This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 16th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Under what circumstances should big tech firms be hauled into antitrust court.

What would happen if the U.S. applied European-style regulation to Amazon, Google, and Facebook?

Christian Stout is Associate Director of the International Center for Law and Economics.

We spoke at the Cato Institute's Who's Afraid of Big Tech Conference last month.

There is a popular story that I have heard from numerous different people about, look, IBM was in antitrust court and by virtue of the fact of it being in an antitrust court, it paved the way for Microsoft to become a massive corporation.

And to the extent that Microsoft has been in antitrust court, certainly in Europe and elsewhere, it has lost some market share because of that.

If that story is true and you can tell me to the extent to which it is or it isn't.

Why wouldn't hauling Google and Facebook and other large platforms in the antitrust court,

why wouldn't that then pave the way for massive new innovation and reduce the stranglehold that these

companies have on users.

Yeah, that is a popular story that goes around.

I think that it fails to take

account a lot of things and even the Microsoft case itself if you think about it.

It failed to take account of a number of dynamics that are important. First, it's not clear that the Microsoft case led to

Google. People like to say that, but I've not seen any evidence that's just that it

happened. I think the thing that gets cited is there's some comments.

I don't even know if it's true, it might be apocryphal.

That Microsoft was thinking about search engines and they saw Google developing

and they were afraid of antitrust regulation or enforcement so they decided not to do

anything with search engines I guess maybe but the more complicated things so like

...