| Hey, it's Eric. Thanks to an anonymous whistleblower, America's tech giants can take a collective breath. Antitrust—which had been dominating headlines this month—is out. Impeachment is in. Over the last week or so, the news-consuming public has been whipped into a frenzy by the revelation that President Donald Trump asked the president of Ukraine for a favor: Could he please investigate the son of Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential front runner? For nearly three years, the president's harshest critics have complained that nothing seems to stick to him. This one did though, and Trump can't seem to shake it off. Suddenly, Nancy Pelosi was announcing an official impeachment inquiry, and questions about Google's dominance over the ad-tech industry were fading from view.
Of course, the impeachment process doesn't mean that federal regulators or state attorneys general just pack up their investigations and go home. That process was always going to take a while to play out. Surely, lawyers in Texas are dutifully building their case against Alphabet Inc.'s Google, and are not simply glued to cable TV waiting for the latest turn in the Ukrainian imbroglio. Yet it's easy to imagine how attention could drift among distractible lawmakers in DC and beyond. In recent months, the crackdown on big tech has looked like the one area of bipartisan agreement. Democrats and Republicans alike were enjoying beating up on Silicon Valley giants. Now that impeachment is the focus, they're going to be beating up more on one another. A distracted Congress could be an advantage. It means that tech executives may be less likely to get hauled in for hearings. (Though Congress and Facebook Inc. are negotiating over getting Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, to attend a hearing as soon as next month, so maybe not.) You can imagine that Facebook, Google and Amazon.com Inc. are happy. At the least, they probably have some time to regroup and think about their strategy. The long-term impacts are less clear. The most significant effect the impeachment inquiry has on antitrust could very well be political. Let's assume that Trump succeeds in his goal of damaging Biden's presidential campaign. Maybe Elizabeth Warren becomes the Democratic nominee instead. That would be bad enough for big tech. Then let's say the impeachment inquiry damages Trump enough to cost him the 2020 election. Suddenly it's Jan. 21, 2021, President Warren is being sworn into office, and (maybe) the government begins functioning somewhat normally. That'd be a scary day for the oligarchs in Silicon Valley. —Eric Newcomer | 
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