Welcome back to another podcast from Emlex, your best friend in the world of regulatory affairs.

My name is James Panicki. I'm a senior editor with Emlex's Asia-Pacific operations, and it's great to be with

you yet again. This week, there's simply too much tech news out of the United States for us to

ignore. In around 10 minutes' time, Mike Swift will join us from our San Francisco offices,

and he'll bring us more on the intriguing story of the compliance by Meta or Facebook as it was then

with the terms of the US Federal Trade Commission's 2019 privacy settlement. It's a story of

compliance and redacted documents and there's plenty to talk about. First up though, big tech's

efforts to get FTC Chair Lena Khan and the Department

of Justice Antitrust Division head Jonathan Cantor to recuse themselves from scrutinising

digital giants has run into trouble. Amazon, Facebook and Google believe that the two officials

past work and past public utterances have made them

incapable of overseeing their agency's investigations impartially.

But a US judge doesn't appear to have bought that argument.

So what is going on?

Well, who better to ask than Max Filion, one of Mlex's intrepid antitrust reporters,

who's based in Washington, D.C. And Max, firstly, maybe can you explain the reasoning

behind Big Tech's recusal requests? Sure. So they basically wrote petitionsitions both to the DOJ and the FTC saying that, uh,

their leaders that would be chair, Lena Kahn, uh, an assistant attorney general,

Jonathan Cantor, uh, have prejudged the outcomes of, uh, you know, their investigations or, or cases against them. They're all at sort of

different points. But they cited Chair Kahn's past work for the House Antitrust Subcommittee

and AIG Cantor's past work advocating for clients that wanted to see the Google case brought and said that

that work had negated their ability to be impartial in overseeing the cases.

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