Welcome back to a special series of Emlex podcasts designed to make sense of 2023 and what the new year is likely to bring.

My name is James Panicki. I'm Emlex's Asia Pacific senior editor,

and it's great to have your company. Today we're off to the United States, where big tech is

facing a particularly big year of antitrust enforcement and policy developments, although it

remains unclear whether digital platforms will in fact suffer significant setbacks

as a result of this flurry of activity.

Kushita Vassant is M-Mex's chief antitrust correspondent for the US.

She's based in Washington, D.C., but is on a well-deserved break in India at the moment.

Kushita filed this 202323 look ahead from Mumbai.

I think I'd be remiss if I didn't say that 2023 will be a big year for big tech. It will be

an eventful year for sure. But will we see wins or humiliation for US antitrust agencies and

lawmakers pushing an aggressive enforcement agenda, it remains to be seen.

I think it's going to be a mixed bag.

The battle between advocates of the consumer welfare standard and the Neo-Brandisians will continue to rage on in the U.S.

Efforts on Capitol Hill to make another attempt at passing antitrust legislation to curtail the power of big tech companies will see more resistance in 2023 than in the first 20 months of U.S. President Joe Biden's administration.

And federal U.S. antitrust enforcers will continue to find themselves in a race against time to deliver on their enforcement agenda.

I'm going to divvy up the look ahead for 2023 US antitrust in three parts.

Policy, litigation and legislation.

Let's start with policy and see what's happening at the FTC next year.

FTC Charalina Khan is done getting her feet wet after nearly 18 months in office and has swung into

action, fulfilling a promise to bring back lesser used legal tools to fix competition problems in

the US economy. One of these is the Robinson-Patman Act, an underutilized tool that is now getting a fresh look.

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