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

In 2017, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Kahn turned the antitrust world on its ear with her Yale Law Review paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which showed how Ronald Reagan's antitrust policies, inspired by ideological extremists at the University of Chicago's economics department, had created a space for abusive monopolists who could crush innovation, workers' rights, and competition without ever falling afoul of orthodox antitrust law.

Now, Dina Srinivasan, a self-described technology entrepreneur and advertising executive who trained Yale Law School has done it again, with a magesterial, deftly argued paper for the Berkeley Business Law Journal called The Antitrust Case Against Facebook. It's one of the most invigorating, significant contributions to a new theory of antitrust for the digital age that I've ever read, ranking with Kahn's 2017 paper.

Srinivasan's paper is especially important in light of Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism thesis, which dismisses the idea that monopoly is the reason that Big Tech is able to control our behavior so thoroughly -- Zuboff posits that machine learning creates devastating behavior modification tools that allow tech companies to manipulate us so thoroughly that we're in danger of losing our free will.

But Srinivasan shows how Facebook came to dominate our online discourse through activities that would have been prohibited under pre-Reagan theories of antitrust, and how, prior to these monopolistic tactics, Facebook was not able to conduct surveillance on its users, having to contend with multiple, bruising PR disasters and user revolts when it tried to do so. Read the rest