Good evening for those of you who are online. Good evening from Chicago. It's a beautiful spring day in Chicago, and thank you for joining us in the room and online. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Luis Zingales. I'm the faculty director of the Stigler Center, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, and one of the organizers of this conference. Tonight we're delighted to host a keynote conversation with the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, and the University of Chicago Professor, Eric Posner. Thank you both for being here and making the time. Before we begin, a few notes. First of all, we are on the record and live streaming, and we will post all the conference video on the Stigler Center YouTube channel. If you have questions for the speakers, we will address them in the last 15 minutes or so. Please wait for the microphone before speaking so that everybody also online can hear your brilliant questions. As usual, views expressed by guests are their own, not those of the Stigler Center or the University of Chicago. We hope that you will join us for the remainder of our conference tomorrow, which will continue in live stream. Also, we invite you to check our website for more details as well as the Stigler Center publication, ProMarket.org, and the Stigler Center podcast, Capital Isn't, which I co-host with Bethany McLean. And now, please allow me to briefly introduce our speakers.
Andrew Ferguson is Chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission since January 2025. Prior to that, he was an FTC Commissioner since March 2024. Before that, he served as Virginia's Solicitor General, Chief Counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell, and as Republican Counsel on the US Senate Judiciary Committee. He also practiced law at several Washington DC law firms. And then our own Eric Posner is the Kirkland Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. His research interests are very broad but include antitrust, constitutional law, and financial regulation. He's also a prolific author, and his most recent book is How Antitrust Failed Workers. Between 2022 and 2023, Eric served as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. And now I turn it over to the speakers.
Good evening. Thank you for that kind introduction. I consider it an honor and a privilege to address such a distinguished group. The purpose of this conference is to discuss whether increased market concentration negatively affects our marketplace of ideas. There are two assumptions hidden within that objective. The first is that it assumes that the marketplace of ideas is something we value or ought to value. And the second is an assumption that increased market concentration could undermine that value, whatever it might be. If that weren't a possibility, this would be a pretty short conference. In my comments this evening, I want to provide some brief reflections on each of those assumptions.
What value are we trying to preserve in promoting a marketplace of ideas? For Oliver Wendell Holmes, the answer to that question was simple: truth. In one of his most famous dissents, Justice Holmes argued that the best test of the truth of an opinion is its widespread acceptance by individuals engaged in a free trade of ideas. Just as success in a competitive marketplace can demonstrate the utility of a product to consumers, so too a consensus forged by the free and open exchange of ideas is the best test of the truthfulness of that consensus. But Justice Holmes did not end there. For him, the truth arrived at by a free trade of ideas is the only ground upon which an idea should find its expression in our law. In other words, the marketplace of ideas is valuable not only because it helps us to discern what is true, but also because it promotes a political order where consensus is forged by the exercise of public persuasion rather than imposed by the exercise of public power or by the collusion of actors wielding private power, or as we've seen recently, the collusion of public and private power together.
Characteristic of Justice Holmes, this opinion was personal, pragmatic, and progressive. Holmes had nearly died fighting for the United States in the Battle of Ball's Bluff. The great contestation of slavery ended with that war, but as he put it, he realized that time has upset many fighting faiths. He believed that political consensus could and should be won not on the battlefield, but in the free trade of ideas. For Holmes, to embrace persuasion over power stands at the very heart of our theory of the Constitution, obliging us to be eternally vigilant against attempts to restrain or limit the free exchange of ideas among citizens. If Holmes is correct, freedom of speech, which makes the marketplace of ideas possible, is a value deeply woven into the very fabric of our constitutional order and our society. If market concentration negatively impacts our marketplace of ideas, it is because it limits rather than expands the free exchange of ideas among a citizenry.
Now, the marketplace of ideas is of course a metaphor, and as such, it has its limitations. For one thing, the widespread adoption of an idea does not necessarily make it true. Nor is an idea's limited adoption necessarily a bar to its truthfulness. My own view is that there are objective truths in the law of nature discoverable by the application of human reason. And those ideas are true even if they are believed and advanced by a very small minority of the community. But history reveals that those truths are not always readily discoverable. And even once discovered or revealed, what those truths portend for any particular community at any particular time or place is not always obvious. Reasonable minds can and do disagree about them. Within the boundaries of objective truth, then, there is much room for debate. And that is where the idea of a marketplace of ideas matters the most. Both for discovering the truth as part of the process by which human beings apply their reason to nature, and for determining how to apply those truths prudently to the circumstances in which a political community finds itself.
When we speak positively about the necessity of a marketplace of ideas for an open, free, and democratic society, we're not thinking about the market for PR men, Madison Avenue, advertisers, and other paid purveyors of propaganda, which all too often includes members of the legacy press. Rather, we are thinking about the free, open, and informed exchange of ideas among ordinary citizens motivated by a desire to seek the truth and serve the common good of their community. And not only that, we are also thinking about a truly public forum through which each citizen, not just society's elites, have equal capacity to express their own opinions, to have them heard and responded to by others, and for the consensus emerging from that exchange to have a genuine effect on the public policy of the society in which the exchanges take place.
I'm thinking about the Vice President providing a detailed response to a policy criticism by a random anon on X. I'm thinking about the fresh perspectives one finds among academics and journalists who no longer have to depend on institutional gatekeepers that have long abandoned their core principles to educate, to inform, and to challenge abuses of public power. I'm thinking about an X thread on foreign policy written by an informed citizen lacking any credentials from the elite gatekeeper institutions which actually can influence public debate among policymakers. I'm thinking about the dissident physician who takes to social media to challenge his colleagues' consensus on a public health crisis and whom history proves to have been absolutely correct. I'm thinking about the capacity of the individual citizen to amplify through sharing or reposting on online platforms his or her own opinion, cause, or policy, and to coordinate civic action to effectuate the realization of that policy into law.
These are all examples of how the digital revolution has opened new avenues for citizens to participate in the political and civic process. Like any other, this revolution has its promises and its pitfalls, and we have to collectively decide how to balance the two. Yet, if the greatest promise of social media is that it facilitates a mass expansion of the capacity of the citizen to engage in a free and open exchange of ideas, its greatest pitfall will forever be the temptation of social media companies to short-circuit that marketplace by censoring and limiting opinions with which they or others, all too often the Democrat Party, don't agree. And because they occupy a new sector of our economy, these platforms often benefit financially from a relatively lean set of laws and regulations governing the conduct of their businesses. Social media companies and the free exchange of ideas they facilitate are therefore vulnerable to outside parties who seek to create, by censorship and control, a more favorable information environment to advance their own social or political agendas.
It should be obvious to everyone here that if the social media space is highly concentrated with incumbents facing little to no competition from rivals, it will be easier for platforms to engage in censorship, whether on their own initiative, in collusion with each other, or at the behest of left-wing public officials, regulators, advertisers, or other DNC interest groups. In other words, increased concentration can negatively impact the marketplace of ideas because it facilitates a variety of censorious practices. And censorious practices, whether carried out by state actors, private aggregations of power, or a combination of the two, is inimical to the free expression that makes our marketplace of ideas possible.
While I think such practices do some symbolic harm to our political culture by undermining the value of free speech in society, they also constitute a deliberate abuse of a social media platform's market power and a potential violation of our antitrust laws. When social media companies practice censorship, they inflict harm not just on those users whose opinions are excluded altogether or limited in dissemination, but also on any user who is attracted to the platform because it facilitates a genuine marketplace of ideas. To be sure, antitrust law cares about the mistreatment of the speaker, but it is no less concerned with the injury inflicted on the user who wishes to ingest ideas on a platform. If part of the attractiveness of a social media platform is that it facilitates a genuine marketplace of ideas, a highly concentrated, less competitive market will make it easier for social media companies to degrade the quality of their product through censorship without facing any competitive consequences.
If a social media platform can make its product less attractive through censorious practices, violations of its terms of service, or through excessive advertisements, and if it can do so without a proportionate loss in its customer base, there are strong reasons to suspect that it is not operating in a competitive environment to the detriment of its users, which could be a violation of the antitrust or consumer protection laws, depending, of course, on the facts. For this reason, the Federal Trade Commission recently requested public comment on the experience of users whose access to social media platforms has been denied, demonetized, or limited due to the contents of their posts, their affiliations, or most terrifyingly, conduct that took place off the platform.
To my mind, the best way to preserve some of the promise of social media as a digital marketplace of ideas is to acknowledge that the quality of its product depends in part on its commitment to free speech to its users. Consumers and content creators want a platform committed to free and open exchange of ideas. If they wanted left-wing apparatchiks to curate or inspect their ideas prior to public dissemination, they would content themselves to sit in a think tank lecture or inside a university classroom, or they could read The Atlantic. Of course, not all consumers or producers of ideas on social media are seeking the truth by engaging in diverse ideas and clickbait. Users have diverse interests on social media. Some satisfy their curiosity with clickbait. Others might be doomscrolling. They might be trolling. Or they may be seeking consolation in the values of their own beliefs or prejudices. In those cases, we are not faced with a consumer or producer of ideas who intends to engage in the free marketplace of ideas. But that doesn't mean that the prospect of engaging in a free and open exchange of ideas is not part of what attracts even those users to a social media platform.
You can't doomscroll without an abundance of pessimistic perspectives. You can't troll without there being individuals whose opinions you see fit to lampoon. And you can't find consolation in the validation of your own beliefs without accepting that others do not share those beliefs as you do. Every user of social media, from the lowbrow meme makers to the self-anointed policers of misinformation, is invested in the preservation of free expression on social media.
Because users of social media prefer it as a form of free expression and as such a facilitator of a marketplace of ideas, high concentration in the social media space leading to censorious practices poses an identifiable harm to consumer welfare. While we cannot always assume that consumer welfare will dovetail with the preservation of important constitutional values like the freedom of speech, it is a fortunate coincidence for an individual like me who is committed to freedom of speech as I am that the vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws can promote this important social and constitutional value. I have emphasized tonight the dangers of censorship in a highly concentrated media market. I have not spoken about the dangers of quote misinformation end quote. This is not only because I categorically dismiss elite and Democrat hysteria over misinformation altogether, but also because I believe that a highly concentrated social media space generates far more opportunities for elite and left-wing manipulation than it does for populist so-called misinformation.
One prominent left-wing scholar once described manipulation as the exercise of power in secret, unknown to those who are influenced and lacking any kind of public legitimation. As Missouri v. Murthy revealed, when a society combines high concentration with opacity surrounding content moderation decisions that control the dissemination of information on social media, you have a recipe for elite manipulation of the public under the guise of combating misinformation. Fortunately, the solution to manipulation and misinformation in the social media space is the same: to ensure that social media platforms meet consumer demand for a product that protects freedom of speech, thereby facilitating a genuine marketplace of ideas through which we might test the truth of our own claims as well as those of our fellow citizens. Thank you, and I look forward to our discussion.
Thank you very much. Chairman Ferguson, your thesis is admirable in two ways. One is that it's so responsive to the topic of the conference. So, I'm sure people appreciate that. And the other is that it's extremely clear and crisp. And so let me summarize it like this. First, consumers want a free exchange of ideas. They go on to social media platforms in search of them. Second, the platforms, and I want to ask you about this, don't actually do that or haven't done that. Instead, they've engaged in what you call censorious conduct or content moderation, or they limit speech, however you want to put it. And then therefore you're arguing that I guess maybe presumptively or you're claiming just as a matter of fact the platforms aren't actually engaged in competition. So on the first, is it true that consumers are actually or users are actually going onto social media platforms seeking the free exchange of ideas? You mentioned that some go on to like have fun to troll other people, maybe to torment or bully people. It also seems to be the case that people don't often want to actually hear the ideas of people who differ with them to a great deal. So what's the basis of your view? It sounds like an idealized view of how people behave rather than the reality.
I do think it's the reality. Even people who are pretty strictly aligned with one side or the other do derive pretty obvious pleasure from engaging in good or bad faith, it depends, with ideas from the other side. I meant what I said. You can't troll unless there are people around that you disagree with. And so even someone who goes on just to, you know, bully, I'm not going to say harass, but even if someone is going on just because they want to pick on people they disagree with, you have to have access to those ideas. Number one. Number two, I think the reaction to the censorship epidemic of 2020, the public reaction sort of revealed a strong preference in favor of having access to ideas that you agree with, that you disagree with, or that you're not sure about. And I think sort of the success of X after it was purchased by someone who had a relatively open commitment to free speech, especially after everyone promised it was going to fail when it was originally purchased, is pretty good evidence that there's a preference for this. Now, it's also obvious that I don't think consumers want sort of a no holds barred access to everything including categorically illegal stuff. It's definitely true that people like receiving some content more than others. But I think it's equally true that the average consumer does not want a platform where particular ideas are just categorically excluded. And if they did, you would expect there to be platforms where the curation was aimed exclusively and expressly to just one side or the other. I guess BlueSky is a potential example which has not exactly taken off. I also think a lot of consumers began engaging with these social media platforms when they were quite openly touting their commitment to free speech and a free exchange of ideas. And then over time that commitment somewhat eroded. And one of the things that the FTC asked in this initial phase of the investigation, asked consumers to weigh in on was, what was your understanding of the terms of service for these platforms when you signed up on them? And then were you being kicked off of these platforms in consistent with their terms of service? And a lot of these platforms had often very flowery commitments to free exchange of ideas in their terms of service. And a lot of consumers think that they didn't live up to them. And President Trump in 2020 actually issued an EO asking the FTC to look into this. The FTC did not, but that's one of the things that we're examining now.
Right. And I do want to ask you about that. But first, a number of people have complained that Musk has kicked them off X or deplatformed them or whatever the term is. And then I'm not on X myself, but I gather that you can't really avoid Musk's tweets or X's or whatever they're called. So I mean so he starts off with I think you're right, commitment to freedom of expression. He loosens the moderation rules, but what should we think about what's happening now? Is this evidence that there's not competition in this type of social media? The fact that he's deplatforming people.
I don't know as an empirical matter whether he's deplatforming people. I simply don't know. I know I'm sure some people, as is true of every platform, are removed for violating terms of service. I also think it's very obvious that people are allowed to say and express ideas on X that you are not allowed to on other social media platforms. I mean, Facebook, for example, still has a vaccine misinformation policy. And then in terms of avoiding Musk's tweets, it might just be my algorithm that gives me ready access to them. He's also one of the world's most famous men and is an important leader in the most important government on Earth. I don't think it's terribly surprising that the algorithm would be putting his ideas in front of people. I don't think that suggests a competition problem. Nor do I think the removal of any particular user does. But I think in so far as the argument is there wasn't sort of widespread idea-specific censorship especially in 2020 and 2021, you're just asking me to not believe my lying eyes. Sure, there quite obviously was.
I want to come back to this point about exchange of information and then one of the speakers earlier today reminded us network effects and you would think that if people want to exchange ideas, be exposed to new ideas, you'd want as big a platform as possible. And that seems to lead you in the direction of monopoly. So how do you reconcile your view that the best use of a platform is exchange of ideas among as many people as possible but your desire as well to have competition in the social media sector?
Yeah. So I do not think that a particular platform's propensity to censorship is categorically an indication of monopoly power or it's categorically an abuse of market power. Honestly, the sort of social media problem that has concerned me more before the purchase of X was the sort of eerie similarity of the censorship policies across all of these platforms, including the almost identically coterminous decision to eject Parler from the online world entirely at the exact same time to get President Trump off of all the social media platforms within a couple hours of each other. The risk of collusion, which is made easier by an absence of competition, is what concerns me more. And I've written about this, but I think in so far as I don't think you said this but if you did just to clarify, the mere fact that a platform engages in censorship is not itself an indication of market power. The thing that concerned I think a lot of Americans in 2020 and 2021 was that all these platforms seem to basically move in lockstep on a variety of social issues. And the reality of this became even clearer once we had discovery in Murthy v. Missouri. They all were adopting the same policies often in consultation with the government or with lists of experts and they all were using the same experts. That concerns me the most is the idea of a handful of market participants, they're just going to agree on what contours their product will have. And when your product is the exchange of ideas, that's extremely dangerous.
Right. And I did want to ask you about that. So, but you quickly went from the, and as an antitrust lawyer, I'm sure you're thinking about this, but you quickly went from the fact that they were all doing the same thing at the same time to the possibility that they were agreeing with each other to do the same thing at the same time. And as you know better than anybody else here or as well as anybody else here, parallelism occurs all the time in markets. It can be prices, it can be quality, it can be all the rest. It can be all kinds of things. And so to use the examples you gave, one you mentioned pushing Trump off the platforms. This was immediately in response to the election controversy. As a test matter, right?
But no, it happened. It happened after. It does not follow it was a response. It is entirely possible that they talk to each other about kicking off the world's most famous man. And I think that's the issue I'm concerned about is if there are only a handful, that sort of collusion is very easy. Or if there's a willing partner in the government to sort of communicate amongst the various platforms what the rules are going to be. It's very easy to do if there's only a small handful of them.
Right. But so you're worried that they might have entered into an agreement, but you don't have any evidence.
No. And I nor did I say that. My contention is, same with the ejection of Parler, these decisions being made coterminously could just be conscious or unconscious parallelism, could also be the result of collusion. Collusion is made easier if there are fewer participants and that is the concern that I'm discussing.
Okay. You also mentioned just now your concern that the government during the Biden administration pressured the social media platforms to censor, as you would put it, limit what people were saying about COVID. Now that doesn't sound like an antitrust problem at least. Do you think that's an antitrust problem if the government says to these platforms, look, you're allowing speech on your platforms that are causing people not to get vaccinated with the result that this epidemic is going to get much worse. Is that an antitrust problem or is it a different kind of problem or is it not a problem at all?
I think it's a problem and it isn't necessarily an antitrust problem. So, I think Murthy itself revealed two things going on. There was pressure applied. The court said it wasn't coercive for First Amendment purposes, but there's definitely pressure, consultation, collusion between the platforms and the government. There also was repeated references to the record of all the platforms consulting with private outside experts on what the rules should be. That is potentially an antitrust problem if there's an agreement among them that we're going to use these experts to help us set the rules. Even if the sort of collusion pressure from the government isn't an antitrust problem, it is a problem for a civic society. And it is a problem made easier if there are fewer market participants. If there's a wider smattering of market participants, it's harder for the government to get on the horn with everyone and pressure them equally. It's easier basically to buck the government because there are more people. It's harder for the government to apply pressure across the board. If there's just a handful of these companies that the government has to pressure, it's just easier to pull that off. And even if that's not an antitrust problem directly, like that conduct isn't an antitrust problem directly because of nor pennington to interstate action or whatever, I don't think it follows that it's a we throw up our hands and say oh well antitrust laws can't address this directly. That is a problem and it is a problem made easier by concentration in the market.
Yeah, I read the Murthy opinion and I guess I just had a different impression. I'm curious, maybe I misread. So I read Alito's concurrence which sort of lays out the strongest case and what I got the sense what was going on is you have a bunch of government officials probably panicking talking to Facebook and a bunch of other these social media platforms and saying look there's a pandemic going on people are dying there's this misinformation being circulated which we think is causing some people not to get vaccinated which of course will harm other people through contagion. So Facebook please stop allowing people to share this information it's causing as much harm or more harm than other types of policies that you have against bullying or harassment or what have you. Now that just sounds to me like the government like very strongly trying to encourage people in the private sector to act in a way that would advance the public good. Is that pressure or is that sort of unacceptable pressure in your view for the government to say to these independent institutions we want you to do that or is there something else going on?
So I think it depends on sort of whose version you believe. I don't know if you read the district court opinion. The district court's view was this wasn't just hey do us a solid or do the country a solid. It was like do it or else.
What is the or else? That's what I didn't get like...
What was the threat, the implicit threat, however you saw it? I think it's the same threat that a government can always potentially inflict on any marketplace participant, which is: we can make your life difficult. The regulators can show up, they can audit, they can investigate, they can cost you a lot of money. And the path of least resistance is: do what we say. I mean, this is not dissimilar to the issue the Supreme Court confronted with the New York financial regulators calling up people and saying, 'Quit doing business with the NRA.' Okay. Or else. And the 'or else' is just: we have a tremendous array of investigative tools. Those tools are expensive when applied to you, even if we don't win at the end of the day. So knuckle under. And you know, the court's conclusion for state action purposes was it wasn't sufficient to transform the social media companies into arms of the state. I just don't think it follows from that sort of doctrinal nicety that the problem isn't government officials backed with potential coercive power, formal and informal, calling up social media companies and saying the following ideas are to be prescribed. And you know, having worked in the government a fair amount, I think your view is either very charitable or maybe a little naive about what happens on a phone between a private company and its regulator.
So, the government shouldn't call up private institutions and tell them, 'Do that, stop saying this,' or 'We're going to punish you.' I do generally think the government should not threaten private people with punishment because of things they're saying. Okay. Unless they are criminal.
All right. Good to know. Well, let's talk about the advertiser boycott issue. Also, you said in the—you've said it before that you're worried about—you think that advertisers colluded or might have colluded to boycott social media platforms that displayed speech that they didn't like. Could you tell us more about that?
Definitely did not say they did collude. I said they might have. Yes. Yeah. If that—this risk is real and needs to be confronted and taken seriously. I mean, look, like part of the way that people who have ideas get them out there is they make a living by propagating ideas. You are one of them. You get this, you know, incredibly protected job at the University of Chicago to sort of say whatever you want. Other people participating in the marketplace of ideas can say what they want as long as they can get the eyeballs to pay attention to them. And part of the way that you sort of make sure you can keep getting the eyeballs is advertising. And this isn't just true of social media platforms. This is true for a huge array of just individual speakers who have views both acceptable to the elites and dissident—bloggers, YouTubers, people on X, all over the place. Part of the way that they get their ideas out there and they can afford to keep getting the ideas out there is if they can attract advertisers. If advertisers get into a back room and agree, 'We aren't going to put our stuff next to this guy or woman or his or her ideas,' right? That is a form of concerted refusal to deal. The antitrust laws condemn concerted refusals to deal. Now, of course, because of the First Amendment, we don't have a categorical antitrust prohibition on boycotts. When a boycott ceases to be economic for purposes of the antitrust laws and becomes purely First Amendment activity, the courts have not been super clear. Sort of a 'we know it when we see it' type of thing. But the concern I raised in that concurrence, with which I am deeply concerned, is if advertisers either get in a room together and say, 'We're not going to do advertising next to this idea,' right? Or they say, 'We're going to agree that this third party decides which ideas get advertisement and which don't, we're just going to let them do it,' right? We are going to dry up the idea because we are drying up the person who has the idea's ability to make money off of that idea. And unless those people can get tenure, they need to keep attracting eyeballs because that's how they make a living. And drying up the advertising will dry up the idea. And so that—the risk of an advertiser boycott is a pretty serious risk to the free exchange of ideas.
Just parenthetically, having tenure does not guarantee you any eyeballs and are free. But we write for very small—
That's right. Just a few pairs of eyeballs.
So, but although having gone to law school, I know they pay a lot to see and hear you.
So yeah, well that's true. So the—again, though, I just want to press you on this a bit. We see parallel conduct. We see a bunch of advertisers who are worried about their brand. And as rational economic actors, they don't want their advertisements to be on a platform that people associate with stuff they abhor, whether on the left or on the right. And so just seeing them pulling their ads from platforms that host offensive speech in whatever way, you know, it could be just speech that the advertiser itself doesn't like—that's not a problem. It's only if they get in the back room. But when we talk about advertisers, we're talking about thousands of companies around the country or around the world. There's no back room that they could all fit in together. Is it plausible at all that they engage in collusion? Or you mentioned also that they consulted with third parties, but it would seem to me, you know, this is just business as usual. There are third parties out there that study brand management and how people react to how the affiliation, the association of an advertisement with a particular type of speech might affect business. What's the basis for actually trying to investigate in this kind of setting?
So, on can they all get into a back room and agree? Having represented trade associations, the answer is yes. Have they? I don't know. No one's looked at it. At least, you know, no one has publicly looked at it. And but you know, is this a possibility? Of course. Number one. Number two, there are lots of advertisers. They tend to use a small handful of advertising agencies to make a lot of these decisions for them. There also are a lot of advertisers, but there aren't that many huge advertisers. And a decision by a bunch of huge advertisers to cut off access could have massive downstream economic effects on speakers who need access to advertising. But again, you know, I don't think you're saying this—the fact that there is, you know, simultaneous identical conduct, this is true across all of antitrust law, does not mean there's an antitrust violation. But you know, where there is smoke, there is not always fire, but there might be. And the whole point of having the antitrust enforcement agencies is when you see smoke, at least take a look. And I think, you know, this could have been for a number of reasons, but one of the most prominent—you can call it brand safety managers if you want—was GARM. And you know, they confronted a single antitrust lawsuit from X and dissolved almost immediately. And it doesn't follow necessarily that they were committing the antitrust violations that they were accused of. But I do think that this risk is sufficient enough and if it got really bad would dry up enough access to ideas that it is incumbent upon the antitrust forces to take it seriously and if they think there's something there to look at it.
