From the BBC World Service, welcome to the documentary, the home of original storytelling.

I'm Adam Fleming, and this is a bonus episode from the Global Story podcast, looking at one big story in detail every weekday.

In this episode, the US government is in the process of suing some of the biggest tech companies on the planet.

Apple, Google, Amazon,

and the social media giant meta.

Washington says they've created monopolies over the technology that now controls many

aspects of our everyday life.

And there is one woman who's fast becoming the face of this battle.

Please welcome to the program.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lena Khan. The millennial, program. Federal Trade Commission chair, Lena Khan.

The millennial, Asian, British-born lawyer, Lena Khan is leading a crackdown on Silicon

Valley that could force major changes to how those companies work. Today we're asking,

who is the woman taking on America's biggest billionaires. And is she winning?

Well, with me here in the studio is James Clayton, who works to the BBC in London, but until very recently, was our North American tech reporter based in Silicon Valley.

Welcome back, James.

Hello, Adam. Thanks for inviting me in.

Down the line from Washington is our North America business correspondent, Michelle Fleury.

Hello, Michelle. Hello from Washington, D.C. James, what is the really simple way of understanding

what antitrust is? Yeah, I mean, it's basically a monopoly. I mean, it's like if you

held all the sweets in the world, you could charge anything you liked for your sweets, right?

And the whole purpose of capitalism is that there are lots of people that sell sweets.

And as a result, there's a sort of competition for those prices and the price of sweets comes down.

...