Facebook asks the court to dismiss the FTC’s antitrust complaint
Last fall, after more than a year-and-a-half of Congressional committee hearings and investigations into the power of technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the government released a comprehensive report alleging anti-competitive conduct. The report, which called for a number of “structural remedies” including that the companies be broken up also gave momentum to an almost unprecedented number of state and federal antitrust actions. One of those was a lawsuit against Facebook brought by the Federal Trade Commission, backed by an investigation conducted alongside forty-nine states; the suit alleged a wide range of monopolistic behavior. When the case was filed, last December, Facebook responded with a blog post calling the lawsuit “revisionist history” and arguing that it “ignores reality.” On Wednesday, Facebook released a much more comprehensive response: a legal defense and request
Yves here. Finally, the officialdom is taking interest in excessive influence that Google and Facebook wield in advertising and as media players, even if the original impetus was RussiaRussia. But the whinging generally hasn’t produced much in the way of remedies. Here’s an exception.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Most people know that Google dominates the online search market, but did you know that the company has become the biggest player in the digital ad market? That’s a problem not only for consumers, but potentially for society as a whole, argues former digital advertising executive Dina Srinivasan.
The antitrust scholar whose work laid the blueprint for a new wave of monopoly lawsuits against Big Tech Authorities had expressed growing unease about the unchecked power of the technology giants. But many struggled with how to bring a case because of the complexity of the companies, until Dina Srinivasan
Author of the article: Daisuke Wakabayashi, The New York Times
Publishing date: Dec 28, 2020 • December 28, 2020 • 7 minute read • With no background in academia but an insider’s understanding of the digital ad world and a stack of economics books, Dina Srinivasan wrote a paper with a novel theory: that Facebook harmed consumers by extracting more and more personal data for using its free services. Photo by Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images
Everybody else is going to lose : Tech industry exiles turn on Google, Facebook Everybody else is going to lose : Tech industry exiles turn on Google, Facebook
By Daisuke Wakabayashi
Normal text size
Advertisement
Three years ago, before she became an antitrust scholar whose work laid the blueprint for a new wave of monopoly lawsuits against Big Tech, Dina Srinivasan was a digital advertising executive bored with her job and worried about the bleak outlook for the industry. It just felt like, OK, Facebook and Google were going to win, and everybody else is going to lose, and that s just the way the cards were stacked, Srinivasan said. I don t think this was widely understood.
Antitrust scholar s research frames the case against Big Tech bizjournals.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizjournals.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.