This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 2nd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The antitrust case against Google is a bit of an odd one.

It claims at once that the company has a monopoly in search,

but not in the method of delivering those searches to actual users.

So does the case stand up to scrutiny?

Jeffrey Manney is the president and founder of the International Center for Law and Economics.

We talked about the case against Google last week.

How did we get to this point with this big lawsuit against Google being cheer-led by many members of the Senate

and many activists who believe they're being treated poorly by the company and what led us here?

Well, I think you're right to point to non antitrust sort of origins here but I wouldn't suggest that there are no

antitrust origins to the suit so so let me take it in kind of two parts the one hand, what has led us here is, as you suggest, a

political, a sense that there is political value in criticizing and hamstringing and showing aggression

against these large tech companies.

We can and should go into more of the details of the reason for that, but let's just leave it there for now.

There is a clear political impetus behind this.

And of course, this has been pointed out many times.

This particular suit was not actually. has been pointed out many times.

This particular suit was not actually handled

by the head of the antitrust division at the DOJ.

It was led by the attorney general himself.

There's been some stories about some resistance

...