I'm

I'm going to be tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Today we have an episode about pretty much the most predictable thing that you can get in litigation.

Never say never in litigation. Things can always go in ways you don't expect. But

the last time we discussed the Facebook antitrust case on this show, I said that it was the longest, the weakest, the most wasteful, the most

misguided of all the big tech antitrust cases. You might say, well, Corbyn was throwing a hostage

to fortune there, right? Fortunately for me and my dignity, everything I said there has come to pass.

On Tuesday, Judge James Boasburg, the good judge in the District of the District of Columbia,

issued an 89-page ruling, demolishing the Federal Trade Commission's Section 2 Sherman Act

antitrust case against Facebook, the case that has been going since 2020 through the Trump

1 administration, through the entirety of the Biden administration, and now into the Trump II administration,

it turns out that bipartisan demagoguery is no substitute for actual antitrust analysis of the facts

and of the evidence.

We're going to talk about that decision today.

Joining me for this episode, as he did for the last one,

the great Jeff Manny, founder and president of the International Center for Law and Economics.

He actually, when I invited him to do this episode, went ahead and went over to ChatGPT,

and he fed the transcript from our last discussion in, and he fed the opinion in,

and he asked ChatchipT to compare the two. This was a very self-esteem, inflating act that he undertook for the two of us. They line up so well

that it makes you wonder why we need a separate discussion. But we do, and we will. Here we are.

Jeff, hello. Call it a victory lap. It is something of a victory lap. There are certainly new things to

discuss last time we had to focus on Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram. Judge

...