The antitrust case against Facebook has been dismissed by the US District Court of Columbia for “lack of facts”. The case alleges Facebook bought up competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp effectively creating a monopoly. The object is to break up Facebook, an outcome Facebook users haven’t been demanding.
The anti-Facebook campaign has a long and not even very interesting history. Facebook was the whipping boy for blatant exploitation by political players in 2016. Previously it was a forum for political trolls in the 2008 election.
Oddities of antitrust
There are quite a few things basically wrong with the legal premise. WhatsApp and Instagram were hardly “competitors” to Facebook in so many ways. WhatsApp is just that. It’s an app with social connections. Instagram is preferred as an alternative to Facebook by younger users and is also a sort of phone extension. They’re not the same thing at all.
Check out the current news for WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp is a virtual digital appliance in some ways, not “social media” as such. Instagram is barely even that. It’s a gossip app at best.
As for “monopoly” status – Both these sites have competitors, just not very good competitors. Is Facebook responsible for Telegram and Tik Tok being so lame? Both competitors also have a few tacky aspects, not apparently considered by the FTC.
The political factor is apparently the driving force behind this semi-literate attempt to break up Facebook. Not much interest has been shown by regulators in any of the other issues affecting social media, like suicides, bullying, hate speech, etc.
When the law is illogical
The law and digital culture are barely even acquaintances, 30 years after the digital culture boom.
What’s the objective of this antitrust case, for example?
Is the idea to:
- Create lots of little Facebooks to “privatize” the company? Inefficient, and bringing all the problems of Facebook with it.
- WhatsApp and Instagram returned to the wild? Who cares? Investors, possibly, but the two sites would be the same things, just undercapitalized.
- Case law to manage social media companies? Like hell. There’s no One Size Fits All legal scenario for social media.
- Reducing the political clout of social media? Forget it. Not going to happen. You might as well try to ban smart phones. This culture isn’t going away.
- “Enforcing” anti-monopoly laws? Really? See below.
Double standards – Why aren’t Big Oil and Big Pharma subject to antitrust actions?
A monopoly, by definition, is just slightly removed from a cartel. A monopoly has no competition. A cartel is a group of “competitors” fixing prices and market conditions.
Does Facebook meet either of these criteria? There has never been an effective competitor, nor is one in the making. You could break the Mississippi into small puddles, buckets of water and creeks, but it ain’t gonna be a practical alternative to the Mississippi, is it?
Facebook is the cultural outcome of digital realities. It’s not a monopoly in the classic sense of the sole survivor of competition on any level. You want competition? Let it stand on its own two feet. Artificially created competition probably wouldn’t survive.
About those double standards –
Koch Industries is the Facebook of Big Oil in many ways if you accept the perspective of Facebook as a monopoly. Nobody’s objecting to its very strong influences on anything and everything, including market baselines and impacts on the consumer market.
Big Pharma is a cartel, and it’s also the pampered pet gorilla of investors. It’s doing quite nicely, thanks for asking, and the maniacal, consumer-destroying prices are immune to any regulation at all.
Is there any risk of antitrust laws targeting these highly destructive, regulation-immune market dictators?
None at all.
Leave Facebook alone
Nobody, including Facebook, is claiming Facebook is perfect. Facebook’s main “crime” is to be the first of its type, confronted with the first regulatory issues regarding social media.
The FTC is indulging in Q-like interpretations of Facebook’s role with this lawsuit. Facebook is not a law enforcement agency, a political arbiter, or even a monopoly as such. Its business is too diverse and all over the place to be an effective monopoly in any conventional form. It’s like calling Craigslist the only alternative to the Wall Street Journal.
For example – A monopoly of what? Define what is being monopolized. Global bitching sessions? Raving lunatics? Billions of people complaining long and loud about global bitching sessions and raving lunatics and being totally ignored? At some point the FTC will have to define a “monopoly of what”, and it’s not a good look so far.
Antitrust is quite specifically NOT the problem. It’s a total misreading of what Facebook is and what it does. It even misreads what Facebook is physically able to be.
Facebook is largely reflecting all these social media issues rather than generating them. It’s the global community noticeboard. It’s Reddit with nicer site layout and more functions. It’s Etsy, sorta, in marketing stuff online. It’s a news disseminator, not an aggregator.
My advice is forget it. Focus on the specific regulatory issues related to Facebook. To borrow a very old saying, if Facebook didn’t exist it would have to be invented. It’s a global forum, not a US thing. It’s a worldwide market. It’s a place to meet.
While you’re at it, think about the likely big hits to social media investment, and the fact that Twitter doesn’t seem to have much competition. Open this regulatory box, and you deserve what comes out of it.
