Is the populist, break up Big Tech movement over, or has it only begun gaining traction with policymakers?
Panelists answered this question at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event on Tuesday. Antitrust litigator Brendan Benedict in particular stressed that the movement is gaining momentum despite the Federal Trade Commission’s recent loss in its lawsuit against Big Tech behemoth Meta. “It’s just the beginning, and I think that antitrust populism has permeated the public consciousness in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Benedict.
In the recent case, the FTC accused Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads and WhatsApp—of several antitrust violations. A previous MRC Free Speech America report detailed some of the FTC’s examples of Meta’s anticompetitive behavior, including:
- Presenting itself as an “open platform” before changing its policies and banning organizations — such as Circle, MessageMe and Voxer — from its critical application programming interfaces.
- Suppressing price competition by deliberately buying up competitors — such as Glancee and Onavo — not to incorporate them into its business but rather to shut them down.
- Buying Instagram primarily to rob Apple of the chance to merge with it.
- Penalizing developers who wished to leave its ecosystem by buying Octazen, which had their contact importer libraries.
- Buying WhatsApp because it was a formidable threat to Facebook Messenger, which Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted was an inferior product.
- Banning and otherwise censoring developers who posted links to competitors.
When detailing the case on Fox News’s Mornings with Maria, Ferguson emphasized the importance of well-enforced antitrust laws. "Here we have actual evidence that the transactions turned out to be anticompetitive and have given Facebook and Meta a tremendous amount of power.” Ferguson later added, “We all saw full on in 2020 how much power these social media platforms have over every aspect of our daily life, of our politics, our elections, our social lives, our economic lives, and that’s what this case is about is about addressing that sort of power and making sure that 2020 can never happen again."
Despite evidence that appears to present a strong case for the FTC, the infamous Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled in Meta’s favor.
ICYMI: Trump’s FTC Is Suing Meta; Guess Who the Judge Is
During the ITIF panel about the case, ITIF Senior Counsel Joseph Coniglio, who moderated the panel, asked whether this case marks “the end of antitrust populism.” He noted, “We’re not getting a breakup in Google Search. We’re not getting a breakup of Meta. We’ll see what happens with ad tech, but I think any breakup there would sort of be separate from, you know, a lot of Google’s [operations,] the search business, for example.”
Benedict gave a resounding no, citing cases still on the FTC’s docket: “Amazon is still to come, Apple is still to come, remedies in Google Ad Tech.” He added that there is bipartisan support for continuing to beat the drum of these antitrust cases. “Lina Kahn and Jonathon Kanter are on TV and podcast all the time making these arguments,” he said, referring to the former FTC chair and assistant attorney on antitrust, respectively.
In reference to the FTC’s case against Meta, he added, “It’s unfortunate that we did not get to get to the part about anti-competitive effects, but I think there’s a lot of cases coming in the future, and this movement[, the populist antitrust movement] has real bipartisan legs.”
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