Facebook Stock Plunge Highlights Flaws of Targeted Antitrust Law

Ryan Bourne and Brad SubramaniamMarkets were roiled last week when Meta ’s (Facebook’s parent company) stock plunged and the company’s market capitalizationfell below $600 billion for the first time since early in the pandemic.This number was more symbolic than it might have seemed. In recent years, politicians have attacked ‘Big Tech’ companies for discriminating on their platforms in favor of their own products. Apparently, it is bad news that Apple’s iPhones come pre‐​loaded with apps that compete with others on App Store, or that Google puts Maps results near the top of Google searches. Given this supposed anticompetitive conduct, Congressional bills outlawing much “self‐​preferential” behavior had used $600 billion in market capitalization as one threshold for determining whether an online platform would be covered by the regulations.The most recent bill iteration – Sen. Amy Klobuchar’sAmerican Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) – revised that figure down to $550 billion (or, alternatively, if the online platform has one billion active users). So Meta and other companies would still face significant restrictions if the bill passed. Large online platforms would generally be banned from using data from third‐​party sale s to improve their own products, from treating their own products favorably in search rankings, or from preferencing their goods in ways that “materially harm competition” (subject to some unclear exemptions).Econo...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs