📑 The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: a turning point in the debate over Big Tech and monopoly

Cory Doctorow discusses Dina Srinivasan’s new paper The Antitrust Case Against Facebook published in the Berkeley Business Law Journal. Srinivasan documents the rise of the platform and how it would not have been possible in a pre-Reagan era. The association between monopoly and surveillance is also explored:

Srinivasan’s history of Facebook’s surveillance rollout makes link between monopoly and surveillance clear. For its first ten years, Facebook sold itself as the pro-privacy alternative to systems like Myspace, Orkut, and other competitors, repeatedly promising that it wouldn’t track or analyze its users activity. As each of Facebook’s competitors disappeared, Facebook advanced its surveillance technology, often running up against user resistance. But as the number Facebook alternatives could go declined — because Facebook crushed them or bought them — Facebook’s surveillance became more aggressive. Today, with Facebook as the sole dominant social network, people who leave Facebook end up joining Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary.

This is a topic Tim Wu, Charles Duhigg and Lina Khan have discussed. A summary of the paper was also published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.