📑 Can Antitrust Law Rein in Facebook’s Data-Mining Profit Machine?

My paper, “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” details the quintessential market power fact-patterns that standard economics and competition law have made familiar. Facebook’s ability to inflict harm today on both consumers and news publishers rests heavily, though not exclusively, on a single practice that Facebook engages in: surveillance. Facebook not only tracks users while they are on its site; it also follows them after they leave Facebook itself. This singular ability to surveil customers—across millions of independent and sometimes competitive businesses—is the source of Facebook’s unusually high profit margins in digital advertising, as well as its ability to inflict harm on market participants. Facebook could not get away with this when it faced real competition.