Fiona Scott Morton

Facebook has a monopoly in social media and/or social networks, whether considered in lay or legal or economic terms. This paper applies an economic and competition policy lens to the following premise: in a competitive market, Facebook’s constituents would enjoy the best social network Facebook can provide.

In this anti-big tech moment, the slogan “break them up” is simple, catchy and has been adopted by some politicians and other observers to capture the emotion of the era. Unfortunately, “breaking up” large tech platforms is often not a good solution to the economic harms created by large firms in this sector. Washington cannot just break up big tech, or any company, solely because it is large or has a high market share.

[Op-ed] The court decision allowing AT&T to acquire Time Warner is an example of the inability of our current system of courts and enforcement to prevent the decline in competition in the modern US economy. In the case of that merger, the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice gets credit for making an attempt to block what it viewed as an anti-competitive transaction. What’s more, that view proved prescient after the now-merged firm almost immediately raised prices after executives testified that the synergies from the deal would immediately cause lower prices.