New York Attorney General is Investigating Facebook For Possible Antitrust Violations (cnbc.com) 16
New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced Friday she is launching a multistate investigation into Facebook for possible antitrust violations. From a report: Attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia will join the probe, according to the announcement. It will focus "on Facebook's dominance in the industry and the potential anticompetitive conduct stemming from that dominance," according to the release. "Even the largest social media platform in the world must follow the law and respect consumers," James said in a statement. "I am proud to be leading a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in investigating whether Facebook has stifled competition and put users at risk. We will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook's actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers' choices, or increased the price of advertising."
Facebook is about to up their political donations (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I dislike both these politicians and facebook equally. I have no idea to root for.
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Now, I have no ideal who to root for.
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Normally companies will give money to both political parties. It gets both parties off their back. While in reality it overall just bad. Because it is like arming both sides of a war with more weapons. It doesn't change the victor or the objectives, just more people get hurt.
So both political parties get more Facebook money, which they will use towards ads to indoctrinate the moderates to their camps. Which then allows the political party to move further in their direction, creating a larger gap which is
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Maybe they will put themselves in the same room and cancel each other out.
That would not be a good idea. That would be an antimatter/matter collision.
It would produce deadly gamma rays . . . and I'm guessing those folks are very fat, so we would have E = mc^2 to worry about.
If they did this at the Davos World Economic Forum . . . we would be doomed!
What industry? (Score:3)
Re:What industry? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have to be the single endpoint to abuse a market leadership position to stifle competition. The latter is what makes it grounds for antitrust.
For instance, does Facebook penalize sites for using other marketing services in addition to their own?
Does Facebook demand special conditions that other advertising companies do not, in exchange for services other than advertising, and do they do this in a way that defacto excludes the use of other advertising companies? (EG, demands for exclusivity?)
Etc.
The notion that they have to have run all other competitors out of town before it becomes suitable grounds for antitrust needs to die in a fire.
Please stop perpetuating the myth,
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Re:What industry? (Score:5, Interesting)
What industry does Facebook monopolize?
Why do you think Facebook needs to be a monopoly to be guilty of antitrust violations? While the Venn diagram between the two certainly has quite a bit of overlap, antitrust behavior extends well beyond merely abusing a monopoly position.
For instance, paying or otherwise coercing vendors to NOT sell your competitor's wares is a classic example of anticompetitive behavior that holds true regardless of one's share of the market. That's something that nVidia was accused of doing, despite nVidia having nowhere close to a monopoly within that market. Alternatively, Apple was found guilty of anticompetitive behavior in the eBooks market when they entered into illegal contracts with publishers that illicitly coerced other eBook retailers to raise prices to match Apple's, despite their only having ~10% of the market at the time.
Moreover, you don't need to be a true monopoly (i.e. 100% market share) to abuse your market position in an anticompetitive fashion. Most famously, Microsoft had less than 100% of the market when they abused their dominance in the OS market to illicitly push IE to dominance in the browser market. Likewise, despite having less than 100% of the relevant markets, Google has been accused and in several cases found guilty in the last few years of engaging in similar behavior when it comes to to things like using Google Play to push their first-party apps or using search to push their travel services.
The reason you may be confused is because as a company nears monopoly status (e.g. Ma Bell, back in the day), they're oftentimes subject to additional regulation because of their special position within the market, i.e. they are the market. In the absence of competition/free market forces, a company's unbridled avarice is able to harm consumers without any consequence to the company, so regulators must step in to provide checks against such greed. And when regulators step in like that, it tends to make a lot of waves, hence why we're all familiar with antitrust behavior when it comes to true monopolies. But again, that's hardly the only sort of antitrust behavior.
In this particular case, I'm not sure what the AGs are pursuing, but I recall hearing suggestions a few months back that Facebook's routine acquisitions of would-be social networking competitors is being viewed by some within the political and legal circles as anticompetitive, since they are preventing effective competition from entering the market. It's a different take on anticompetitive behavior than I've heard of before, but it's possible it may hold some weight in court (IANAL, so I'm not one to say). Likewise, while Facebook doesn't have a majority of the online advertising market (contrary to your suggestion that Disney is a major player, Google owns about 60% of the online ad market, and Facebook is second with about 30%), they do have enough market share—as well as an ad product that is so differentiated that it's been suggested it's a distinct market unto itself—that they've been able to exert potentially undue pressure on advertisers (read: strong-arming).
But really, those are just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook is so sprawling, so flagrant, and so wantonly careless with private data that regulators and legislators could come at the company from any number of different angles.
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do you have any examples of them "strong-arming" advertisers?
While I know I've heard other examples of—and analysis suggesting that—they're doing so, the only specific item I could recall is this graph [stratechery.com] from this analysis [stratechery.com], in which we see the price-per-ad increasing from 2017-2018 despite the number of ad impressions dropping significantly over that same period. I.e. Advertisers got less for their money and Facebook increased prices, which is the inverse of what we'd expect to see in a healthy market where competition was present. Moreover, Facebook's ad r
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I am a fan of anti-trust actions, though. I just think their are much more im
This reminds me... (Score:2)
...of the case where teens were charged with possession and production of child pornography [washingtonpost.com] for simply sending naked photos of themselves to each other. Seems like the same logic would apply here, and anyone that uses facebook could go down with facebook. No?
Ohio is part of this also (Score:2)
https://www.cleveland.com/open/2019/09/ohio-attorney-general-dave-yost-is-investigating-facebook-for-possible-anti-trust-violations.html/ [cleveland.com]
It's about damn time! (Score:1)
Next Headline (Score:2)
Really Compromising Pictures of NY Attorney General Go Viral On Facebook (And they really, truly, aren't deep fakes!)
Chickens roosting, etc. (Score:2)