The case for breaking up Google has never been stronger
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief for The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today, we're talking about the very real possibility that Google might be broken up by the United States government. And to figure that all out, I'm talking to Jonathan Cantor, the former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust under the Biden administration. Jonathan left the DOJ after President Trump was elected, but he was the architect of the major antitrust cases that Google just lost and which the Trump administration continues to pursue.

In the first case, the court found that Google illegally maintained its monopoly over web search with a series of default placement deals, most particularly on the iPhone. That case is back in court right now for the second phase of the trial, where a judge will decide what the remedy will be, essentially how Google will be punished. The government is asking for a very big remedy. It wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser and make its search data more accessible to rivals.

On top of that, literally simultaneously, Google lost another antitrust case just last week. A different court ruled that the company, quote, substantially harmed publishers and users on the web with its advertising monopoly. That case will also now head to a remedies phase, and it's very likely the government will ask for part of Google's ad tech system to be sold off as well.

Obviously, Google says it's going to appeal all of this, so things will take many more years to play out. But these initial verdicts are clear, and chances are high that Google, and the web itself, will be very different when everything comes to a close. Now, the search case was filed during the first Trump administration, but it's Jonathan and his team that took it to trial and won. It's also Jonathan and his team that filed the Google ad tech case in 2023.

That team also filed a big antitrust case against Apple. And if you've listened to Jonathan's appearances on the show, you know that he had to play the role of buttoned-up prosecutor while he was working for the DOJ. But now that he's out, he's much more free to share his real thoughts on what it takes to build and win these cases, and about what should happen next. You will not be surprised to hear that Jonathan Cantor thinks we should break up Google Earth.

But I think you'll find it fascinating to hear how he put together his team, how he thought through the construction of these two cases in particular, and what kinds of audiences he thought he was addressing in the legal complaints themselves. Think of it like Jonathan was the head of a very specialized boutique law firm within the government, staffed by the most talented trial and antitrust attorneys the industry had to offer. That's decoder bait all by itself. But the weirdest part is that Jonathan left and handed that entire law firm and those cases over to an entirely new administration.

So I wanted to ask him about what happens now that Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi are in charge of his little law firm. Especially because we're seeing a pretty intense political realignment around antitrust these past few years. There are some prominent members of the new administration and the MAGA movement who have reached a rare consensus with some Democrats around breaking up big tech. So I wanted to know if the DOJ's antitrust division was still able to operate at the same level of effectiveness now.

Or if Doge and the Trump administration's purge of non-loyalists has hollowed it out. And I really wanted to know what Jonathan thought of the case's counterparts at the Federal Trade Commission are pursuing against Meta in court right now. The case which seems much messier, but which might result in the breakup of Instagram and WhatsApp.

As you'll hear, Jonathan was quite cordial about his replacement, Gail Slater, in the antitrust division. He was also optimistic about Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, who he hopes will continue to aggressively pursue tech regulation instead of treating the government like it's, quote, coin-operated, which is something that many big tech executives would like it to be. In general, I'm deeply worried about the perception of corruption and the amount of nihilism that so many people feel towards the rule of law right now.

So we talked about that a little bit as well. You'll hear me say this again in a little bit. We've had a lot of full circle moments on Decoder this year, and getting Jonathan to come back on the show after he's left office might be my favorite one yet. I think you're going to like it too. Okay, Jonathan Cantor, DOJ's former assistant attorney general for antitrust. Here we go. ♪

Jonathan Cantor, you're the former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. Welcome back to The Coder. Great to be back. And yes, free and clear. Yeah, you're one of our very few third-time guests. And I'm particularly excited because you're not in the Department of Justice anymore. You're free. You can just say whatever you want.

It's a weird feeling to just say what's on your mind. I love it. I'm very excited. We've done a lot of full-circle decoders this year, but this one in particular I'm excited for. The last time you were on, you had just won an antitrust case against Google in search. You're on again today. The Department of Justice, not your Department of Justice anymore, but your case at the Department of Justice...

It has been won. Google has lost the antitrust case in the ad tech market, which is very different than the search market. Although I did find it interesting, the judge made reference to the search case as well. So let's just start at the beginning. What's this case? Why is it different than the search case? So the search case is the Google that most consumers know, which is you go google.com or your search bar or your whatever, and you put in a search and you get an answer back, right? That case focused on Google's core product, which is a search monopoly. This

This case focuses on all the interactions a lot of people have with Google on a daily basis, but don't realize it. So when you go out to the internet, any site, and you see an ad, chances are very high that that ad is passing through Google technology. Ads are bought and sold on the internet using Google's pipes and plumbing. And so that's what this case is about. It's all that infrastructure, the stuff you don't see, that allows publishers, news publishers, or anyone who creates content...

to sell an ad space and anyone who wants to buy an ad to buy ad space. Now, when people think ads, they think Mad Men.

They think the old style, pouring a glass of whiskey and taking someone out to buy some airtime. That's really not how ads work in the modern world. How they work in the modern world really is more like a commodities or a securities exchange. Equities where you buy and sell programmatically on these open market exchanges and people bid in their auctions. That's how ads are sold. And this case is about exactly that technology.

So there's a lot of complicated components to that auction. The way that I always think about it is there's a lot of different software products that interact at every stage of that auction. And most of those markets where those products play, Google is the one or two player, right? It's just a dominant position across every piece of technology you need to make an ad auction go. Right.

How did you put this case together? How did you see that this was a problem? Where did it come from? And how did you know, okay, this is one we can go win? This is years in the making, but the facts here are incredibly strong. So I think when you get out of the madmen and into the kind of commodities exchange mindset, the case becomes very clear. You have the buy side and the sell side, right? The tools that someone, a publisher, will use to sell ads, the tools that an advertiser will use to bid and buy on ads, and then you have this exchange in the middle.

What we found in investigating is that Google has a dominant position on the buy side, the tools that buyers use. They have a dominant position on the tools that sellers use. They own and have the dominant exchange in the middle. And then Google buys and sells on its own exchange. And then they rig the results of those auctions so they win more and competitors lose less and publishers get less money as a result.

So those tools in the middle, that's the open web. What you're describing here is the open web, right? Exactly. You run a website. You put some ad slots on it. You buy some software products to auction off that inventory. Someone shows up to use some other tools to buy it. That's a smaller piece of Google's revenue today than it was before.

The part that really interested me about this whole case is the connection to search, which is under all kinds of pressure, not just the antitrust case that Google now has to defend in the remedies phase, but also AI. Also, just everyone can see what SEO is doing to the web overall. And so you see the web is kind of under all this pressure. It's under revenue pressure from Google as well because of all the monopolization in the ad tech space you're describing.

But then Google itself is making more money on its own platforms, on search itself, on YouTube.

Was there ever a sense that you were chasing a thing that was dying all by itself? Not at all. Because that felt to me like the hardest part of the puzzle here. First and foremost, right, this technology matters a lot, particularly to news publishers. And news publishers are critical for the free flow of information, which is vital to democracy, right? And I think that industry has been under assault for years, in part because the revenue streams have dried up.

in no small part due to Google's conduct, in my view, in the view of the court here. So I think that is an important starting point. Second is, I think ahead to AI as well, right? And Google really, at its heart, is an advertising company. It makes its money on advertising. And it puts out all these products, some of which are really good and interesting to attract users in order to get their attention, in order to get their data, so then they can flip it to advertisers and sell for money.

When you think about where AI is going for a company like Google, that is likely to be how it monetizes a lot of its AI business, certainly its consumer AI business.

And the infrastructure that we're talking about here is likely to be the same kind of infrastructure, whether it's this advertising infrastructure from the search case or the ad tech infrastructure from the ad tech case that translates into how Google sells advertising alongside its various consumer-based AI products. And so getting this right now wasn't just critical to fix these industries as they exist today, but was to make it clear that they can't use these same anti-competitive practices in playbook in the future.

Let me push on that just a little bit harder. I hear that. The nihilist in me says, well, it's already too late. The web has been scraped by all of the model makers fully and completely. The economics of starting a new website are pretty bad. Most new information happens on a closed platform. Will a case like this combined with the search case result in the economics of publishing on the web being better than they are today?

Well, they will hopefully result in new businesses being funded and entering the market to figure out how to monetize content, monetize AI, and sell advertising to advertisers and help publishers figure out better ways to maximize their revenue. Right now, the system wasn't working, right? The companies like Google were not only extracting all the data from these sites through crawling and indexing and training their models—

but they were extracting massive amounts of inventory through these intermediaries, these middlemen that they created to buy and sell and exchange ads. And so we need something better because what we have now doesn't work. And so either we can roll over and say, well, we'll just throw our hands up. The market's moved on to something else if they're going to dominate and use the same playbook. Or we can fight. We can say what they did was wrong, broke the law, and they shouldn't do it again in the future. One of the things that really struck me about the search case was

was Google's pretty compelling argument that, yeah, the market might be distorted in favor of Google search, but everything else is bad. Like Bing is just bad. There are other competitors that mostly use the Bing index. It's just bad. Satya Nadella took the stand and said, I could make Bing better, but it wouldn't be worth it. And the real competition, as you and I discussed, was maybe from these AI products that might disrupt search in some other way. And then the real problem was

By paying Apple for default placement, no one else could ever get the volume of search clicks to be better. But at the end of the day, Google's core argument was, look, our product is just better. Like, people like it. If we didn't pay Apple, people would just choose Google by default. We might as well get some money. They lost on that argument, but it was very intuitive the way that they fought back, right? It was intuitive to say, look, our product is better. It's winning in the marketplace. This distortion, just ignore it. Again, they lost that case, but I understood the argument intuitively.

They made the same kind of argument in the ad tech case. Do you find it as compelling? Did you find it as distracting? Did you find it to be as much of a reflection of, well, the product is superior, so the product stays superior, as I thought in search? I found it flat, right? So if you listen to the trial and follow the trial, what you hear is publisher after publisher coming in saying they hated it.

That they wanted to work with somebody else, that the technology sucked, that Google was giving themselves an advantage over others, that they wanted the freedom to work with other competitors, but that Google was imposing restrictions, whether they were tying restrictions or providing limited access to inventory for other publishing ad servers. The whole range of conduct that actually made it harder to work with rivals and pissed off

to a significant degree, most everyone in the industry. And so whereas the case admittedly in search was powerful, but a little bit more nuanced, which is it's learning by doing. And the more queries you get, the smarter your search engine gets. And so by suffocating rival search engines, it made it harder for them to get smarter and compete on quality with Google. We didn't have those same issues here. In fact, we had the opposite. We had the industry coming forward in trial saying that they were very upset

They were unhappy with the level of quality. They were unhappy with the returns on the ROI that they were getting for their ads. And they wanted something better, and they couldn't use it because Google was getting in the way. And in fact, it's funny. I don't think Google called a single witness that didn't either work for Google or is paid by Google. And so they had no one coming to their defense. Tell me about the mechanics of putting a case like this together as the attorney general for antitrust.

You decide, okay, we see some conduct. We've heard from a lot of publishers that they're mad. We can see the distortion in the search market. We're going to do both, right? Like we're going to chase both of these down. How did you decide to prioritize these cases? And then I want to know how you decided to put them together because no one ever really gets that view. These are really hard cases, right? And so what you do is let me start kind of take a step back. For the investigation, you talk to the industry. You interview people. You talk, you learn about the products. You understand how they work.

And then you send out subpoenas and you get information and documents for Google. And we found incredible stuff where Google knew that what it was doing was wrong. It talked about how owning this publisher server and these technologies and these ad exchange would be like if Goldman Sachs owned the New York Stock Exchange. That's an actual document that they wrote that we featured in our case and actually made it into the opinion.

And then you put all that evidence together, and then you realize that the impact here is great. Advertising, internet advertising, is huge business. This is not a side hustle. When you think about from the advertiser's perspective, advertising is one of the largest, if sometimes the largest, costs for most small businesses. In particular, small and medium-sized businesses who rely on internet advertising more.

for lead gen and customer generation. And many even offline businesses rely on online advertising in order to get people coming in through the door.

People who create content for the masses, whether they're news publishers or any other type of content who doesn't want to sell exclusively by subscription, needs to sell advertising. In the internet world, you can't sell advertising the madman way and make money. You have to have technology and tools in order to clear all those impressions.

And so Google understood early on that it could gobble up through acquisition all of the components to give itself power in those tools, and then it could use market manipulation, exclusivity, and other types of coercive behavior in order to lock itself in. And that's exactly what the court found.

So put me in the room. Is it like billions? Are you screaming, we're going to go get Google? Is it a presentation from your staff that says, we think we have a case here. Here's how we're going to make it. Was there a PowerPoint? How does this work? It's extremely deliberate. So-

The staff will investigate. We will, in my office, stay in tune and in line with the staff and get updates on those investigations, make sure that we're sending subpoenas and interview requests out to everyone in the industry. We hire experts, get data, we analyze that data. It's expansive and very expensive, actually.

And then when we get closer to thinking there's a problem, we start figuring out, okay, how do we tell this story? And does it survive scrutiny? And so we put ourselves through a very rigorous red-themed style exercise to make sure that we're right. The power of the government is extraordinarily significant, and we don't wield it lightly. We want to make sure that we're doing the right thing for the right reasons. And so we want to make sure it's going to hold up in the court of law, that we think we're going to win, and that it's the right case for the right reasons.

And then you have to figure out, okay, how are we going to litigate this case? How are we going to write it in a way that, especially in a market like this, is filled with acronyms, it's incredibly complicated, things move at the speed of milliseconds in terms of data. And so how do we tell that story in a way that's accessible?

And we took a very interesting path, and I think this was consistent with our approach in a lot of these antitrust cases. Some lawyers will say you want to write a tight, short, crisp complaint. I actually took a different view. My view is we have all of this evidence. Let's lay it all out there for the public and the court to see at the outset. And so let's err on the side of saying more rather than less, but let's almost have three different stories in one.

And so the way we would structure our complaints would be we have a very short intro, page or two, that gives you the thematic opening to the case, the stuff that if you're going to read one thing and you need to quickly understand what the case is about, you can read that one or two pages and understand it. And in our case, we put it forward with that Goldman Sachs quote because I think that really told the story.

Then you have a longer executive summary, right? And this is for the person who's got a little more time, is willing to read 15 pages, wants to get some more detail on what are the relevant markets and what are some of the key documents and what's some of the harm, right? Then you have like the antitrust nerds like you who want to read the whole thing from start to finish. And that's the extra, the additional 80 or 90 or 120 pages, whatever it might be in the case, which...

Where you go really deep into the weeds and you can understand how the industry functions, where the documents are, what Google understood it was doing at the time, why it knew that it was behaving in an anti-competitive fashion, what the harm was and how competitors were responding. And then we position all of that to the court so that we can go to the court and say, this is not a theory. This is not just based on a guess.

This is based on a really serious inquiry. It's based on data. It's based on analysis. It's based on internal documents and testimony. And the story is going to be coherent from start to finish. That trend towards really readable complaints that are narrative, essentially, it's new. It's not so new. It's new in the past five years, maybe. Do you think about, okay, well, this PDF is going to be on social media. I had better make it hooky. Is that like on your mind?

No, we think about, you know, when we initially filed this case, we asked for a jury trial. So we thought about how does this play with the jury? My view is if you can't tell the story to a jury of your peers, how are you supposed to tell the story to the judge and how are you supposed to tell it to the public? And so I think we didn't want to sacrifice sophistication. But on the other hand, being hooky was really more about

boiling something down to its core essence and saying, okay, this story, it's what lawyers do. If you can't make the case digestible, if you can't make it easy to understand, you're not likely to win.

If you have something that's really complicated, how do you make sure that you're not skimping on the nuance and the technicalities while at the same time saying, what did they do that's wrong? Why should they be held in violation of the law in a government lawsuit? Okay, they own an exchange. They represent the buyers. They represent the sellers. They own the exchange in the middle. They buy and sell in their own exchange, and they manipulate it, and they knew they were doing that the whole time.

To me, you don't have to understand the technology to know that that's wrong. And it's really important to boil things down like that. And we did it in all of our cases, whether it's this one and Ticketmaster and in our Apple case and others. And then we explain why it matters, right? It's important for a court to understand why this matters to the public. Why are we going to the court and say, we're asking you to take a lot of time and use your resources to

to try this case and figure out the right outcome. We believe in it, and here's why. And here's why it's a good use of our resources and good use of the court's resources. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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We're back with former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Cantor. Before the break, Jonathan and I were going over a high-level overview of what the Google ad tech case was really about. And he was walking me through the logistics of putting a case like that together in his role as the assistant attorney general during the Biden administration. Cases like this take a lot of time and labor. And as you heard Jonathan describe, there's also a narrative component. The

The legal briefs you file need to tell a compelling story that's backed up by a mountain of evidence, while at the same time being easy to understand, both for a potential jury, in this case, a federal judge. But that's all just prep for the most important part, the actual trial. So I wanted to ask Jonathan about the courtroom experience, and what it was like to sue one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.

There's the complaint. There's the storytelling. There's convincing the court it's a good use of resources and surviving however many motions to dismiss Google wants to file. Then there's the trial, right, in which you had to bring up a lot of experts, talk a lot about price increases on the orders of pennies but over millions and millions of transactions. Right.

Yeah.

Ad tech in particular is boring. Like it just inherently – the only people who care about it are people who work in ad tech and they care about it a lot. But regular people, eyes glaze over. How did you think about that in the course of actually being in the courtroom?

So first and foremost, you have to invest in the right team. And so when I started the antitrust division, I realized that we weren't going to be successful unless we can convince courts and juries and judges that we're right. And we had the best, in my view, and still do, antitrust lawyers in the world, but many of them hadn't had the experience of standing up in a courtroom and trying cases. And

And so the vision that we brought to the antitrust division when I arrived was, how do we take world-class antitrust lawyers, match them with world-class trial lawyers? And so we went out, we built this kind of elite core of first-chair trial lawyers. About 25, these are people who have grown up in courtrooms.

Former U.S. attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys and DAs and plaintiffs, lawyers and partners at law firms, how do we assemble folks who really can be that lead lawyer in first and second and third chairs alongside the antitrust experts? And that if you combine those two expertise, you can bring the sophistication and you can bring the storytelling and in-court skill sets together.

And so we built that and we brought in incredible people. It was run by a woman named Heddle Doshi, who is one of my deputies and is just an extraordinary gifted storyteller and lawyer and debater and mastermind in the courtroom. And then we assembled this incredible team of what we called Senior Litigation Council. And so I actually recruited a former partner of mine from private big law, a woman named Julia Wood, who ended up becoming the leading trial lawyer in the case and

Aaron Teitelbaum, who is a former prosecutor in the Colorado U.S. Attorney's Office, and then a number of others to help lead the trial team and go head-to-head with my former firm, Paul Weiss. It sounds to me like you're building a little law firm inside the Department of Justice, right? You're describing a culture shift. You're describing hiring and recruiting. Is that how people should think about it, that this is a little law firm that you ran? Yeah, it's a scrappy little law firm, certainly compared to the size of the big law firms.

And we had incredible assets when I arrived. We just needed to shape them a little bit differently. And so bringing in this trial unit, building data scientists unit, boosting the core expertise that I thought we needed in order to go head to head with companies like Google and litigate two cases in a year and win both of them while at the same time suing Apple and RealPage and

Ticketmaster and a number of other companies. And so we needed to scale, we need scope, and we need a depth. And how you build your team is really important. And we invested a lot in that early on before we went to battle.

I'm going to come back to this idea that you started a law firm and it was good at its job because I think that's hard for people to see. I think they see the Department of Justice and you're describing a unit within the Department of Justice that you built. Like you started a law firm and that's useful to me, but I want to come back to it. Yeah, we built the world's best antitrust boutique firm inside the Department of Justice and we kicked ass.

Yeah. Like I said, we're going to come back to it. The Department of Justice won on two of the three counts here. I just want to read you this quote because I'm curious what you think this means.

Google says, quote, we want half of this case and we will appeal the other half. The court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions such as DoubleClick don't harm competition. We disagree with the court's decision regarding our publisher's tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable, and effective. Sounds to me like Google is as bad at math as it is at antitrust.

Okay, so I'm curious about this. Half of what? There were multiple claims inside all of those, right? And so there were the publisher-side tools, there were the ad exchange, and then there were advertiser-side tools. We not only won on multiple claims involving both the publisher ad server and the ad exchange, but even though the court didn't find a relevant market on the advertising tools, the court was quite clear that its power on that side of the market was relevant to understanding its power on the other sides of the market.

So to say it's spin would be a little charitable. Yeah. We're onto the remedies phase now in both the search case and in the ad tech case. What do you want those remedies to be? The last time you were on, you couldn't say-

But you've told me you're free now. What do you want those remedies to be? I'm free. Those remedies need to be structural and forward-looking. So structural means the company has too much power. It's used that power. It's abused that power. And particularly in the case of ad tech, it has conflicts of interest. It represents buyers and sellers, the exchange, and buys and sells on its own exchange.

The only way to deal with that is to eliminate those conflicts of interest and to reduce its power. In terms of forward-looking, we need to confront the market where it is today in light of a decade of anti-competitive behavior. And this is true in both search and in ad tech.

And the infrastructure, whether it's search infrastructure and search advertising infrastructure or the ad tech infrastructure, is going to be used now going forward, not only for current-day products, but also going forward as things morph into a web that includes a lot of AI-driven content and information and technology.

products. And so I think it needs to be structural. It needs to be definitive. It needs to be forward-looking. It needs to look, again, escape to where the puck is going, which in this world is a more AI-driven marketplace that still relies on a lot of the same infrastructure just for different use cases. Do you think Google should be broken up? Yes. How would you break up Google?

In these cases, the Department of Justice has asked for Google to sell its Chrome browser, which was critical to the finding in the search case.

And in the context of ad tech, I think, again, it should not be able to own the buy side and sell side and exchange all at the same time. And I think that anybody who has even a passing familiarity with securities, financial, or commodities markets will tell you that that's just table stakes. So Google owns DFP, DoubleClick for Publishers. That's what websites run to get the ad inventory. They're on AdEx, which is the exchange, and they own their own tools, which advertisers use. Which of those tools

would you want them to sell? Yeah, I think that's going to require a little more work to figure it out. But I think I do worry about them owning the publisher side tools. And then I do worry, we'd worry about them recreating a lot of the same advertising and exchange and creating that functionality somewhere else in the marketplace, like in a browser, for example. And so you need to have really good

fencing and remedies, as we call them in the industry, and other kinds of anti-circumvention provisions. I also do think that when you look across both cases, it's quite clear that their strength flows from the small and medium businesses that advertise on AdWords. That's their core firehose of demand. And that has been built now through two markets where they've been found to have violated the antitrust laws. And so I think we need to take a very careful look at AdWords. I

I think an independent AdWords would be extraordinarily powerful and would address all of those conflicts of interest quite quickly. Now, ultimately, it will be up to the folks who are in the DOJ today and the state attorneys general to make that determination, just to be very clear. It's out of my hands. I no longer have a say in the matter. But I think there's a lot of value to be created. And, you know, I think we also, in the street now, I think is confronting this across a lot of different industries, which is that these conglomerates are

by accumulating and acquiring all these assets have actually destroyed a lot of value, and you'd actually have more value created overnight, frankly, if you start divesting assets. You can look at what GE did, for example, voluntarily, not for antitrust reasons, but for business reasons. You'll get a company like Google, and just to be very clear, this asset wasn't part of the case. But if Google divested YouTube...

The MAG-7 would become the MAG-8 overnight, and you'd probably unlock a lot of market value. There are two separate discussions. One is what needs to be done for the purposes of resolving the antitrust case, and I think there are structural remedies in terms of breakup that should be and will be on the table. And then there's the second question is just from an efficiency and market perspective.

Are these companies too big and are they locking up too much value or stifling too much value by holding on to assets that would be worth a lot more on their own?

Do you think there's a Google left if you peel off all those pieces? Again, I keep coming back to the open web. The open web right now relies on Google. It's the number one referrer of traffic to different websites. It is the number one monetization engine for all of those websites. Chrome is the dominant browser. You break that company up into 100 little pieces –

What's left? Does the web persist or does it all just become AI training data? Well, I think the web may sadly be turning into AI training data regardless of whether there are antitrust remedies. The fact of the matter is, you know, Google is going to continue to exist after this case and it's going to continue to be a really significant company just as AT&T continued after its breakup. Well, note that AT&T reformed itself like the Terminator. Right.

Well, it kind of did. That's true. But I will also say, quite interestingly, you know, it was the Reagan administration that ultimately pulled the trigger on breaking up AT&T. There were multiple cases going back to the 50s that involved patent divestitures and licenses and other things. But ultimately, it was AT&T or the Western Electric case. And that separated the hardware from the line, right? It used to be that you had to rent kind of a rotary phone from AT&T with their proprietary plug and plug it into the wall.

The DOJ got AT&T to sell off Western Electric to break the hardware up from the line. And guess what? We saw tons of innovation, right? Companies started building first phones with buttons rather than rotors. And then you saw cordless phones. And eventually you saw wireless smartphones.

And so I think the technology is actually – it was great for innovation. There's an argument that if the government hadn't broken up AT&T, we all might be walking around with iPhones that have big rotors on them that had to plug into your wall. I mean, it's – and so a lot of antitrust over the years has actually unlocked a lot of innovation. Now –

you know, there is a question, right? Because throughout the 80s and beyond, a lot of those antitrust breakups, whether it was in oil or in telecommunications or other areas, re-formed itself in a very Borg-like way. It re-assimilated its old components and created this brand new monopoly. And I think, or brand new, recreated a lot of the, like AT&T T-Mobile and, or T-Mobile Sprint, rather, sorry, AT&T bought and then, or is going to, and then withdrew from that.

And so I think there are good questions about whether we should let them reformulate. But I think it is indisputable, at least in my view, that these breakups have actually generated rather than destroyed value. The iPhone is an interesting one because it launched with a singular executive on stage. And then by the time it actually came out, it was AT&T once again. And so you just see that the industry kind of re-rolled itself up into different kinds of companies, maybe with the same name. But what's fundamentally interesting to me is

For example, with Microsoft, the Microsoft antitrust case is sort of what allowed Google to exist, right? It allowed the open web to thrive. Do you see a challenger like that to Google that hasn't been able to exist because Google is dominant in the places where it's dominant? Absolutely. So to me, antitrust is most important when you reach inflection points in the market. So the AT&T case preceded the kind of emergence of the PC market.

There's an IBM antitrust case that preceded the emergence of software and operating systems. The Microsoft case immediately preceded the internet era and the launch of Google. I think what enforcers and the antitrust lawyers are concerned about is that incumbents, seeing these new threats and these new inflection points coming, will use their power to slow them down and make sure that they can turn their dominance in market A into market B. They can incumbent it

into this new technology. But that's not what you want, right? What you want as an enforcer is you want these new nimble companies to emerge without the kind of lethargy of a big monopoly aircraft carrier, and you want someone who can move quickly and decisively. And so if Microsoft had won its antitrust case, who knows what would have happened? Perhaps it could have owned browsers. Perhaps it could have owned

you know, search. It could have owned all these businesses, but instead companies like Google and others were allowed to thrive. It's not lost on us. And we put this in our Apple case that, you know, iTunes and the iPod, which was really the precursor of the iPhone really got traction when it went from being a Mac only to,

to a Windows product. And when you can use your iPod at the time with your Windows computer, because iTunes was available, that was something that was made possible by the Microsoft consent decree that involved competing media players being on Windows.

Right. And so all of these things, you know, interact with one another. And so we're sitting here now on the dawn of this new era. You had like kind of web 1.0 and 2.0, and now we're kind of moving to the AI-based web where, you know, you interact with agents and others.

all other cool stuff that you guys talk about all the time. And we want to make sure that those new companies, those little tech companies, those startups, those other incumbents in other areas who see as an opportunity to diversify can come in here and invent new technologies and compete on the merits.

rather than running into obstacles. And if you look at both Google cases, the obstacles were man-made, kind of like our economic problems today. They're not due to better innovation. They're due to contractual restrictions. It's Google paying Apple $20 billion to lock up defaults or Google tying products and services together or giving itself first look or last look at auctions, which is what we proved in the ad tech case, rather than having an open auction where anybody can win, right? It's putting...

sand in the gears or bumps on the road to slow other people down rather than speeding themselves up to innovate in order to compete. So I buy it with Microsoft, maybe because I was young and Microsoft was the evil empire during that time.

But Google was like a cute upstart company that had slides in the office. You wanted the open web to win. The web itself was a new technology. Apple was on the brink of death. Steve Jobs was going to save the music industry with Jimmy Iovine. You wanted the iPod to succeed.

I don't know if anyone feels the same way about Sam Altman in OpenAI. Is that the company you're trying to protect? Like, the AI industry is made up of trillion-dollar giants, right? It's not a bunch of kids. That's a separate problem, right? But I think part of what we're trying to do is we're trying to go giant by giant and make sure that they can't use their power in one market to dominate another.

And so if you look at where the antitrust cases are, let's look at the big four right now across the two agencies. It's Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta, right? And the idea is saying, okay, we've had these massive conglomerates who are locking up commerce and locking up business and innovation who have become these sort of essential platforms.

And they're making it hard for new folks to emerge. And whether you root for open AI or against open AI is a separate question. You can't say that there should be no more innovation, no more progress. We just want to make sure that the markets are as competitive as possible. That's a separate question, in my view, from whether we need other kinds of restrictions, like on privacy or data use or copyright. I think there are a lot of important conversations to be had

But once a company has so much power, it's hard to have market-based solutions to any of those problems if you don't have competition. So you've got to start by saying, let's make the market as competitive as possible. Figure out how a competitive market and all the innovations that flow from that can result in advances and help maybe get people to innovate on better copyright solutions or better privacy solutions.

And then if there are market failures or safety and security issues that aren't being addressed by the market, like privacy and security and other things, then you can put some lines on the road so people can drive in the right lanes. But I think none of that works unless you have a free, fair, competitive marketplace. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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Copyright 2025, Kona Brewing Co., St. Louis, Missouri. Mahalo for enjoying responsibly. We're back with former Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Cantor discussing Google's ad tech monopoly and what happens to the company next.

Before the break, we were talking about what it might even mean to break up a big tech giant as powerful as Google, and how that might affect both the open web and the AI industry in the same ways we saw the antitrust case against Microsoft give rise to a more competitive internet and really Google itself. I think we can all imagine what that change might look like in the abstract, but down here on the ground, something very important has changed as well.

Both of these cases went to trial during the Biden administration. But the DOJ under Donald Trump looks very different. Pam Bondi is the new attorney general, replacing Jonathan's former boss, Merrick Garland. And Jonathan himself was replaced by Gail Slater. So now, as we enter the remedies phase of both cases, it's a very open question as to whether Trump's DOJ will be as aggressive against Google as it was when Jonathan worked there. Earlier, we were talking about you building a little law firm at the DOJ and that law firm being really good.

Is the little law firm at the DOJ still as good as the one that you had? I hope so. I mean, I think they've lost some folks. And my hope is that I will give them the benefit of the doubt. The people who are there now, I think, are talented people, Gail and others who are running it. And all signs are that they're going to continue with their foot on the pedal doing good work. And so if they do and when they do, I will be there to cheer them on and support them and give them the credit they deserve.

And that's where I hope we'll be. Of course I worry, right? We built something, it was really successful, but fragile. And I think there are a lot of, there's been a lot of damage done. Forget the antitrust division, just more broadly to government due to Doge, which I have a lot of feelings about, and, you know, the villainization of government workers. And I think what I saw was very different from what a lot of people portray about government workers. These are people working harder than folks in the private sector for less money, right?

And frankly, are under-resourced, significantly so. And the value that we created for the economy was extraordinary. And I will say we did it at the antitrust division at zero cost to taxpayers. And I ran a unit with a budget surplus every year. We ran solely on Hart-Scott-Rodino fees. These are the merger filing fees.

We did it with, again, a budget surplus. So we ran it very carefully and responsibly. And so I hope they continue doing that, but I hope that they continue investing in and maintaining and fortifying the resources that we developed. And of course, everyone should run it the way they want to with their own stamp, but I think what we did was pretty special.

Has the DOJ been affected by Doge? Has your group been affected by Doge and the cuts? I don't know exactly. And so my sense is it's mostly what's happened at the DOJ more broadly. There were reports they wanted to shut down our San Francisco and Chicago offices, which boggled my mind because the San Francisco office was absolutely critical in a lot of our big tech cases, including both Google cases.

And our Chicago office was a center of excellence for antitrust enforcement in the agriculture industry, which people care a lot about, especially farmers. And even from just a pure political perspective, it was a widely popular program with people like Senator Grassley and others. So I hope that smarter heads prevail and that they don't do any of that. I don't know that that was being driven by the antitrust division, but I think those are more of the Doge-style efforts where people who don't really understand how things work

come in, feel like they need to break something in order to prove that they're doing their jobs. And then it'd end up causing more harm than doing good. You ran a pretty independent operation from Merrick Garland, the attorney general under Biden. That seems to be going away in the Trump administration. There's the idea that...

of the unitary executive that Trump is actually making all the decisions and all of his appointments are just extensions of him. Pam Bondi is firing attorneys, is trying to wrestle control of various divisions. Describe how independent you were and how independent you perceive the current antitrust division to be. Yeah, so we worked very well with the rest of the Department of Justice, including the Attorney General. And there is a culture, which I think he was trying to restore, appropriately so,

That enforcement needs to be done for the right reasons and not for political reasons. And so I think, you know, creating centers of excellence inside the Department of Justice, giving prosecutors and lawyers the ability to investigate and bring cases that are right on the law and right on the facts.

is the right way to do it, consistent with a broader policy, the broader policy objectives of the administration and the attorney general. And so we found, I think, that right balance. And it's hard. I think a lot of the concerns that are occurring now is that by sort of doing a seat-of-the-pants political rolling up of power,

And sort of taking away those principles of prosecution being done on the facts and the law in a way that is sufficiently distinct from political considerations creates a risk of corruption and a risk of all sorts of an undermining of confidence in our judicial system. And I think when it comes to the law and it comes to using the awesome power of the Department of Justice and the ability to prosecute private individuals and corporations, it's

We need to make sure that we're doing, one, is we're holding bad actors to account, regardless of their political influence, heft, or donations. And two, that we are doing it the right way for the right reasons. Do you think Gail Slater is sufficiently independent of Pam Bondi? I don't know what's going on in the DOJ. I have a lot of confidence in Gail. I know her well, and I think she's a good actor. And so my hope is that left to her own devices.

she will do an excellent job. But there are things that are happening in the administration more broadly that do concern me. Well, I ask that that way because...

Our readers have reacted to this news with what I can only describe as nihilism. Not some readers. Almost all of them. That was the reaction to our coverage of the case. It's in the comments on our website. It's in the replies to me on Blue Sky. People saying, well, Google will just buy themselves out of this. They'll just write a check to Donald Trump and the case will go away. That this doesn't matter. At some point, it's going to hit 100%.

some level of transactional Donald Trumpism and that's why they were all on stage with him at the inauguration. Do you think that that's credible?

Well, I think we should watch and find out. I mean, so far that hasn't happened, at least on these cases, right? DOJ is going to court on the Google remedy and FTC is going to court on the Facebook case. And frankly, let's be clear, that shouldn't be celebrated for its own. That's the right thing to do. Cases should be brought for the right reasons and people shouldn't be able to buy their way out of antitrust cases.

cases through political donations and favors. Now, when you have Tim Cook and Sundar and Larry P. or Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg and others toasty and warm inside the rotunda on a cold day during the inauguration, it creates a perception that leads to the reaction that your readers are having. And that's why those kinds of

Things matter. Those appearances undermine confidence and trust in government. And that's a problem. And I sure as heck hope that they are not buying their way out of legitimate antitrust cases or other prosecutions. Only time will tell, though. You said this two-word phrase earlier. You said, little tech. That's an Andreessen Horowitz phrase. That's a phrase they use to describe how much they want to see things like NFTs on the iPhone being sold without the Apple tax.

That's a real thing they want. That's the thing they use to describe Google's dominance of the web. J.D. Vance has very specifically said that Google was a problem for him when he was a VC. At one point, he said Lena Kahn was the only good member of the Biden administration. That's the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. That's one side of the tech industry. Then there's the oligarchs. Then there's MAGA, the general MAGA movement, which is very populist.

And there's some weird lines between all three of these. We just covered an antitrust event put on by Y Combinator where Lena Kahn took a selfie with Steve Bannon. I would never expect this in the past. But these are the new kind of addled lines.

As you look at these cases and see how they're going to move through the system, how do you think that's going to break down? Let me start by saying when I was in office, I was fortunate to have bipartisan support or support across the aisle for antitrust. And that was a good thing. I don't view that as a problem. I view that as a rarity, an unfortunate rarity in today's society where you actually can have agreement on things among people who sit on both sides of the aisle. At the

At the same time, we had Republicans and Democrats who were unhappy with what we were doing, and it just didn't neatly break down along political lines. And that's fine. I think if that's the case for antitrust, that's a good thing, and we shouldn't shy away from that. Of course, there'll be differences, and people might do different things or have different motivations for what they're doing. But so long as they're done for legitimate policy and law enforcement reasons, I think

I'm pleased that we have actual continuity. I think it's something we should celebrate rather than reject. But I also understand at the same time why there's a degree of distrust and concern. Again, when you see these modern-day oligarchs in the rotunda and giving money and trying to buy themselves everything.

by their way out of antitrust cases, it raises concerns and we should not have a government that's coin-operated that way. And hopefully we won't. Coin-operated is a good phrase. We've been calling it gangster tech regulation because it just feels like there's just a lot of threats and leverage and people are paying each other off and that's how it's going to end up. But just so I can be an equal opportunity critic, right? I was just as critical and still am of the role that Google had in the Obama administration, right?

They were way too cozy with the Obama administration, right? They were in and out of the White House like they live there. And I think it wasn't right then and it's not right now. Let me ask you about the other law firm in the government that pursues antitrust cases. That's the Federal Trade Commission. I've got you here. I have to ask you about the meta case that's ongoing right now.

That was run by the FTC. It was started. That case, I believe, was filed in the first Trump administration, pursued by Lena Kahn's FTC, and now it's being taken to trial by the Trump FTC. Straightforwardly, is the FTC as good of a law firm as the DOJ?

I think they're pretty damn good. I know some of the people over there who actually, their head of the Bureau of Competition was one of our leads on the Google Ad Tech case at DOJ. And they have some excellent lawyers over there. They did back when during our admin and they do now. And I will also note for the record, I'm a proud alum of the FTC. I started my career as a lawyer there. So they're a terrific group of people. They're excellent litigators. They have a wonderful litigation team on the Meta Facebook case. And

And by all accounts, they're doing a pretty good job in court. It's too soon to say how it's going to result, but I think they've done a good job so far, an excellent job in terms of putting on good witnesses and surfacing the right documents, at least to open up the case. And so, yeah, I'm a big fan of the FTC and I'll remain so. And hopefully the FTC will continue to exist as an independent agency, but we'll have to see. We'll come to that.

I actually disagree with you, and I was hoping you would take the bait. I've been watching the Meta case very carefully. That case seems way harder than either of the two Google cases that you managed to win. Harder because Google runs in an open ecosystem. It has to make deals with third parties. There's lots of evidence in the various Google cases of its emails, of its contracts, of how it deals with Android vendors and Apple and whoever else.

Google is also just chattier as a company, it seems, even though they had gotten some trouble suppressing evidence. Meta, on the other hand, the FTC has struggled and continues to struggle to even describe what Facebook is. The market definition tripped this case up so badly that at one point it went away and they had to refile the complaint. And now we're in court and the FTC is claiming that Meta has no competitors save Snap and some tiny social network called MeWe.

And that, to me, just feels like a strategic blunder. We're struggling to even define what this company is that we say is dominant. How would you have done that differently? Well, I don't know if I would do it differently. I mean, I think the – let me just try to give you a sense of what I think they're trying to say, which is that a social graph is different than a performance graph.

And so if you think about YouTube and TikTok, it's about an audience connecting with people that they want to perform for them, whether that's singing and dancing or podcasting or whatever people on TikTok do, which is a combination of all of them. It's about being entertained or informed by people that you generally don't know but admire or are interested in hearing from.

I think the FTC is saying that is distinct from connecting to people that you do know, friends and family. And so the social graph for the perspective of communicating and sharing family pictures and reconnecting with people from your school and communities, it's a different—you use the tools for different reasons. And I think what the FTC is doing is they're using the documents in the case to say that

It's not just the FTC's perception. What the commission is saying is that that's how Facebook views it internally, and that's how they've distinguished themselves, and that's why they view themselves as different from a TikTok, for example, or YouTube, and essentially offer different functionality.

for different purposes and so that the two coexist. Now, I see you smiling as if you don't necessarily agree. I think that's a factual question. I'm just saying, take the compliment. I'm saying you did a better job in your cases than they did in this one. How would you have done this one better? Listen, I— Would you have pursued that theory of the case?

I perhaps, right, I think it is a plausible good theory, which is that social graphs are different than what TikTok does. And I think, you know, one of the things that they really have going for them is the documents in those cases are fire, right? Like, it's not as if they just made a better product, according to the FTC, what the commission is saying is.

is that they said, shit, what's the biggest threat to us is if somebody starts peeling off messaging and photos and other things that are central to our social graph-based product, and then they go off. And that's what Instagram and WhatsApp were doing, according to the FTC, is they were off-ramps.

They were a way to sort of start building bridges to people creating new networks. They were disintermediating. They were removing friction. They were, you know, filling them out, whichever metaphor you want to use. And instead of competing by building their own stuff, which they were trying to do and not doing as good a job, the FTC is saying they just went and bought them and said so in their documents that we're buying them because they're a competitive threat and we're going to neutralize that competitive threat so that we can maintain our power. Right.

I think if the court focuses on the words of the executives, they have a very strong case. Yeah. I think I look at it and I say, well, Facebook today is not just about friends and family. It's a feed full of stuff from all kinds of people. And TikTok is a competitive threat to them.

Yeah. But I think there's one thing that's true and I trust it's worth distinguishing. Just because they compete for some part of the business doesn't mean they compete for all of it. Right? And so while there may be aspects of Facebook or Instagram that do what TikTok does, it's not true that TikTok does everything that Facebook does or a big chunk of it, which is the friends and family piece. And from my perspective, that's where the FTC is focusing. Right.

What's interesting about that case in particular is Andrew Ferguson is the new head of the FTC. Donald Trump has fired the Democratic commissioners of the FTC. That case is going to trial. That appears to be legal under a 100-year-old statute that lots of people want to talk about, but we'll set aside for the purpose of this conversation.

Andrew Ferguson is a fire breather, right? He got that job by writing a letter to Donald Trump basically saying everything Lena Kahn did was bad. I mean, I'll just read the quotes. Lena Kahn should stop abusing FTC enforcement authorities as a substitute for comprehensive federal privacy legislation. She should stop bringing novel and legally dubious consumer protection cases. I will end Lena Kahn's politically motivated investigations.

And then here we are. We're pursuing the meta case. And none of that stuff is coming up in this case, right? None of that's none of the censorship stuff that Trump likes to talk about is coming up in this case. Do you think that this case is still as like legally clean as it was before? Because right now it seems like leverage, if anything, gets a deal made to for exit ramp. It feels like this case is right on the line. Listen, we can.

We can voice those concerns. And to my, as I said earlier, I think when you have an administration that presents itself as being quite operated, it opens itself up to that degree of distrust and concerns about whether things should be done for the wrong reasons.

They're trying the case the right way, right? They're not trying it like a coin operated operation. They're trying it the same way that Trump won did, Chair Kahn's FTC, and now Chair Ferguson's FTC. And so in terms of what they're putting in front of the court, I think it's, you know, very much, you know, in line with how it's been done. And it's being tried the right way, you know, in a very sensible, professional legal manner, one that does not appear politically motivated.

What happens in the future and whether they settle something or take the 25-cent coin in the slot and spit out a Dr. Pepper full of settlements, I don't know. But I hope they don't. It's a couple million dollars to the library, actually. Speaking of a couple million dollars to the library, Tim Cook did pay a million dollars for Donald Trump's library. That's the next big case. That's your case at the DOJ. It's Apple. It's saying Apple uses the power of iOS to prevent all kinds of applications from being developed. My favorite part of it is the limitations on CarPlay.

We talk about CarPlay a lot on this show for some reason. It comes up a lot. How do you think that one's going to go now? We'll see. I hope they do the right thing for the right reasons. It's a strong case. It is an important case. And, you know, Apple is a company that has extracted a lot of money from a lot of people for the same product without necessarily corresponding innovations. And so while it once was this incredibly powerful

visionary and innovative company, they've, you know, a lot of what they're doing, at least in our case, was restricting the innovations of others in order to maintain their own position and be able to extract fees. Fees from developers, fees from Google in terms of its search engine, fees from banks in terms of basis points on tap-to-pay transactions, from car manufacturers and others, right? It is an extraordinarily profitable and extractive business, but

but it's maintaining that position by restricting the ability of others to innovate. And so our case was not about saying, Apple, you have to stop innovating. It's Apple, go innovate the way you want to, just stop telling others how they can and can't build their products and services.

Last question. This has been a theme of this conversation, right? The idea that the power of law enforcement here is enormous. The government should wield it responsibly, that there's a right way to do these things. There's a wrong way to do these things. There's a way to tell these stories.

I just keep coming back to the idea that this government in particular is not prone to using that power responsibly. We see it all over the place. We see the irresponsible use of power, power for power's sake, all over the place with the Trump administration, particularly here in the second term. These huge companies in the first term were checks on that power.

Right. They were the ones who stood up and said, no, we're not actually not going to do this. The stock market tanking, at least in the first term, would sometimes stop Trump from indulging his worst impulses, maybe less so in the second term. But it still seems to have had some effect on him.

tariffs, imports, the tech industry, AI, all that stuff wrapped up in these huge companies. Do you think there's any danger at all in all of these enforcement actions being taken against the very companies that might otherwise check the worst impulses of this administration? No, I think that's exactly the wrong way to think about it. Okay.

We are at our best when we have rule of law, right? People come to this country because there's rule of law. What distinguishes us from a tin pot dictatorship or a banana republic is not that we have a constitution, but that we have checks and balances in the court system to enforce the laws.

And so saying that we need to allow these companies to become powerful, well, they were showing up to the inauguration and they're giving money. I think they're going to be here. And they're doing business with China. It's not as if they are an extension of the U.S. military or the U.S. government. They're private companies and great that they should be there.

And those institutions should speak up for the rule of law because, frankly, they benefit. They might not like our antitrust case, but their ability to make the kinds of profits for themselves and their shareholders flows from having an open marketplace in society. I think about what's happening now is a going after all of those institutions that function as checks, right?

independent businesses rather than having nationalized businesses. It's independent law firms rather than having nationalized law firms. It's courts. It's universities who seek truth through scientific research and political thought and debate and speech and many others, right? And those institutions matter a great deal to our freedom. They matter a great deal to our progress. And so,

And it is one of the reasons, if not one of the most significant reasons, that people want to do business in the United States, that they want to come to school here, that they want to build their businesses here, that they want to rely on our currency because they believe in the stability of our nation. Once we start undermining that trust, and once we look like we're coin-operated, once we look like that, once people are concerned that the rule of law no longer has power and effect—

They're going to stop investing in the United States and they're going to find other partners. And that is going to put us at a major disadvantage and set us back decades, if not more. If people are listening to this and they heard you and they're inspired by it, what do you think folks can do? They don't compromise core principles, right? Focus on what matters. Rule of law matters. Hold your leaders accountable. Vote.

Make sure that elections are fair. Make sure that your voices are heard, right? We can't be complacent. And I think sitting back and letting somebody take our democracy bit by bit, institution by institution, is only going to result in there being nobody left to fight. And so if you see something that's wrong, stand up for it. And I think...

whether that's a university or a law firm or a judge, we need to stand up for our independence. And I think that includes making sure that our courts have the freedom to reach decisions, that the executive branch follows the directions of our courts as our constitution demands, that our institutions like universities have the freedom to seek out truth, that our law firms are free to defend without reservation or hesitation independent actors from government overreach.

That's how our system works, and we need to protect it. It's rare that a conversation on antitrust ends with a stirring call to defend the Constitution, but I think that's where we are now. Jonathan, this has been wonderful. We're going to have to have you back for a fourth time. I love it. Thanks so much.

I'd like to thank Jonathan Cantor for joining me on the show and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. You have thoughts about this episode or really anything else, you can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads or blue sky. And we have a TikTok and an Instagram, both at decoderpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.