When it comes to Facebook, antitrust authorities are making it up as they go along. The company is extremely big, and so necessarily “bad” in the eyes of today’s neo-Brandeisian trustbusting movement, one member of whom, Lina Khan, now chairs the Federal Trade Commission. These people just know that Facebook is a monopolist using its market power anticompetitively, and so see the task of their agencies to define the market to first prove that Facebook meets the conditions necessary for antitrust action against them.
Back in late June, the U.S. District Court in DC threw out a complaint by the FTC against Facebook, saying that “The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims — namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services.” In an amended complaint yesterday, the FTC attempted to flesh out the contours of this supposed product market and, well, the results were remarkable.
According to the FTC’s revised complaint, Facebook dominates a market dubbed “Personal Social Networking (PSN) services in the United States,” which consists “of online services that enable and are used by people to maintain personal relationships and share experiences with friends, family, and other personal connections in a shared social space.”
Three features purportedly distinguish products in this market. They:
- “are built on a social graph that maps the connections between users and their friends, family, and other personal connections”;
- “include features that many users regularly employ to interact with personal connections and share their personal experiences in a shared social space, including in a one-to-many “broadcast” format” (i.e. a news feed);
- and “include features that allow users to find and connect with other users, to make it easier for each user to build and expand their set of personal connections.”
According to the FTC, making these three features necessary excludes a whole range of other social media companies from this relevant product market.
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