Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover

Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and

find links down there information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives,

but every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is August 23rd, 2021 and my guest is Glenwile of Microsoft, where he is

the office of the chief technology officer, political economist and social technologist,

a mouthful, but it does create a great acronym, which is Octopest. Glen is the octopus.

Microsoft, more simply, he advises Microsoft, senior leaders on macroeconomics, geopolitics,

and the future technology. His mission statement there is, I help a corporate octopus,

reimagine itself as democratic infrastructure, rigorously accountable to those it holds power over.

Glen was last year in May of 2018 talking about radical markets. Our topic for today is antitrust.

In this draws on a conversation, Glen and I had with the American Bar Association's

Anti-Trust Sections magazine, antitrust. On what policy objectives, antitrust law,

ought to advance it and how it can achieve this, a transcript of that conversation will appear

in the Polish with Anti-Trust magazine. We'll post a link to that one. That issue appears, Glen.

Welcome back to e-contalk. Thanks Ross. It's great to be back with you.

It had such a great conversation a few years back and we're going to talk again.

Me too. Traditionally, antitrust has been focused on making sure that firms didn't gain

monopoly power, market power more generally, which would let them raise prices on consumers

in the name of higher profits. How should we think about this model in a world where so many firms

charge nothing out of pocket to their consumers, Google, Facebook, social media generally?

...