Hello and welcome to another MLX podcast.

I'm Amy Miller, MLEX's Senior Privacy and Data Security Reporter in San Francisco, California.

With me, our Josh Cisco, our senior antitrust reporter in San Francisco. Hi. With me are Josh Sisko, our senior antitrust

reporter in San Francisco.

Hi Amy.

And Mike Swift, our chief correspondent for Digital Risk.

Hey Amy.

So everything changed in 2018 for big tech companies in both privacy and competition.

In Europe, we saw the GDPR take effect. In California, Governor Brown signed into law,

the California Consumer Privacy Act. In Washington, we saw five new members on the FTC, and several

new commissioners are saying they're willing to bring new antitrust scrutiny on Google, Facebook, Amazon,

and other big tech companies. It's a bit of an understatement

to say these are interesting times for tech regulation. What do you see ahead for 2019, Josh?

Well, the West Coast and California in particular is going to be a veritable battleground for

litigation in the first part of the year with some repeat players, including a couple with

the Federal Trade Commission, a couple with the Federal Trade

Commission, a couple with chipmaker Qualcomm. And unless there's any sort of courthouse step

settlements, there's going to be at least three big trials in the first third of 2019.

Looks like one of the biggest everybody's watching is a FTC versus Qualcomm trial. Can you tell us a little bit

about that? Yeah, so that one, that's a high stakes trial for both sides, and it starts right in the

beginning of the year. January 4th, to be exact, is the first day of a 10-day bench trial in San Jose

with Judge Lucy Coe, who is the judge in the Apple Samsung series of patent trials.

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