1. Facebook has an uncomfortable level of power in advertising, eyeballs on screens, and proprietary data
2. Legals definitions that were created over 100 years ago mostly focused on price gouging are not going to address this neatly
#1 is assuming the argument, really. #2 is stating that old law doesn't work and implying we need new law to let us do what we want...again, assuming there is a problem, making no attempt to determine whether there is a legal problem
To point 2: monopolistic behavior resulted in consumer harm and clear negative impacts on the wider economy. The original laws have been reinterpreted for a variety of modern cases (see - antitrust case against Microsoft).
Facebook's "market" is advertising in which it isn't the leader.
I guess it would be hard to prove a monopoly on something you don't even sell.
do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior email :D
Giving something away for free and monetizing something else still means you are in that market.
What are the alternatives for social ads? Google is a different kind of ad service , kind of like billboards vs tv
Google's display ad offerings may not be directly social, but their Adx and Adsense ads are shown across most forums and long-tail social channels, including Reddit and StackExchange. Lots of competitors in the social ad space.
Facebook is large, and might be the largest, but it's not fair to say that Google is an entirely different type of service. Hell, Google even offers native ads a la Facebook through their "Discover" ad product which serves across all their various social feed channels like Gmail, Youtube, and Discover feeds.
The court dismissed the pleading document (the initial complaint) due to its inadequacies but not the case itself, which means that the FTC can file a new complaint with more detailed allegations.
The rough order of civil procedure: the complaint, where the plaintiff(s) makes allegations of fact and law about the defendant party (or parties). This is followed by discovery, where the actual fact-gathering occurs, then usually a motion for summary judgment adjudicated on the facts acquired during discovery, and finally, a trial on the merits (unless the parties settle first).
If Facebook convinces the judge to accept a broad market definition, game over for the FTC.
If the FTC convinced the judge of the reverse, bad news for Facebook.
The judge has basically told the FTC that they did a terrible job exactly on the market definition issue. This is a big problem for them.
I also don’t see why a judge wouldn’t accept something like “online communications platform” as being the right market in this case. Then all of the players you list are plausible competitors and the FTC’s job becomes much harder (or IMO impossible).
Because lots of things that could be described as “online communication platforms” are probably fairly simply demonstrable to not participate in competitive substitution, and as such arr not direct contributors. I mean, HN is an online communications platform, and so is GMail, but if service on HN is bad, I don’t think people move from HN to Gmail.
In a certain market, Facebook + Instagram have great market power, but it depends on how you define the market. I'm curious if anyone has done it, maybe financial analysts, and how they define it:
* If the market includes public messaging, such as Twitter, then Facebook's power is relatively much diminished.
* If the market includes public forums, such as Reddit, HN, and every phpBB board, then it's hard to say Facebook controls monopoly power.
* LinkedIn provides similar service to professionals
* Where does Pinterest fit? TikTok?
Part of the problem is that Facebook competes in all these markets. In which one(s) do they have a monopoly and how are they defined? 'Personal user page + social communication'?