I'm John Betts with Jessica Mollusion,

director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

We're speaking of MAGA antitrust,

acknowledged to be a catch-all by Andrew Ferguson,

the new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission,

MAGA antitrust.

Having established Lena Khan as the driver of Neo-Brandesian thinking at the previous FTC,

I moved from the Amazon case to one that's ongoing right now as an example,

because I'm not being an economist, I can only think in terms of specifics.

I need to look at something before I understand at least a little bit of the argument.

Under review right now, continuing in the first hundred days and afterward, is a case brought

by the FTC, or at least involving the FTC, against the very successful Mark Zuckerberg

and his work now called Meta. And as I understand it, this turns on the acquisition of something

small that Mr. Zuckerberg saw as competitive. Jessica, is it instructive that MAGA Enterprise continues this case,

quite independent of its thinking, or is this a way of talking about MAGA antitrust as a mix of things?

It certainly is a mix of things, but I think the meta example is a really helpful one in understanding

where the differences turn from our current FTC and from the previous, but also where there's a lot

of overlap. The meta case was actually originally brought by the first Trump administration

in the last weeks in December. So that was, if you'll recall, after an election that Donald

Trump had lost and has been very public still to this day, but certainly then, about what he

believed Meda and Facebook's role in that loss of election was. What amount of political influence the case had there?

I am not privy to, but it seems likely to say that it was at least some.

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