put to death

because of something he said at Twitter. I mean, this is a really dramatic case in point test of the Elon Musk principle of like, okay, well, if this is legal in Saudi, are you just cool with it? Like even when it's you know, people are being rounded up and sentenced to death for exercising, you know, the most basic understanding of free speech.

you're supposed to abide by that. Just saying you're going along with government regulations, I mean then, and you know, every dictatorial government on earth will just pass whatever, you know, thing that they want you to do, and you're just going to do it. That's not how we should American companies should operate, and if they are well, we should absolutely change the lot.

great disrespect and I didn't like it. And I didn't like the idea that they were getting us security when they came over here. Now I think it's it's not a good situation going on with the two of them, But I didn't know that they don't like. Somebody mention it might be possible they wouldn't be the only ones.

so lazy as well. After the revelations about their Spotify deal, where I mean, I just can't imagine that, Crystal, you having somebody else sit in for you and do an interview and then come in and record your voice on top of that. That's so crazy when you're getting paid millions of dollars and they were doing this like one a week or something like that for their pod. So anyway, I just thought it was hilarious. It was one of those where it will never happen. I kind of wish

it would happen. It would be like a throwback to the old days. But Hugh Hewett is not wrong that a lot of people would watch it. So they watched the interview.

and they're like, this is Megan Markle. I'd like to and they were like, who, like, what makes you think I care what you think about this legislation literally at all.

cannot stand them. They repel me in such a repugnant way that I just, I don't know, I a cheat, and I'm totally willing to admit this.

want to start with the picture of an octopus. Since eighteen ninety there have been a few big Monopoli trials that have shaped the biggest corporations in America, So starting with Standard Oil around the twentieth the turn of the twentieth century. So this is a cartoon of that corporate behemoth. You couldee standard Oil written on the top of the octopus's head and America. And there's a reason for that, Americans have traditionally symbolized with monopoly power as an entity

with tentacles reaching out everywhere, hence an octopus. It's actually still a good metaphor today. So Google, which had which is worth almost two trillion dollars in terms of its total value, has a lot of tentacles. It knows more about most of us than our families because it answers intimate questions from billions of people every day. It controls

much of our communications. To boot, it has ninety five percent market share and search annual revenue of a little less than three hundred billion dollars a year in fifteen products with more than five hundred million users apiece. We've perhaps never seen any corporate asset as power full as Google. Search marketing professor Scott Galloway in twenty seventeen he went so far as to say that quote Google is God. Okay, So why is Google on trial and what does this

trial signify? Well, Google is on trial for violating antitrust law, which means, in short, that it has an illegal monopoly. The government argues that Google controls roughly ninety to ninety five percent of general search and search advertising, and that it has used this remarkable market share monopoly share, using illegal tactics to keep rivals out of the market unfairly. Now, Google, of course disagrees, but we'll get to the details of the case in a bit. But let's ask a different question.

So does this case really matter? Let's put it in context. Don't powerful corporations always win? Doesn't big money always carry the day in America? In fact, no. Historically, anti monopoly has been the pro business tradition in America, ensuring equality in the marketplace. And to understand what that means, it helps to look at previous antitrust cases involving the biggest corporations in the world at the time that they were held. So there have been a few big ones that are

as historically important as the Google case. So there was Standard Oil in the eighteen nineties, Alco in the nineteen forties, IBM in the nineteen seventies, EIGHTE and T in the

nineteen eighties, Microsoft in the nineteen nineties. And these cases are almost always against high tech firms that control a key sector in the economy, so Oil in the eighteen nineties, telecommunications in the nineteen eighties, operating systems in office productivity software in the nineteen nineties, win or lose, they determine

what our society looks like going forward. Now, most people think technological progress is due to scientists and engineers figuring stuff out and innovating, and it's sort of true, but it's also due to law. Want to know why we

even have the Internet? Well, one reason, and an important one, is that in nineteen eighty two, a judge named Harold Green ruled to break up AT and T, which had historically tried to control its network tightly and probably would have tried to block things like dial up modems from being attached to its network, and certainly did block a

lot of stuff prior to the nineteen sixties. So you could see a memorial to the AT and T case when you walk into the DC Court building, which is the same one where a judge named am Meta is hearing the Google trial, so you can see it. There's a cartoon on display as a man in a robe tangled up in phone courts. That's a cartoon of Harold Green. He was an extraordinary man. So he was born in Germany.

In nineteen twenty three, fled the Nazis, enlisted in the US Army during War two and then went to night school. After the war, he ended up at the Justice Department, where he helped draft the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, And in nineteen seventy eight Jimmy Carter put him on the court as a district judge. That's where he heard the AT and T case. Now, so Green was no fool, and he was no fan of corporate power. He ruled against AT and T and sought

the goal. Sought to fulfill the goal of quote deconcentrating AT and T's vast economic power. The guy had been up close with the Nazis. He was not intimidated by a large corporation. And the thing about it is, at the time there a lot of people said, Oh, this is terrible for the country. It's going to hurt this great corporation that everybody loves, very innovative Bell Labs. But

in truth, the breakup really delivered. Telephone rates came down for consumers, but far more importantly, there was a massive explosion of innovation, including in all likelihood the development of the Internet and mobile telephony. The judge in the Google in the Google case is named Judge Meta. He's pictured here let's take a look. No Meta is now in this same position as Judge Green, able to shape a

future to all of us or just to Google. But in contrast to Green, Meta's career tracks very much like most of our technocratic elites. Now. He's an immigrant, but he grew up in his suburb of Maryland, worked at the big lfew firm Lathan and Watkins for a few years of training, he was and then he was a public defender in DC, and then he served as a

white collar defense attorney. Metta doesn't, as far as I can tell, how a strong record of recognizing the threat of concentrated corporate power or an instinctive skepticism of the powerful. And we can already see some problematic choices from Meta, and I'm going to focus on Mata. I'm going to do a few segments on the Google case. I'm going to focus on Meta because judges really go unexamined in our culture and it's important to change that. They are

political actors. So Google executives, including its CEO Sundar Pichai, have been found in multiple cases, including this one, of destroying evidence related to potential anti trust violations, essentially deleting chatlock. So chatlog's involving discussion over antitrust show that quote. Pachai personally asked whether a chat group's history could be turned off and then attempted to delete that message end quote.

Now that is that is a big no no. Okay, you are not supposed to destroy chat logs and anti trust late related or monopoly related evidence. You just don't do that. That's illegal. And in California a judge actually sanctioned Google for this behavior. They levied penalties on Google and its lawyers. But so far, Judge Meta has not. Now, I don't want to overstate the problem. The judge has

ruled reasonably well in an earlier merger case. He might do something about the document destruction, but that's who he is. So that's the judge. Let's go a little more into the case, which is all about something called defaults. Right, That's how Google controls its market power. At least that's

what the government argument. The government says that Google's monopoly in search is illegal, and it has maintained this monopoly not by making a better product if you notice there's a lot more ads in Google Search today, but by locking down everywhere that consumers might be able to find a different search engine option and making sure that they only see Google instead. So here's a slide that the Department of Justice include in its complaint in twenty twenty.

So it is the default search engine Google whenever you open your phone or whenever you open most browsers. As a result, when you use Google, you are giving Google some data which it can use to improve its search engines and which it's more importantly, its competitors cannot. Now the basic claim is that Google has essentially bought up all the shelf space where people might find a different

search engine. It pays forty five billion dollars a year to have distributors refuse to carry its competitors products, signing deals with Apple, Motorola, Samsung, major US wireless carriers like ATTT Mobile, Verizon, browser developers like Mozilla, Opera uce Web to secure default status for its general search engine, and in many cases to specifically prohibit Google's counterparties from dealing

with Google's competitors. So that's the case, and the big partner here for Google is Apple, which receives something like ten to fifteen billion dollars a year for placing Google as the default search engine on the iPhone and the Mac. And this revenue is really important to Apple. It's basically Apple and Google sharing monopoly profits. Apple is fantastically profitable, but still fifteen billion dollars is a lot of money.

And that's just in the US. Now, here's a story that came out in the Financial Times in twenty twenty when the Apple case was filed. Apple is in fact preparing its own search engine in case it's deal with Google falls apart due to this case. In other words, if the government succeeds, will have more search engines and competition in this market, because at least Apple won't enter.

Now it should be a slam dunk case, and not just because Google search has become much worse over the last five to ten years, packed increasingly with ads and poor results. To understand why this case makes sense, look no further than the experience of Niva, a search engine whose quality was as high or higher than that of Google, but died a few months ago because it just couldn't get access to customers. Niva, according to David Pierce in

The Verge, was running an aproduct. So that's the most innovative that artificial intelligence a full stack search engine and a privacy first browser. If people went through all the bother of switching, they became converts. Pierce wrote. The problem was that very few of them managed to make it past the thicket of default settings and redirections. Now, I actually used Niva and it was a good search engine.

But as all defaults are set to Google, they're an endless number of screens encouraging people to set their search engine to that of the search giant. So Neiva, despite its quality, despite its differentiated lack of ads, could not get in front of potential customers, and it died. These default settings and redirections are what's on trial, because that's what killed Niva, and that's what prevents anyone else from

investing in the search next search competitor. If Google is found guilty and disciplined reasonably by being broken apart or having a choice screen imposed, or some other set of remedies, then the new technologies of machine learning AI you will actually be deployed in a competitive marketplace. That's new. Rival search engines can try different things, and we'll see immense possibilities open up, similar to those after the AT and T breakup. The future of telecommunications was not obvious in

nineteen eighty two when that breakup happened. It only happened because of the breakup. There's actually a good amount of evidence on that as well. And that's true historically with all of these old antitrust cases. Okay, so far, I've laid out the arguments in the case in the historical context.

the day to improve its search engine. Fundamentally, Google argues its ability to exclude others is a good deal for America. The exclusion is the price of this great search engine. In other words, consumers love Google. They love the search just so much that its monopoly is legal. That's Google's argument. Now, my view is that Google is Google Search is not as good as it used to be. It's not as good as it would be if it were disciplined by competition.

Google is coasting. Essentially, it produces an increasingly shoddy product. There's an economist in the sixties. He said a great line. She said, the best reward for a monopolist is a quiet life. That's what Google is at this point. So as one Googler who left the company recently put it, quote, Google has one hundred and seventy five thousand plus capable and well compensated employees who get very little done end quote. Google used to be magic, but that was ten years ago.

Today's search is full of too many ads, crap results peddled with Google's because of Google's own self interest. So here is what the Washing Post noted in twenty twenty. The Internet Archives wayback Machine stored some Google search results over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges of how Google increasingly fails us. There's more space dedicated

to ads that look like search results. More results start with with answer snippets, sometimes incorrect, ripped from other sites, and increasingly results point you back to Google's own properties, such as maps in YouTube, where it can show more ads and gather more of your data. Many judges believe what executives say, and so judge Meta is likely to hear from Google CEO that economies of scale are all

that drives product quality, and he may buy that. The judge may believe that, and I actually think Google executives believe it as well. Still, such an argument isn't really any different from what every monopolist has always argued. Standard Oil discussed how it brought cheap kerosene to the masses at and T stressed its awesome quality and universal service. Alcoa said that its control over aluminum was a result of its focus and dedication to America. IBM talked about

how much it innovated and developed the computing industry. Monopolists always believe they are serving humanity, but Congress made it clear by passing antitrust laws that monopolies, whatever they may say or think, are not actually doing that. And the evidence from Standard Oil's breakup leading to the development of gasoline to the lawsuit anti trust lawsuit in the sixties against IBM creating the modern software industry suggests that Congress

was right. Depending on what happens, there may be additional time spent on a remedy, or the case may go on appeal. Indeed, Judge Meta is not the only person who matters here. He does decide the whether Google is guilty initially. He decides the remedy initially, but the case is likely to be appealed, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court judge Meta the DC Circuit, the Supreme Court erodes into trust case law against Google so much that this giant search monopoly

that's obviously a monopoly. Everyone knows it's a monopoly. If they say, well, this is not the monopolization laws don't apply to this monopoly, even though it's giant controls all this information, controls society in many ways, then Congress will be confronted with the reality that it is hard to use the existing antitrust laws to address dominant corporate power,

which is what they were written originally to address. As witnesses testify from Google executives to rivals, we're about to learn an enormous amount about how the Internet developed, how advertising is sold, and why decisions about what we search for happen the way that they do. It's pretty disconcerting. That so much key evidence was destroyed by Google, and the judge hasn't done anything yet, but this case will still be a massively educational experience for the public, for

the industry, and for Congress. Indeed, a tidbit that came out on a hearing last Friday is that Google is actually a posing having a public feed in the courtroom, whereas the government actually does want a public feed. Apparently the search giant doesn't want the public to be able to hear the arguments and evidence at hand. I guess

that sometimes Google is concerned about privacy. Well, the thing is is that if I were Google, if I were Google executive, and I wanted to maintain Google's monopoly, I wouldn't want this information to come out either. I mean, I wouldn't want I would want the public to know as little as possible about my business. But that is in many ways what these anti trust cases are for. To learn about how our markets work, to learn about whether firms are using coercive market power or whether they

are competing on the merits whatever happens. Reviving laws to constrain corporate power does take time, as people within many institutions have to change their mind and come to grips with the choice of living in a free society or one that is dominated by monopolies and is much more

authoritarian in its commercial structure. Sure, unfortunately that change is happening in September October, so that is this month, starting on Tuesday, we're going to start to see some of the fruits of that change, and hopefully Judgemta will live up to the legacy of the DG District Court set forty one years ago by the courage of one Judge Harold Greed. Thanks for watching this big breakdown on the

Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to know more about big business and how our economy really works, you can sign up by going to the link in the description below for my market power focused newsletter. Big Thanks and have a good one.

stall that that event is. So, as you can see here, the number one recommendation from these computer science experts emily is a basically a Department of AI or some type of agency underneath a Department.

game is already lost. It's a matter of time. We can try our best to do what we can do, but like the game has already lost. And I think this also reflects that level of disagreement. I think we're going to see that level of disagreement come out in really important sort of forums that Chuck Schumer, who by the way, is himself like very deep into tech world just based on his own connections. He's very much sort of connected by family. I think his daughters are both

in the tech sector. So what his you know, motivations are, whether he has incentives to do the right thing on tech I think is an open question. But he at least has been having people who are sort of familiar with the technology chirping in his ears, saying that you need to take this seriously. I feel like we're going to see those disagreements come out just next week when he has all of these tech experts here in Washington, d C.

unemployment that only bothered twenty two percent of people. I think, you know, there's serious concerns about both of those issues, But I mean, come on, that you have that level of disparity twenty two percent only worried about employment versus discrimination and bias up at forty two percent.

those contributions aren't particularly I think useful. That that's that's more in the realm of you know, the democratic control that you know that currently operates through our politicians, right, but you know, ultimately is supposed to come from you know, the people who are then able to then you know, enforce their will over these over these machines. The one area that I feel like the alarmists are missing is that there's more to.

humanity and also with you know, resource allocation and resources that exist in the world.

different advanced llms. Whether or not they're capable of those a different question, but like it is, that's a legitimate concern, especially if they start exporting it to the developing world and other places like that.

so we'll see some of that coming into play. The good old bootleggers and what's the phrase bootleggers and you know talking about it, Yeah, which is a legitimate thing.

can take those two things out. It's the same thing with atomic weapons. So yeah, with nuclear weapons. So when you're looking at AI, there has to be some level of global cooperation too, because if people in China can use AI to hack American websites, we can do everything we can in the United States and only prevent that to an extent.