Finance Docket: FTC Chair Appears On The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Slams Tech Monopolies

//

The Federal Trade Commission – FTC (photo by David Lat).

Ed. note: This article first appeared in this week’s Finance Docket newsletter. You can subscribe and view the full newsletter with the form below.

googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-top-300x250" ); });

Jon Stewart is back (one night per week) on The Daily Show, at least until the November election. Yes, it’s sending a wave of nostalgia through millennial and Gen X viewers. Beyond that, Stewart doesn’t seem to have lost his comedic chops, or his ability to bring complicated, often wonky, topics to the masses.

Sponsored Is The Future Of Law Distributed? Lessons From The Tech Adoption Curve The rise of remote work has dramatically reshaped the relationship between Lawyers and Law Firms, see how Scale LLP has taken the steps to get… From The Team at Scale LLP  

Enter Stewart’s recent interview with Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Khan has been outspoken in her calls for breaking up big tech companies, comparing them to Gilded Age monopolies. Under Khan the FTC has targeted powerful companies, including Amazon, with antitrust litigation.

Stewart discussed antitrust issues with Khan, and matters got even more interesting when the conversation turned to artificial intelligence and its potential to displace human workers. “I wanted to have you on a podcast, and Apple asked us not to do it,” said Stewart, referring to restrictions his former employer placed on the content he was attempting to put out on the topic. “Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?”

googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-middle-300x250" ); }); googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-storycontent-440x100" ); }); googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-in-story-youtube-1x1" ); });

Khan replied that a position like the one taken by Apple “just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.” She added that throughout the history of this country, “there was a recognition that, in the same way that you need the constitution to create checks and balances in our political sphere, you also needed the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to safeguard against concentration of economic power.”

Well, I guess we’re having the conversation now. Stewart has always been more focused on policy than his late-night peers. Let’s see more of this though.

Sponsored Sponsored Navigating Financial Success by Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Firm Performance In this CLE-eligible webinar on April 10th, we’ll explore the most common accounting pitfalls and how to avoid them for your firm. From Pilot and Above The Law   Sponsored Legal AI: 3 Steps Law Firms Should Take Now If 2023 introduced legal professionals to generative AI, then 2024 will be when law firms start adapting to utilize it. Things are moving fast, so… From LexisNexis   Sponsored Early Adopters Of Legal AI Gaining Competitive Edge In Marketplace How to best leverage generative AI as an early adopter with ethical use. From LexisNexis   Sponsored Legal AI: 3 Steps Law Firms Should Take Now If 2023 introduced legal professionals to generative AI, then 2024 will be when law firms start adapting to utilize it. Things are moving fast, so… From LexisNexis  

Isn’t it more important – more entertaining, even – to hear about what a powerful government official is doing that probably impacts your daily life than to listen to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson try to explain the plot of Fast and Furious 37? Next stop: Gary Gensler on Colbert.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-bottom-300x250" ); }); Sponsored Sponsored How Generative AI Will Improve Legal Service Delivery Learn how emerging tools will likely change and enhance the work of lawyers for years to come in this new report. From Thomson Reuters   Sponsored Is The Future Of Law Distributed? Lessons From The Tech Adoption Curve The rise of remote work has dramatically reshaped the relationship between Lawyers and Law Firms, see how Scale LLP has taken the steps to get… From The Team at Scale LLP   Topics

ATL Finance, Finance, Finance Docket