Wie kann jemand ernsthaft daran zweifeln, dass Meta ein Monopol ist?

I despise Meta. Even before the recent released news that they don’t care about what’s the weather about sexual predation on their platform.

This article was written by a law professor? Except the very first rule of antitrust taught in virtually every class is: Monopolies aren’t illegal; monopolistic behavior is illegal.

But the author keeps talking about how Meta is a monopoly. But so what? So are patents, copyrights, and any business that does way better than any other. He’s must know that as a professor, though.

The issue is whether Meta was engaging in monopolistic behavior that would push out the competition. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t.

But if we’re talking about a corrupt behemoth like Meta, you can’t fight it by being inaccurate.

….

Even worse, the real issue isn’t Meta’s demonstrated terrible behavior. The real issue is how they never face any real punishment. The real issue is how they view lawsuits as a mere cost of doing business.

Who cares if they get busted for violate antitrust laws if they just look at that as a cost of doing business? That’s the real issue.

EDIT: Just did the research that the law professor should have. From the ruling itself:

“The FTC failed to establish that Meta’s past acquisitions constitute unlawful maintenance of monopoly power under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

The judge did NOT rule that Meta was a monopoly.

I don’t know; I don’t use Meta products. Why is it a monopoly?

Does this author even know what a monopoly is?

I think we need new economic terminology really.

No one can truly argue that Spotify doesnt bear traits of monopoly. Obviously google, obviously Facebook/meta, amazon and so on.

The issue is that the old idea of a market doesnt really translate to many of these online services.

What SEO people used to do (helping companies to make people click onto their webpage) even that paradigm is increasingly outdated.

Every time a type of technology makes the buyer “closer” to the seller, this distinction vandiges more and more.

The old idea of a marketplace is that Ib the square of a town, 50 people are selling their goods. The buyer essentially is as exposed to any ware of a particular type, as any other ware of that type.

Now some wanted you have to send for. Maybe forexample milk is too perishable and so you need to have “milkman” on a carriage that delivers a jeg every morning.

But now you are no longer exposed to the other seller. So you organize some way to meet them, so they can offer to sell it to you for less and of better quality.

But this is still HUGELY dependent on you both knowing a fixed concept of “milk” for even the idea of value to be applicable to it.

These concepts of goods, markets, value simply do not at all apply to something like the services of meta. Its so disconnected tht we began talking about users not as consumers but the product, and us being sold as data structures to companies that want to “sell” to us – although even the premise of that sale is dubious.

The ruling discussed in the article differs mostly under the idea that we can use a 1980’s antitrust act to say *anything* about how good to bad for a country the practices of meta are.

In lobbying for rights for private companies, the US coorporate interests have achieved such success that it is sort of forgotten why we would even look for legal precedence here.

The legislation is there to make the kind of society you would like to live it.

It shouldnt matter whether the word “monopoly” applies really. The only thing that matters is that THERE IS NO MARKET HERE TO KEEP ALIVE/PROTECT. And if you want to make a society that works better, the current structure fo ownership and control of such entities as meta is totally unsustainable, because they have active financial interests in decreasing democratic participation, education, free commercial for that matter… list goes on.

People can choose to not use Facebook/Insta.

Clearly our captured judiciary can.  Federal judges are a joke, chosen to side with big money, by both parties.

You all might shout go team when biden nominated judges, but it is a big club, a big team, but you aint in it.  You are not part of the team, and that team has nothing but contempt for you.

A major undiscussed foundations problem with this article is that the FTC investigated and approved facebooks purchases of these companies 6-8 years before filing these lawsuits. You can’t run a stable society/economy with schizophrenic leadership of regulatory agencies. That lack of stability and grounding in a strong/clear legislative framework also opens the door for the very corruption that the author also bemoans several paragraphs later. I get that the frozen legislature is frustrating and fraying things everywhere, but trying to bypass it in the executive branch while it swings wildly is just a really crazy idea.

Honestly we need to stop thinking about it as „Monopoly? Y/N“

Are they engaging in anti-competitive practices? Are they abusing their market share? Are they providing customers a product they want or tricking people into making decisions against their interest?

Easy. They’re paid to say it’s not.