LAST FRIDAY, President Joe Biden announced a sweeping executive order aimed at ending what he called a 40-year “experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power.” Attorney and law professor Zephyr Teachout joins Ryan Grim to discuss the return of antitrust under the Biden presidency.

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RG: We’re joined today to answer those questions by Zephyr Teachout, law professor and author of the recent book “Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.”

Zephyr, welcome to Deconstructed.

Zephyr Teachout: Thank you so much for having me on.

RG: Thank you for joining us.

And so I actually wanted to start by mentioning a few names for you.

ZT: OK!

RG: And having you give some background to people about you know who these folks are, and why they’re relevant to today’s antitrust discussion. And this is not a pop quiz, because I suspect these are all actually, if not close friends of yours, at least people that you’ve worked with for a long time.

ZT: Yes.

RG: So let’s start with Tim Wu. Who is Tim Wu?

ZT: Yeah, Tim Wu is somebody who I have been actually fairly close friends with, as well as colleagues with, for many, many years. But that’s not why he’s important. [Laughs.]

RG: [Laughs.]

ZT: Before this moment, probably best known for coining the phrase network neutrality, and being an advocate for over a decade now for the position that there are certain areas of our economy that have gotten so gobbled up, so they’re the choke point control, especially when it comes to areas of the TK internet and telecom, that a handful of corporations so control them that we need a pretty significant policy change in the way that we deal with them.

And, at this point, Tim is now an adviser at the White House, and has played a really critical role in what Joe Biden did last week.