The Future of the Internet Hinges on Gail Slater
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and what GMC has done for over 100. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Assembled in Flint and Hamtronick, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana of U.S. and globally sourced parts. Hey everyone, it's Lizzie. Just wanted to flag that yes, we are following the blow up between Elon Musk and President Trump. And as that story develops, we will be following it. But today's show is about someone in Washington you may not have heard of. Okay, here it is.

Last week, reporter Nancy Scola sat in a federal courthouse in Washington, listening to government lawyers talk about the best way to break up Google. A federal judge has already ruled that Google broke antitrust laws to maintain its search monopoly.

And now the government needs to do something about it. So both sides laid out their case. The Justice Department is pushing for some pretty aggressive measures. One of the things that the Justice Department is asking for is that Google actually has to sell off Chrome, which is its browser. Google, not surprisingly, not a fan of that idea.

While Nancy was in the courthouse, she was keeping an eye on one key player, Gail Slater, the assistant attorney general for antitrust, a quiet but vital position in the Trump administration. Nancy wrote a profile of Slater for Politico magazine. This is a make-or-break case for her. She's only a few months into the job.

But this is, you know, we sometimes talk about the trial of the century. This is a pretty big deal. This is a trial of the century in some way. She inherited the case from the Biden administration, which inherited the case from the Trump administration. But her name's on it. Which Slater is clearly aware of. Here she is speaking to reporters in April. The Google search case matters because nothing less than the future of the Internet is at stake.

Are we going to give Americans choices and allow innovation and competition to thrive online? Or will we maintain the status quo that favors big tech monopolies? And if she succeeds in breaking up Google, the public will notice, the president will notice. And there it could sort of enshrine her in the annals of antitrust history. So she's keeping pretty close tabs on it.

Today on the show, Gail Slater is one of the most important people in Washington who you've probably never heard of. And what she does now could change the Internet forever. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. This episode is brought to you by Discover.

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You know, I think Gail Slater is not a name that a lot of people would know, even if they follow the Trump administration pretty closely. Can you tell me a little bit about her background? Introduce me to Gail Slater. So Gail Slater is well known in Washington, D.C., tech policy circles. She's a quiet Irish born lawyer known for her accent. She still retains her accent after these years, all these years.

She came up through the Federal Trade Commission as an in-the-trenches enforcement attorney and then a attorney advisor for a Democratic commissioner. Put in time at the Internet Association, which was the first big trade association for online companies in Washington, D.C. And so really just developed a ton of relationships around Washington on these issues.

It's important to note that when Slater was at the Internet Association, she was working on behalf of big tech. Then she joined the first Trump administration. At the time, she wasn't actually working on antitrust. Her focus was 5G, though she also contributed to First Lady Melania Trump's Be Best initiative, too.

But what she witnessed during those years seems to have changed her outlook on big tech's power. In Washington, often you have principals and staffers, right? Staffers who, like, get into the nitty gritty. They know the law. They know the policy really well. And I would love to talk about her evolution from kind of staffer to principal. You know, she worked for the Internet Association, right?

Do you think her attitudes around tech regulation shifted as she became more prominent? Do you think she is taking on the policy priorities of her boss? I think both. I think a little bit. There's the idea that Slater, like many folks on the right,

saw the power of the tech companies during the first Trump administration. They look at some of the issues around COVID information and the content moderation policies of platforms like Twitter and Facebook. They look at

January 6th, where President Trump had his account banned from Twitter and Facebook. They look at, again, with January 6th, Parler, which is a writer's center social media platform that was used to organize some of the events of January 6th. And Parler was booted from the Apple Store and the Google App Store. And Gail Slater talked in her confirmation hearing about

How she finds it frightening that people can be disappeared from the Internet because we have a handful of dominant platforms that really can say, OK, you no longer can have an account on our platform. And their argument is then you're effectively silenced. They look at

the company's willingness to do this to President Trump and say, this is evidence that they've grown too powerful. If they're willing to, quote unquote, silence the president of the United States, clearly they don't feel the pressure of other competitors in their markets. And therefore we need to apply antitrust enforcement action against them. She, this, it's interesting, you mentioned this evolution from a staffer to a principal. In Trump's Washington, you sort of have to make that leap. You have to see yourself as a political leader

figure making a lot of noise around your issues. It's not okay to be behind the scenes just working on the policy front. One of the things I found so fascinating was that after decades of being in Washington and not having much of a public profile,

Assistant Attorney General Slater, three weeks into office, held an event at Justice Department headquarters, right? This hulking building that's the center of, you know, the headquarters for the Department of Justice in Washington called Big Tech Censorship. It was a forum bringing together

what Slater called some of our most important MAGA influencers to discuss the behavior of these tech companies. So that's Steve Bannon. That's Benny Johnson, who's a conservative commentator. And so that was her really embracing the sort of Trump flavor of politics in a way that was frankly surprising to me as somebody who's covered these issues for a bit of time. Yeah, that is not the move of someone who wants to fly under the radar and just kind of make the policy trains run.

Yeah. And she mentioned she quoted what she said, the great Steve Bannon, who was at the event. She said, in the words of the great Steve Bannon, it's time for action, action, action. Very much a Trump approach to politics and policy. I think that's so fascinating because in traditional Republican policy circles, that is not the way that antitrust was seen in the GOP.

Absolutely. And that's why I wanted to write this profile is because when President Trump came back into office, we didn't know there was a scramble in Washington to help the president staff his administration with antitrust enforcers and help in the way of giving names. You know, you had the tech industry suggesting names, folks on Capitol Hill giving names, trying to get their school of thought on these issues staffed in the administration and the anti-monopoly movement.

faction, which is what we call the sort of folks on both the right and the left who want more aggressive enforcement against tech companies in particular, they really won. They won at the Federal Trade Commission with Chair Andrew Ferguson, who's very aggressive on big tech, and they won at the Justice Department with Gail Slater. So the thing about tech policy that has been so fascinating for, I would say, the last decade, though one could probably go back further to the

former FTC chair Lena Kahn's time in law school when she published a very famous article about this, is the anti-monopolist sentiment on both the left and the right. And I guess what I would like to interrogate with you is whether Gail Slater is looking at this from let's break up a monopoly or...

You are being mean, big tech, and quote unquote censoring conservatives. Like, do you have a sense of where her thoughts lie? In writing this profile, I really pressed on that point. Antitrust experts you talk to say you just don't bring cases saying that

Company X has been mean to the president and therefore we need to break them up or apply these other remedies. Because they're private companies. I mean, you might not like it, but they are private companies. They're not arms of the government. The argument that folks on the right, like, you know, Assistant Attorney General Slater, Chair Andrew Ferguson of the FDC is, they are so powerful that they effectively, the ability that they have to

remove people from their platforms to not allow people speech means some of those rules are out the window. Some of what we talk about as, hey, they're just private companies and therefore it's a hands-off approach. They would look at that and say, it's failed. That approach has failed. And they still, what's interesting is Gail Slater in particular will say, we still believe in a free market.

We haven't abandoned sort of these principles that we traditionally would associate with the right. The way that you have a free market is aggressively using this body of law that's been developed over a century and a half in the United States and break up monopolies. Now, to be clear, there's folks on the right and look at that and say, that's ridiculous. If we're free market folks, we're free market folks. We don't try to dictate how these companies behave. And in the Google case in particular, it's interesting because they are in some ways attempting to dictate how these companies behave.

It's simply not spinning off the Google browser. It's also saying to Google, hey, all the search data you get, you have to share with OpenAI, Perplexity, these other AI companies. That is really sort of, you know, sticking your hands into the machinery of the free market. And they've won. That argument that, hey, it's OK for Republicans and it's OK to conservatives to tell businesses in detail how to behave right now in Washington, that's the argument that's winning.

There were some conservatives, notably J.D. Vance, who were fans of Lena Kahn, the chair of the Biden FTC. Are there people on the left who are Gail Slater fans? Absolutely. For this profile, I spoke with Luther Lowe, who was for a long time an official at Yelp, who is attempting to get action taken against Google on the argument that Google had treated Yelp unfairly and stymied its development.

Gail Slater came up through the Federal Trade Commission and Luther Lowe describes meeting with her a dozen years ago, 10 years ago, complaining about Google.

And her being one of the few voices inside the agency who listened, she was skeptical of these companies even back then when nobody was skeptical of these companies. And it won her a lot of fans. She was quietly behind the scenes, made her opinions clear to some of these folks. And so they were thrilled. Luther Lowe, I quote him in that piece, says, you know, I'm a Democrat.

But to have somebody on the right side of history in power now, they're absolutely thrilled by it. And they look at a Trump administration and say, this could have gone very differently. The applauding that you heard on the anti-monopoly left when Gail Slater was picked was pretty loud. When we come back, Gail Slater's biggest challenge, her boss and his love of posting.

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So I think one of the things that might get in Gail Slater's way, which you wrote about this, is the president himself. Because let's say you're trying to put forth a large, careful case and saying this is about systemic stuff, this is not about, you know...

individual animus from one person toward a company. And then all of a sudden the president comes along and posts, you know, they are wrong and bad or this CEO is terrible. Like, how does she deal with that? It is enormously difficult. It's what makes her job very hard. The in the first Trump administration, he did this. He railed against CNN and

The Justice Department at that time tried to block a merger of AT&T and Time Warner, which at the time owned CNN. And folks close to the president, like Rudy Giuliani, said, oh, yeah, you know, we're attempting to block this merger because the president doesn't like CNN. Right. They said the quiet part out loud. They said the quiet part out loud. Now, the question is, has he learned? Right. You know, he did this also during the first term on his, you know, ban of people traveling from Brazil.

predominantly Muslim countries, the courts looked at that. They said, you know, his lawyer said this isn't based on race or religion. And then Trump would tweet things that made clear it was based on race or religion.

Has he learned to not make those beliefs clear when it could imperil the cases his administration are bringing? We don't know yet. We do know, though, he's very invested in these issues. He posted on Truth Social when he nominated Gail Slater saying big tech has run wild for years. Gail's going to take care of it. He personally looks at these companies and thinks these are

powerful entities that tried to beat me, they lost. And we're taking, you know, the thinking is he's feeling like he can take a little bit of revenge. If he says that out loud, it's not great for her. It's not great for her. The judges don't tend to enjoy that. Well, yeah, I mean, she has said she doesn't believe that President Trump would ask her to target a company for political reasons.

But then if you look over at, say, the FCC and what Brendan Carr is doing there, the current chair, or if you... Yeah, I mean, mostly like the case against 60 Minutes, all of those things...

Those read very clearly as I don't like you. You're a target. We're coming after you and using the power of the state to do that. Absolutely. Which becomes all the more problematic when you're a law enforcement agency, as the Justice Department is. It's a little bit different than launching an investigation and passing some rulemaking, that sort of thing. She's using the full powers of the Justice Department against these companies.

It can be very problematic when it looks like the president's dictating go after my political enemies. Well, so what do judges then make of that? Like, does she does it weaken her arguments in front of a judge or her staff's arguments in front of a judge?

Is there a way that the Justice Department will try to thread this needle? Like, I'm just trying to figure out how they do that in these huge, consequential, multibillion-dollar cases. The somewhat wonderful thing for her, from her perspective, I would imagine, is that the Google case was brought by the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, at a time when President Trump was talking about how

mean Google had been to him, but it was continued by the Biden administration. So that buys her a ton of cover, right? A judge can look at this and say, this is a bipartisan case. You know, the Biden administration ran with it. They pursued it pretty aggressively. The challenge for her becomes when she brings her next cases, the cases she starts from scratch.

does a judge look at that and say, this is politically motivated and people in antitrust, you probably all know this talk about judges. Judges don't like these cases. Anyway, antitrust is obscure, complicated, boring, a lot of money to interest trying to get you do this or that. And correct me if I'm wrong, but antitrust judges tend to be in many ways, more small C conservative than kind of the modern antitrust movements. Well,

Well, it's a little bit frightening if you could think about being a judge and breaking up Google or taking some of you can make you can make your name on it, but it's also a big step to take with huge consequences. So they do tend to be more conservative

on the economics of it, right? To sort of embrace what we used to call the, excuse me, the antitrust consensus that you, you know, if a company was offering low-cost, no-cost products, you kind of left them alone. Judges, that was nice for judges because they didn't have to sort of go mucking around in these industries. And so they, if they look at this and say, this is a political case, I'm already prone not to want to

take some of these aggressive antitrust actions, I'll just back away from it. That's hard for her then. That creates a lot of difficulty of actually getting these cases over the line. In the past, we saw several of what I would describe as the more muscular cases brought by the Biden administration fail in court. Some of them did not go that far. Yeah.

Where do you think this ends up shaking out? Like, are we going to have the last word on these big cases while Gail Slater is in charge of this part of the antitrust division? Or is this going to be something that gets kicked upwards? We're in year six of the Google search case. And Google has already promised to appeal. So I think it's possible we see

The Google search case in particular resolved during Gail Slater's tenure. It's also possible not. Other cases she may well bring and then hand off to her successor. The Google case is not the only big case that Slater has on her plate. There's a case against Apple over monopoly in smartphones. She might be involved in the FTC's case against Meta over its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp accounts.

What are you watching for as someone who's been following her closely to sort of figure out where antitrust policy is going? One of the things you sometimes see in antitrust is there's some novel theories that people use to discuss cases when they actually filed them. They're pretty old school antitrust lawsuits.

What I'm looking to see from Gail Slater is the cases brought by her division is, is she advancing new theories about what antitrust enforcement is or isn't? Is speech actually an antitrust concern? FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has said, absolutely, speech is an antitrust concern. Does she actually put that in briefings to the court? I'm very much waiting to see.

If that's the case. The other thing is simply the targets she picks. You mentioned the Apple case. There's a big case against Live Nation Ticketmaster. Who does she go after next? That's, you know, in some ways it's very it's very sort of simple. It's, you know, you have to tee up targets of these lawsuits and who they've limited resources. Who does she choose to direct those resources at? And what will that tell you?

If the old way of thinking, quote, unquote, old way of thinking about antitrust in Washington, in the legal community, that mostly the concern of antitrust is our consumers getting products for low costs. We saw a deviation from that during the Biden administration.

Silicon Valley, other folks in other industries have very much wanted to return to that norm. And threw in a lot of money and support behind the Trump administration. Yeah. So I guess the thing that I'm looking for is on two fronts. The tech company really did, as President Trump said, run wild, at least in Washington, in having their way in dictating policy and how government treated them.

Are those days really truly over or was the Biden administration something of an interregnum? Is that, you know, they had a bad couple of years, but we're going back to business as usual. So that's on the sort of tech industry role in Washington, keeping an eye on that. On the antitrust front, is it what was traditionally antitrust concerns? You know, is only businesses really sort of raising prices on consumers, behaving in really

unacceptable, anti-competitive ways that gets antitrust enforcers attention? That's the way it was for many years. Or is it the aperture widening? The Biden administration really widened the aperture. What we think of as antitrust concerns is a whole range of different potentially problematic behaviors. Do we narrow the aperture back to the way it was the 80s through the Biden—excuse me, through the Obama administration?

Or do regulators, lawmakers, antitrust enforcers say we were looking at things too narrowly back then. We've now seen the light. We've now see all these behaviors potentially of concern of government. And we're not going back to the way things were.

It has not escaped probably anyone's attention that the CEOs of some of the biggest tech companies in America donated a lot of money to either the Trump inauguration or to the campaign, came to the inauguration, you know, sat there, lots of photos of them. Are they getting what they want out of Washington and out of antitrust policy? Because they did a lot of complaining during the Biden administration.

What they want from Washington is a whole range of things. Whether they get what they want on trade policy, on AI, seems like potentially, yeah. On antitrust, it seems a little bit different. It seems like they're not going to get their way at the Federal Trade Commission or at the Department of Justice.

The challenge is they do have so many interests now, right? These are not single issue companies in the way that they might be in other industries. They have their finger in so many different regulatory and law enforcement questions. So how those issues play out, you kind of really have to keep a scorecard. We won't know until four years, you know, at the end of four years, whether they won more than they lost. On the tech CEO

question sitting at the inauguration just as an aside. I don't know if it's useful, but I spoke to someone on Baccarin who's

central figure in the Trump world, very close with Gail Slater, who said everyone looked at the tech CEOs at the inauguration and thought, oh, they're being given, this is an honor, they're being given pride of place, right? They sort of won. And after four years in Biden's Washington, where they felt like they were kind of just trampled on day in and day out. And this person said, you're seeing it all wrong. These are heads on a pike.

President Trump looks at these CEOs and founders, billionaires many times over, and says, you put everything you had into keeping me from this moment, keeping me from being sworn in again, and I won. And he wanted to make a show of it. And in some way, that understanding of the political dynamic between President Trump and the tech industry is defining how Washington approaches this.

Nancy Scola, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Lizzie. Thanks for having me. Nancy Scola is a contributing writer at Politico magazine. She covers the intersection of technology and society.

And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell. Our show is edited by Elena Schwartz. TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard today, the best way to support our independent journalism is to join Slate Plus. Just head on over to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up. All right. We'll be back with more episodes next week. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.