Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold.

I'm fortunate to be joined today by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, the author of this month's cover story for Reason magazine.

Elizabeth is a senior editor at Reason and the founder of Feminist for Liberty.

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Playboy,

among many other publications, and she appears regularly on television and radio.

Elizabeth's cover story is called the bipartisan antitrust crusade against big tech,

how reactionary politicians are using monopoly concerns as cover to pursue pre-existing

political agendas.

On Capitol Hill, at least, the so-called tech clash is going strong.

So many anti-tech bills are flying around.

It can be hard even to keep track of them.

Elizabeth's article discusses some of those bills, and we will do so here too.

But what I especially like about her piece is how it captures with these really piquant turns of phrase,

the root fallacies, both factually and philosophically, that underlie our political party's

current attitudes about technology and the market.

Members of both parties, Elizabeth writes, have grown adept at slotting their desire

for censorship in the case of Republicans, and economic control, in the case of Democrats,

into an antitrust framework, no matter how ill-fitting that framework might be. As Elizabeth puts it, the left's new antitrust

crusaders essentially want to wield government power to reduce income inequality between businesses,

no matter the consumer effects. While on the other hand, the right wants to use it as a sort of

welfare for cultural cachet,

subsidizing speakers and ideas that private market actors would rather not.

...