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27 Stan. J.L. Bus. & Fin. 268 (2022)
Roadmap for an Antitrust Case against Facebook

handle is hein.journals/stabf27 and id is 280 raw text is: Roadmap for an Antitrust Case Against Facebook Fiona M. Scott Morton* David C. Dinielli Abstract The late 2010s saw large technology companies, including Facebook, continue on growth tra- jectories nearly unprecedented in modern economies. Antitrust lawyers and economists un- derstand that bigness, though not necessarily bad, sometimes implies the existence of market or even monopoly power, which generally results in harm to competition and to consumers. Throughout the 2010s, however, data necessary to diagnose the health of the rapidly expand- ing digital markets was largely unavailable. Tech companies are notoriously secretive, prices for products and services (most of which are bartered) are hard to observe, quality and output are difficult to measure, and consumer behavior on the increasing number of connected devic- es with which we interact is virtually impossible to track (unless you actually are one of the big platforms or handset makers that scoops up personal data as a humpback whale does krill). Near the end of the decade, antitrust economists and lawyers drew hope from widespread re- porting that Google and Facebook were under investigation for anticompetitive practices by the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and coalitions of state Attorneys Gen- eral. But U.S. enforcement agencies as a general matter don't share information gathered in investigations. Things are different across the pond, however, where the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was conducting a study of online platforms and digital advertis- * Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale School of Management; Deputy As- sistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (2011-12). t Senior Policy Fellow, Tobin Center for Economic Policy, Yale University; Visiting Clini- cal Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School; Special Counsel to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (2011-12). In the last three years Fiona Scott Morton has en- gaged in antitrust expert witness consulting for a variety of corporations, including Amazon and Apple, as well as for government enforcers. During the drafting of the original version of this paper and its initial release in 2020, Omidyar Network provided funding in support of Fiona Scott Morton's work relating to digital markets and digital platforms and employed David Dinielli as a Senior Advisor. With the exception of this support from Omidyar Network, neither author received financial support for this work from any source other than from his or her current home institution or institutions. 268

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