Hello, welcome to Emlex's weekly podcast covering the most pressing issues in regulatory affairs

with the assistance of our team of reporters around the world. My name is James Panicki from

Emlex's Asia-Pacific team. Thanks for your company. Now, there are those who had assumed

that with Democrats been able to muster an absolute majority in both houses of the US Congress,

the Biden administration would proceed with an ambitious play to overhaul antitrust laws.

Well, not so fast.

Dave Pereira from our DC team is reminding us that having a majority in the House of Representatives

and a slim majority in the Senate might not be enough to push through those antitrust changes.

And then we'll cross to London for an update on one of the most controversial Brexit issues around the status of Northern Ireland.

We'll get to that story in just over 10 minutes from now.

First up though, to the US.

Dave Pereira is an M-lex correspondent in Washington, D.C.,

and he covers tech issues from the

U.S. Capitol, and I'm pleased to say that he is with us now.

Okay, Dave, when Democrats captured the Senate after the U.S. national cycle ended in January,

they were quick to promise a big, bold agenda.

Why were they so confident in making that promise?

So they were confident because for the first time in a long time, in about a decade,

Democrats had a unified control over the federal government.

That's to say that they had control of both chambers of Congress, the House and the Senate, as well as the presidency. And unified governments in

American politics are historically fertile times for regulation because the threshold for getting

things through Congress is obviously a lot

...