Dina Srinivasan: Exposing the monopoly power of Facebook and Google

A Q&A with Dina Srinivasan, who, in February 2019 as an independent scholar, published an academic paper entitled ‘The Antitrust Case Against Facebook’, in which she identified a correlation between privacy and economics — and argued that the social media giant lowered its privacy standards as soon as it had defeated its rivals. Just months later, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a coalition of state attorneys-general began preparing an antitrust investigation into the tech group, filing actions against it in the following year. Then, in December 2020, Srinivasan published another paper suggesting that Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in financial markets. Just over a year later, the US Department of Justice and several states sued the tech company, alleging that its dominance in digital advertising harms competition. Both cases continue, and the companies contest the claims, but Srinivasan believes their power has been allowed to become too great.