Hello, everyone, and welcome to this E-Sype online conversation about competition technology and the new desire by policymakers to regulate big tech.

My name is Frederick Erickson,

and I'm very pleased to welcome today Sam Bowman. Sam is the Director of Competition Policy

at the International Center for Law and Economics, a research think tank in the United States,

and he has long been a prolific writer on matters of competition and technology.

Before joining the ICLE last year, he was a principal at Fingleton,

a London-based regulatory and competition advisory firm,

where advice corporate clients on competition and public policy issues

and led industry reviews into open banking and open data in the energy market.

Hello, Sam. I'm very glad to have you with me today. Good afternoon. Thanks very much for having me.

Great to be here. So I was hoping we could start this conversation talking about the growing trend of

regulating technology firms and the way they compete,

especially the platform companies that offer customers and ecology of different technologies

and services.

We will come in a minute to what governments are doing or what they are planning to do

to clip the wings of these companies.

But I wanted us first to take the pulse of the

thinking behind this trend and what motivated. So in your view, Sam, why has it become so easy

to put Facebook, Google, Amazon, and perhaps others in the political crosshair and take a shot

at them? Well, I think it's really notable, and this will be clear to everybody,

that we're seeing similar trends in Europe, in the UK, in the US, and even in China.

I won't go into China in too much detail because I'm not an expert,

...