That's kind of the issue. If you have a monopoly through market forces in America, we're probably going to let you keep it.

But it's your inevitable use of the money and power that comes with that to then abuse your monopoly, is the term, that gets them in trouble, even if they're not charging money.

And that is the unusual thing with Google, is that, you know, it's free at least at the POS to use.

Hello and welcome to Tech won't saybus made a partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host,

Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Rob Larson. Rob is the author of Mastering the Universe,

the obscene wealth of the ruling class, what they do with their money, and why you should hate them even more. Quite the title. He's also a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College.

Given the recent ruling that Google is indeed

a monopolist, I thought it was a good opportunity to not just look at that case, but look back at this

broader push to have antitrust enforcement against the big tech companies, to try to promote

supposedly more competitive markets in the tech sector, and what the impact of this is increasingly looking

like as we see more enforcement in the European Union and these cases in the United States

continuing to weave their slow way through the courts. As we discuss in this episode, the big

hopes of a few years ago when everyone was talking about breaking up the big tech companies

seem to be a bit more elusive the further down the track we get with these things. And while

there are positive developments to come out of it in terms of restricting some of the

worst practices of these major tech companies, it feels like it's a bit too little, a bit too late

to actually change the power dynamics of

what is actually going on here. And if we actually want to do something about how these tech

companies work and the control that these tech platforms have over our lives, it feels like we

would need to take a step beyond actually trying to make more competitive markets or

changing a few things about how these companies

actually operate. But it doesn't seem like that is really on the table. So that's what I wanted

...