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The Federal Trade Commission – FTC (photo by David Lat).
Ed. note: This article first appeared in this week’s Finance Docket newsletter. You can subscribe and view the full newsletter with the form below.
Jon Stewart is back (one night per week) on The Daily Show, at least until the November election. Yes, it’s sending a wave of nostalgia through millennial and Gen X viewers. Beyond that, Stewart doesn’t seem to have lost his comedic chops, or his ability to bring complicated, often wonky, topics to the masses.
Enter Stewart’s recent interview with Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Khan has been outspoken in her calls for breaking up big tech companies, comparing them to Gilded Age monopolies. Under Khan the FTC has targeted powerful companies, including Amazon, with antitrust litigation.
Stewart discussed antitrust issues with Khan, and matters got even more interesting when the conversation turned to artificial intelligence and its potential to displace human workers. “I wanted to have you on a podcast, and Apple asked us not to do it,” said Stewart, referring to restrictions his former employer placed on the content he was attempting to put out on the topic. “Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?”
Khan replied that a position like the one taken by Apple “just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.” She added that throughout the history of this country, “there was a recognition that, in the same way that you need the constitution to create checks and balances in our political sphere, you also needed the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to safeguard against concentration of economic power.”
Well, I guess we’re having the conversation now. Stewart has always been more focused on policy than his late-night peers. Let’s see more of this though.
Isn’t it more important – more entertaining, even – to hear about what a powerful government official is doing that probably impacts your daily life than to listen to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson try to explain the plot of Fast and Furious 37? Next stop: Gary Gensler on Colbert.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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