Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. We've made it to Wednesday, it's January 25th. I'm Nyla Boone.

Today, what to know about filing your taxes this year? Plus, a historic Oscar season for Asian actors.

But first, new anti-trust scrutiny in Washington. That's today's one big thing.

I was one of the millions of people disappointed by the disastrous ticket master pre-sale process for Taylor Swift back in November.

And that process brought attention to the company's dominance of ticket sales. Well, yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a much anticipated hearing on Live Nation, which owns ticket master.

Also yesterday, the Department of Justice filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google's parent company Alphabet for its alleged monopoly on digital ads.

Here to break down what's going on in the anti-trust world is Axios' tech and policy reporter Ashley Gold. Hi, Ashley.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So let's start with ticket master. Can you help us zoom out and tell us what is the bigger issue at play here?

Absolutely. The bigger issue at play here is that there are not many players in the whole ticketing industry and ticket master is the biggest one.

And because they have so much power and they have these exclusive partnerships with venues, they have unchecked power on how tickets are bought and sold for these events.

So how does what's happening with Google compare?

Well, with ticket master, everybody has had the frustrating experience of wanting to get tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, a sporting event, and you know, not being able to get in.

Having bots buy up tickets and resell that frustrating feeling when tickets are marked up with excessive fees with Google.

It's a little different. We're talking about digital advertising. We all see digital advertisements every day on our phones on the web when we searched on Instagram.

But it's a little less clear how those ads all get served up to us hint. It's mostly because Google is doing it.

There are advertisers and competitors that think it's not fair that Google controls this whole ecosystem and finally the Justice Department took action.

So you wrote that right now is a time of unprecedented antitrust scrutiny. What do you mean by that?

We're at a time where the federal government is concerned about consolidation across all sorts of markets. It's not just tech or ticketing. It can be farming, airlines, anything else.

There's this really sort of fever pitch of a concern that we've let businesses get too big. We've let businesses acquire other businesses at two rapid eclipse and that there's no competition anymore.

And that consumer suffer and that we have higher prices and worse experiences because of it. And this is actually something that Democrats and Republicans agree on.

So what are you watching for next?

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