Welcome back. Great to see you again. My name is James Panicki. I'm a senior editor here at Emlex, and this is our weekly podcast covering the top stories in regulatory affairs with the assistance of our

team of reporters around the globe. And don't let that adjective regulatory put you off because

today's program deals with issues you'd most certainly be familiar with. In fact, we're discussing

two of the world's most prominent digital platforms, Facebook and Google. In just under 10 minutes from

now, we'll be crossing to Luxembourg, where our editor-in-chief, Lewis Crofts, has spent the

entire week passing and analysing every sentence uttered at the EU's general court. That's where

Google is appealing a massive antitrust fine relating to its Android operating

system. It's an incredibly important hearing and not surprisingly it has attracted global

attention. First up, though, we head straight for Silicon Valley to raise questions about Facebook's

financial outlook. Now, I know it sounds like a preposterous premise.

This is, after all, a digital platform that has been growing and growing. In fact, it earned a record

$29 billion for the second quarter of 2021. So what's the issue, I hear you ask? Well, it's about privacy regulation and changes to

Apple's privacy policy. Both those factors are likely to have a very real impact on Facebook's

bottom line. I know this because our chief global digital risk correspondent Mike Swift has

written an insightful piece of analysis on this very issue,

and Mike joins me right now. So Mike, lay it out for me. What's the worry about privacy

regulation and Apple's changes? Sure. So today it's September 30th where I'm speaking,

and today's the day that Facebook closes the book on its third quarter earnings.

And this will be the first quarter where it's the first full quarter where Apple's changes have been in effect for the full three months.

And about a week ago, Facebook dropped a little mini bombshell in the

sense that they posted a blog post saying that these regulatory privacy headwinds that we've

been warning about for years appear to be kicking in now. So that had an effect that day on

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