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0 pointsdcolkitt5y ago0 comments

> Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.

This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.

In this case integration between services is a pretty strong defense against this. Facebook can argue that consolidating the infrastructure allows them to deliver each product at a lower cost and/or higher quality than if it was served independently.

If the court accepted those facts, then Facebook would have a ironclad argument against being broken up under the consumer welfare standard.

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vageli5y ago

> > Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.

> This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.

Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.

csharptwdec195y ago

It depends on how the Justice department feels, to some extent. GM in the 50s and 60s actually kept an eye on their market share, and sometimes would kill/cutback projects or products that may have threatened going over a certain percentage (around 60%, IIRC.) At that time merely going over that number would have been enough to start an investigation.

Some would argue though that back then DOJ 'cared' more.

sanatkapur5y ago

If you're curious about how this changed, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" by Lina Khan article is a wonderful read: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

The summary is that the Chicago school of Economics promoted the idea that in a competitive market, predatory pricing is not possible. Thus, when you see an industry structure emerge (e.g. duopoly), you should assume that it is an efficient competitive outcome. After this, instead of focusing on market share percentages, antitrust authorities began to focus primarily on consumer harm (which is much more challenging to show in court e.g. for predatory pricing, you cannot only argue that your competitor has very low prices right now, you also have to prove that they intend to raise prices once they achieve monopoly power).

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dcolkittOP5y ago

Jurisprudence also changed on the topic since then. In particular, Robert Bork published the legal theory of consumer welfare in 1978. SCOTUS essentially adapted that wholesale into case law starting with Reiter v. Sototone.

Given the current makeup of the court, it seems extremely unlikely that the justices would overturn this precedent.

human5y ago

The biggest challenge for the antitrust lawyers in this case will be to outline consumer harm. In more traditional cases harm is measured in dollars. Here it will have to be measured in privacy, free speech, etc. And that’s a much harder case to make. I even wonder if it’s possible to argue that services for which you don’t pay (Fb, Insta, and Whatsapp) and that are not essential can be considered monopolistic.

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