BREAKDOWN: As Biden Targets Big Tech, a Reminder That Decentralized Technologies Are Anti-Monopolist
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
President Biden’s decisive action to promote competition in the U.S. reflects a decreasing public approval of Big Tech.
This episode is sponsored by NYDIG.
On this episode of “The Breakdown,” NLW analyzes President Joe Biden’s “Factsheet: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” including:
- The shift in public sentiment against Big Tech
- The order’s implications to the tech and finance sectors
- Crypto’s decentralized nature as intrinsically anti-monopolist
For a period of time, tech companies enjoyed the highest public opinion among large corporations. However, the rise of ad-focused platforms and the advent of social media (with all its demons) encouraged increased scrutiny. Privacy concerns only add to the distaste toward companies including Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
With public opinion souring, governments are similarly implementing various regulation schemes as they become wary of the threat of monopolization. Take Europe, for example, which created the General Data Protection Regulation system, and China’s more aggressive actions against social media. The U.S. has dabbled in tightening its reins on big tech with an assortment of antitrust lawsuits, but President Biden’s recent executive order takes the mentality to a new level.
The public mindset and regulatory shift places crypto as the potential solution to concerns of monopolization. Crypto’s decentralization – its lack of CEOs and corporate power structures – make it an attractive path away from monopolies in the American economy.
-
NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for Bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
-
Image credit: Tom Brenner/Bloomberg/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I would argue that the impulse behind these moves to remove concentrations of corporate power |
| 0:05.2 | is shared by many in government on both sides of the aisle and by, broadly speaking, |
| 0:11.0 | Bitcoiners and the crypto industry. |
| 0:13.2 | What's different is theories of change. |
| 0:16.8 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:20.8 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:28.1 | The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDask. |
| 0:34.6 | What's going on, guys? It is Friday, July 9th, and today we are talking about Biden's new |
| 0:40.4 | executive order that targets, among other things, big tech. And I have to acknowledge before I start |
| 0:46.7 | that this has been something of a think boy week here on the breakdown. I haven't had the normal |
| 0:52.4 | briefs. I haven't had a lot of guests. And for whatever |
| 0:55.5 | reason, it's just seemed like a week to, instead of digging deep on specific news, to really |
| 1:00.9 | explore some bigger picture things. I don't know if that's just because it's the summer and this is a |
| 1:05.3 | slightly slower news cycle, or just because we've had a bunch of small pieces of news that are |
| 1:10.5 | reflective of much larger, |
| 1:12.1 | bigger, more important trends. But either way, I promise every week won't be so high level |
| 1:17.1 | and meta, but hopefully you're enjoying it for now is something a little bit different. |
| 1:20.7 | So let's talk about Biden's executive order, and moreover, a reminder that decentralized |
| 1:26.7 | technologies are anti-monopoulist. |
| 1:30.1 | One of the major trends in American public life over the last five-ish years is a falling out of |
| 1:35.1 | love with big tech. There was a fairly long period during which tech companies enjoyed the |
| 1:39.9 | highest public opinion among large corporations. There are many reasons for this. One, simply put, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CoinDesk, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of CoinDesk and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.