Posts tagged Regulation
Facebook, anti-trust, and the coming regulatory storm

Was I happy when I heard that the FTC and more than 40 states were accusing Facebook of anti-competitive behavior and demanding they spin off Instagram and WhatsApp? Happy is an understatement. I was ecstatic.

Digging into the details, this seems like an important first step, but a difficult one. Anti-competitive behavior is hard to prove—especially when those acquisitions were approved less than a decade ago—though in this case it’s pretty well known how Facebook has had a chilling effect on the social media industry with its buy, copy, or kill approach.

The problem is in the framing: thinking of Facebook as a social media company.

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"Consumer choice, willingly made"

Elizabeth Warren made headlines last week by outlining several proposals to break up Big Tech, including tighter regulation of acquisitions and mergers, and prohibiting companies from offering a marketplace for commerce and competing in that marketplace—or often choking off competition. (Watch Hasan Minhaj’s excellent outline of how Amazon does this, if you haven’t already.)

The policy proposals seems to have been met with excitement by consumers (including me) who think Big Tech is getting too powerful, and hasn’t done enough to self-regulate. But some of the specifics have been met with criticism.

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