the democrat leader in the us senate says president biden's multi—billion dollar covid—19 relief plan will be implemented, with or without support from the republican party. the number of coronavirus cases in the us has now exceeded 25 million. riot police in the netherlands have used water cannons to break up protests against coronavirus restrictions. demonstrators in the city of eindhoven had gathered in defiance of a 9pm curfew. some threw fireworks and looted supermarkets. there were similar clashes in amsterdam. the mexican president, andres manuel lopez obrador, who has been criticised for playing down the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, has tested positive for the virus. the president, who's resisted pressure to wear masks or introduce tougher covid restrictions, said that he had mild symptoms.

now on bbc news, it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. can and should anything be done to halt the inexorable rise of the western world's global technology giants — the likes of amazon, google and facebook? over the past decade, we have seen these tech titans come to dominate data collection, cloud computing, retail, social media, publishing — the list goes on. but now, there is pushback from anti—monopoly lawyers and sceptical politicians. my guest, american lawyer lina khan, is in the vanguard of the movement to tame big tech. but whose interest is she serving?

lina khan in dallas, texas, welcome to hardtalk. thanks for having me. do you believe there is a new momentum behind the push to tame the big, the giant technology companies in the western world? yes, i think there absolutely is. i think we have seen a transformation in public opinion over the last few years and the public case for how these firms have so much power and how they are wielding it in ways that harm our economy and our society i think have only become more apparent, such that now we see a wave of lawsuits — anti—trust lawsuits as well as new regulatory proposals —

that would curb their power. but in a funny sort of way, what we have learned through the covid—19 pandemic is just how useful, how incredibly important these technology companies are — i'm thinking of the likes of amazon, apple, google. we perhaps rely on them more now in this very restricted world of lockdowns than we ever have relied upon them before. i think that's absolutely right and i think what the pandemic has underscored for us is the degree to which these firms essentially provide infrastructure for the digital age. these firms control the core infrastructure for both commerce and communications and they are providing very valuable services, but it also means that you have a small group of private executives that are ultimately setting the rules of who gets

to use the infrastructure and on what terms, and that approach is historically at odds with how we have treated infrastructure which has always been accountable to public rules and has had to meet a higher set of regulations. but in your daily life — as you are right now at home in dallas, texas — are you thinking to yourself, as you use your laptop and your smartphone, are you thinking to yourself "oh, my god! these services that i am getting actually don't work. they're utterly dysfunctional and they need to be changed" because i dare say many people watching this around the world are not thinking that. that's a great question. i think two things. one is i think even when services are good for consumers, they can be hurting a whole set of other interests, be it workers, be it new business formation, be it democracy at large. and second, you know, we — it is really difficult to know what we are missing out on. one reason why the us in particular has focused so much on competition policy is because there has been a view that competition and forcing businesses

to compete on the merits of their products and services is really one of the best ways to guarantee that consumers and users are getting the best products and services that are available. and when you instead have firms that gain monopoly power and are exercising that monopoly power in ways that inhibit new firms, new competitors, from competing on the merits of their own products and services, you know, you can lose years and years of innovation, years and years of superior products that users just never had access to because the incumbents, the giants, snuffed them out. so i think that counterfactual can be quite difficult to get at, but it is something that is very real to consider. right, well, i want to dig deeper into that notion, that competition is not working and is not delivering for the public and specific sort of ways in which you can make that case a little later, but i do actually want to track backjust for a short while and ask you how you got into this, because your back story is fascinating.

you came to the us from the uk as a kid with your family. you went through university, i believe you thought for a while you wanted to be a journalist and then you got very preoccupied with the law, but in particular with anti—trust law and the way that the us capitalist system works and the way its regulated by law. what — what drove your fascination with anti—trust? so one of the firstjobs i had after university was as a policy researcher and journalist, and my beat was to document how markets and economies across the us economy had really evolved over decades. so i did these deep dives into all sorts of sectors — including agriculture, chicken farming, the seed industry, the airline industry, the book publishing industry, rental cars — and what became clear after doing these deep dives is that there had been a systemic trend across the us economy towards increasing concentration across the board. so across sectors, markets had

come to be controlled by a very small number of companies. and this was creating all sorts of problems for us as consumers but also for us as workers, as citizens, it had contributed to a decline in new business formation, and so here was this systemic problem across the economy and it was interesting to encounter because the us has a set of anti—trust, anti—monopoly laws on the books. and so i got really deep into researching how it was that on the one hand, we had all of these laws that were designed to prevent the exact situation that we were now confronting, and that led me to understand how, in the us, we have undergone this wholesale ideological transformation crosstalk. well, let me stop you — let me stop you there, because i think this is really important. what you appear to believe is that the way in which the us government and the courts have

interpreted anti—trust laws changed fundamentally in and around the 19605 and �*70s, and it became much more driven by a very simple notion of whether the consumer, the customer, was being served in terms of price more than anything else, and as long as that was the case, as long as the customer was getting a decent low price and it appeared to be the customer was being well served, then anti—trust laws did not come into play, and your contention is that there is more to it than low price? am i right? that's right. foundationally, the us anti—trust laws were passed in order to curb concentrations of economic power. there was a recognition that in the same way that concentrations of political power — say, in a king — would undermine democracy, the concentration of economic power in the hands of industrial titans would also undermine democracy.

and so, there were these democratic roots to how anti—trust laws were passed and how they were enforced. when we underwent this revolution instead to focus the anti—trust laws on consumer welfare, they effectively became focused on efficiency. and so the idea was that if companies are merging but that they can promise that they will lower prices, that they will produce more goods and services, that that means there were no other problems. but surely you cannot argue that the sort of service being delivered, for example by amazon — which has become a real target company of yours — you cannot argue that their service is not both and tens of millions of people — notjust in the us but right around the world — have turned to amazon, in the face of many, many alternatives. for online retail, online shopping, they go to amazon because it is very efficient and relatively cheap, and that is, surely, a success story. i think it's worth

interrogating what we mean when we say amazon is efficient. there is one thing that is operational efficiency and then there's another thing when it is basicallyjust increased bargaining power over retailers, over brands and over third party merchants. i think there is an open question as to whether consumer prices have fallen. amazon goods and services, you know, prices change hundreds of times a day and so there is kind of an instability of prices that limits our ability to actually do one—on—one comparisons. crosstalk. but in a capitalist system, isn't the ultimate arbiter what the consumer does? and the consumer turns to amazon. as i say, they have other choices. there are many other online retailers in most capitalist economic models across the world and people choose amazon because they like what it offers. i'm just struggling to see how, in a competitive marketplace — which still, to me, it looks like it is — you can claim that amazon is breaching anti—trust rules. so amazon in the us captures more than 50%

of all online commerce. that's a very significant amount. and during the pandemic, its share has only increased. it also, importantly, not only sells its own products as a first party retailer but also serves as a host to third party merchants. and there has been terrific journalism showing how amazon actually exploits those third party merchants in order to, you know, basically mine that marketplace for information that it then uses to actually, you know, directly compete with those businesses and under — you know, demote them in its rankings. and so i think there is a real question here about, you know, whether these third parties are able to compete on a level playing field. you know, the real essence of competition is the question of whether you can compete on the merits of your own product. so if you have a third party merchant that introduces a new, say, vacuum cleaner. 50% of all online sales are made through amazon, so it has to sell on amazon. all of a sudden, amazon sees that the sales of this vacuum

cleaner are off the charts. what it does often times is uses that information to go create a direct replica and then all of a sudden, amazon's replica is number one in the rankings and this original merchant that took the risk is nowhere to be seen. this is an age—old argument, goes back to the supreme court judge louis brandeis, a century ago and his phrase about "the curse of bigness". you just do not like big, successful capitalist corporations, it seems, and the big tech companies with their trillion—dollar values these days are the biggest of all. but is it enough to want to bring them downjust because they are very big and very successful? so, two things. i think there is actually ample evidence that these firms have actually not grown and — you know, to the heights that they have simply through competing on the merits, right? in the us, as well as in the uk, we have a series of competition rules that

clarify what is fair conduct, what is pro—competitive conduct and what is unfair conduct or anti—competitive conduct. and so, you know, if you are a grocery store and a new grocery store emerges across the street, if you go and burn down that store, that is not considered fair competition, right? there are all sorts of rules that limit what kind of conduct you can engage in. i think we have seen from the lawsuits filed in the us recently — in particular against facebook and google — is that at key moments, these firms engaged in predatory and coercive tactics that were designed to maintain their dominance and squash rivals, rather and so i think those are the questions that we really need to be asking. separately, i do think we are at a stage of assessing whether these firms are now providing essential infrastructure to us as citizens, as consumers, as businesses. and if so, traditionally, we have applied a very different set of rules to infrastructure, right? i mean, the railroads which were also monopolistic 100,120 years ago, we require them to abide by non—discrimination rules, we applied rate caps that

limited how much they could charge because we understood that when companies are playing a gatekeeper role, they can use the gatekeeper power in all sorts of extortionary, and so even if we're not gonna break them up, we need to apply a set of rules that limits how they can use their power. crosstalk. and so that's really the conversation we need to have. right, raises the question whether your view of what should happen will actually happen — i.e., is the us government really ready for a very big fight with the technology giants who wield an awful lot of power and influence in the united states today. you spent some time working inside the federal trade commission, which has a key role to play here. what do you believe today? do you think right now, the us government is ready for that kind of a showdown? the us government has already entered that kind of showdown, right? the justice department

in octoberfiled a landmark lawsuit against google. the federal trade commission in decemberfiled a landmark case against facebook. we also have somewhere between 48—50 state attorneys general that have brought their own separate lawsuits — two against google and one against facebook — so we are already in the throes of this fight when it comes to anti—trust litigation. yeah, but it's not clear, it's not clear how hard the government is going to press this, and it is not clear whether they are going to press it all the way to calling for the break—up of some of these companies. there's a professor at colombia law school, whom you know well — tim wu — who argues the only remedy here is to break up companies like facebook, for example. facebook being sued on the basis that it has gone too far in its monopolistic practices by taking over whatsapp and instagram. timothy wu says the only remedy is to force facebook to relinquish those branches like instagram and whatsapp. do you believe that

can and will happen? well, i think there is no doubt the government is requesting from the court that facebook be forced to divest whatsapp and instagram, so the government is already pushing for the break—up. i think we have to see how the arguments unfold in court and what remedy, ultimately, the court decides in this case. that said, you know, lawsuits — antitrust lawsuits are only one path to achieving break—ups. you can also achieve break—ups through legislation — which, in the past, the us has done again when dealing with infrastructure industries, be it railroads, telecoms firms, banks — and so if lawsuits do not get us there, i think there is a question about whether new laws could. yeah. but the point is, one looks

atjoe biden and what he has said about big tech and the need for government to intervene, to change the rules of the game, and his signals are quite mixed. for example, those who know best say that his favourite pick to run antitrust matters at the department ofjustice is a woman called renata hesse, who used to work for one of the tech giants and who, in the past, has talked about amazon in a very positive way, saying it has added hundreds of billions of dollars of value to the us economy, it's a brilliant innovator. it doesn't necessarily sound likejoe biden�*s top team are gonna be as keen in on this as you are. it's a great question, and i think we are all eagerly awaiting to see who he picks for that key role. you know, public advocacy groups in the us are very

concerned that it could go to somebody who has a history of representing some of the same companies that the justice department is currently investigating and litigating against, so i think that will be a key signal. but i also think there... crosstalk. as a matter of interest, what do you think of renata hesse? another quote from her — "the reason why people use google search generally," she says, "is because they like it better" which goes back to the argument we were having earlier about the importance of consumer choice and judging consumer choice about what people actually do. she doesn't sound like a woman who is determined to go after any of these companies. well, i think that argument in particular is one that has now been significantly rebutted by the evidence. actually, the uk's competition and markets authority did this fantastic report, very closely studying the search market and search advertising markets in particular, and noting all the ways in which actually google�*s dominance inhibits competition on the merits, and so it's not just that users like google better and so they go to google for that reason, but that google has instead

systematically deprived rivals of the type of traffic, of the type of data that would allow them to compete on their merits. so i do think that that view — which my understanding is she expressed a few years ago — is increasingly out of date and not really corresponding to the new facts and realities that we are seeing on the ground. why do you think that in europe, for example, there appears to be a much greater readiness to hit these companies hard and very soon. for example, the european competition commissioner margrethe vestager has said that the digital markets act and the other legislation that the commission is pushing forward will involve a willingness to impose "structural remedies, divestitures — that sort of thing". she has been very explicit with the stick, rather than the carrot. why? is it because there in europe, they are less pressured by the financial clout of these big american tech giants? it's a good question and,

you know, i would say that these giants have so much at stake that they are really able to, you know, throw a lot of money in all sorts ofjurisdictions. i think europe has been quite clear—eyed about the problem. the european commission has investigated and brought lawsuits against google for antitrust violations three times now. i think the real key issue that they have run into is the problem of remedy. and so in each of those cases, the remedy ultimately ended up being quite weak and i think that is what has then pushed the commission to really argue in favour of structural rules, of broader marketplace—wide rules, and so it will be really interesting to see what happens there. let's turn the focus from the raw economic power of these companies to their

power as content providers, as — well, some would say publishers, although they do not like that phrase. it has come into sharp focus over the last four years in the donald trump presidency and in particular, the last few weeks with the ending of the trump presidency, and with trump finally being taken off twitter and facebook. and then the right wing conservative social media platform parler effectively being shut down because it lost its amazon servers. in these various different ways, were you happy as a — if i may say so — a progressive person, that these things happened? or, were you extremely worried because again, it pointed to the power of big tech, the unaccountable power, to actually decide what gets published and what does not? i think it's quite coherent to think both that facebook and twitter and belatedly youtube did the right thing to remove trump's messages, and that their unilateral ability to do so is a problem for democracy, right? but the context here was that messages from trump had helped incite a violent and deadly insurrection and additional communications from him posed

an immediate threat. but this also demonstrated the remarkable way in which private power is now governing our public sphere. and so, ithink, you know, the question of whether, on any given instance, these firms do or do not remove harmful messages is besides the point. the question is really who is setting the rules? is it democratically accountable public officials, or it is really a small number of private executives? right. but does it give you pause that angela merkel, alexei navalny, the russian opposition politician, tony blair, all of these individuals expressed deep alarm that twitter, facebook could just unilaterally take donald trump off their platform. there is a real issue here of freedom of expression, is there not? and who actually controls the way in which information flows in the 21st century? i think those are the central questions that we are grappling with, right? the reason that there was

so much alarm at the unilateral ability of these firms to cut off the president of the united states is because these firms are now serving as core communications infrastructure, right? if there were adequate competition or if there were real alternatives, then i don't think you would not have seen the same level of alarm. crosstalk. butjust finally then, is it time — because they are acting like publishers and they are making editorial decisions and judging content — is it time for them to be treated as publishers under us law? which they never have been in the past, and which is one more incredibly important a bone of contention. i think the time is absolutely

right to reconsider whether the section 230 regime in the us that we have had that exempts these firms from liability for the content that they host, whether that is still right. i think we have seen that, you know, in many ways it doesn't make sense any more — especially given that these firms�* business models — facebook and google�*s in particular — incentivise them to promote hateful speech, propaganda, disinformation, and so i think the business model also raises questions about whether they should not really be liable here. very briefly, lina khan, will these giants — thinking of amazon, google, facebook — will they be with us in their current form in the size they currently are, or even bigger, in ten years�* time, or not? it's a great question. you know, i think it will really depend on the courage of public governments to take on these firms and ensure that their core infrastructure is really working for the public and notjust a small number of private executives. and you think, therefore, the answer is they will be brought down, they will be tamed, or not? i think we are at a point where it seems like the us, at least, is finally interested in doing so and we have a strong history of doing so —

you know, in the first gilded age where we dealt with the first era of big monopolies. so i am hopeful that we'll be able to draw on that tradition and do so again. lina khan, thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thanks for having me. hello. monday will start with widespread frost and ice after a wintry weekend which, of course, brought some significant snow in places. it won't be the last covid—secure snowman we see sent in to us this winter and, hopefully, sunday's weather did bring a bit of fun at least. but of course, more people have to be out in the morning,

and so that does mean some difficult conditions on untreated roads because it will be icy in places with that widespread frost. after further wintry showers overnight and into the morning across parts of scotland, rain and sleet on the coasts, some snow inland and into the hills. maybe the odd shower into northern ireland and northern england but, actually, monday is one of the better weather days of the week. most places will be dry, variable cloud, decent amount of sunshine and it will feel a bit less cold than it did over the weekend. into monday night, still some showers, wintry in nature, particularly to hills, affecting parts of scotland, northern ireland and northern england. still frosty and icy, although temperatures start to come up across western areas as we see another system and that's going to spread its rain and a bit of hill snow northwards during tuesday. it brings a bit more rain, as do others that follow this week, so if you are in a flood—affected area, certainly worth keeping across conditions near you. not as much rain as last week, but more rain isn't necessarily

what you want. we see some rain spreading further north and east during tuesday, into the colder air. at least hill snow into parts of northern england and scotland, and the chance as tuesday comes to an end, especially in scotland, some snow even to low levels here. whereas further south, it turns a bit more milder, but of course, it is wetter. as we go into wednesday, the next weather system will start to move in. looks like it's a pretty slow affair, bringing its rain to the south—west initially, and it is of course the source of milderair coming in from the atlantic. but running into that cold air towards the north and east, it does set up a bit of a battle, and as that battle takes place during wednesday, again as the wet weather starts to move in, as it moves further north and east, there's the chance of seeing some snow out of that, particularly as we get into wednesday night. although some parts are turning milder this week, it isn't going to last because by the end of the week and into the weekend, the colder air will come south again and there is the chance again next weekend of some parts seeing a bit of snow.

that's the forecast.

this is bbc news. i'm sally bundock with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. democrats say they'll implement a huge covid relief package with or without republican support, as the us passes 25 million cases. oxfam says the combined wealth of ten of the world's richest men has increased by $540 billion — enough to pay for the whole world to be vaccinated. the president of mexico — who has repeatedly played down the severity of the coronavirus — says he has himself tested positive. ten years after the arab spring, we ask whether egypt has changed in the years since the tahir square protests. lauched into the record books — spacex sends 143 satellites

into orbit on a single rocket flight