FTC’s Case Against Facebook Will Challenge the Adaptability of U.S. Antitrust Law
Society leads, and the law follows.
This is especially true in antitrust, where industries and markets undergo constant change brought about by innovation and changing consumer behavior. Confronted with ever evolving commercial circumstances, the courts face a constant struggle to keep up. With the filing of the antitrust cases against the Facebook “monopoly” by the Federal Trade Commission and 47 state attorneys general, U.S. antitrust faces one of its most significant tests since the case of U.S. v. Microsoft, now 20 years old.
In the intervening decades, the Internet has spawned a new category of industry, “demand aggregators.” These businesses seek to grow market share not just by capturing supply, but also demand. The power of the dominant digital platforms—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Uber—arises as much or more from their position as the source of customers than as a supply of goods or services. Of course, the platform must be able to deliver, but when customers view your website as the place to go—Amazon for goods, Uber for rides, Facebook for friends—the supply will follow.
Demand-side dominance is only one of the thorny issues the court will have to resolve in the antitrust authorities’ cases against Facebook …
Read the complete post by antitrust and competition law experts Jonathan Rubin and Jennifer M. Oliver as well as other posts on competition law in the tech space, including commentary on Google, Uber, Amazon, Apple, and more at the MoginRubin Blog.
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The Intersection of Privacy and Antitrust Webinar Now Available On-Demand on the West LegalEdcenter
Available as part of your subscription to The Thomson Reuters West LegalEdcenter®. Don't subscribe to the West LegalEdcenter? This webinar is still available directly from HB. Take it now! Questions for speakers Questions@LitigationConferences.com CLE questions CLE@LitigationConferences.com Check out the MoginRubin blog for more insights on antitrust and privacy law. What attorneys and companies need to know about the increasing interplay between these critical areas of the law. Highly publicized cases and investigations in the U.S. and Europe of big technology, e-commerce, and social media companies demonstrate how anti-competition laws are being used to scrutinize and challenge not only how these corporations conduct themselves in the marketplace, but the very core of their colossal success: the mass collection and utilization of user data. Are the privacy and antitrust worlds beginning to cross over? Or do they simply run parallel while addressing entirely different types of conduct? Whatever the answer, data is the raw material that drives the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, so how it is handled is a critical question when counseling clients on mergers and acquisitions. Moderator Daniel J. Mogin | Managing Partner, MoginRubin LLP Speakers Jennifer M. Oliver, CIPP/US | Partner, MoginRubin LLP Thomas N. Dahdouh | Director, Western Region, Federal Trade Commission Franklin M. Rubinstein | Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Randi W. Singer, CIPP/US, CIPT | Partner, Weil, Gotshal & Manges Contributor Dina Srinivasan | Independent Researcher & Author of The Antitrust Case Against Facebook Dina was unable to present but we thank her for her content contributions. Agenda Who should regulate privacy violations in the U.S.? Which antitrust issues implicate privacy concerns? What role does machine learning play on the competitive landscape? What is big data really? How is it different from “data”? What are the elements of effective merger reviews? What are the appropriate remedies? What are “notice-and-choice” versus “harms-based” approaches? Plus answers to your questions. Send them to Questions@LitigationConferences.com.