Tech Titans Play Monopoly

Amazon and Facebook tussle with the FTC, but this fight is only just getting started.

Last week, a federal judge dismissed the Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly lawsuit against Facebook, concluding that the agency hadn’t made a sufficiently clear case that the social media giant controlled the market in a monopolistic way. At the same time, Amazon has demanded that FTC Chair Lina Khan recuse herself from any antitrust investigation into the company, given that much of Khan’s academic writing was highly critical of the retail giant. These are obviously big news events, but, as very often happens with legal matters, the reporting on the subject makes it almost impossible to identify what’s meaningful about the stories — and there’s plenty that’s meaningful about them. So let’s break it down into its parts, because the AMGAF-FTC drama isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the consequences for everyone else.

Let’s Oversimplify

Let’s start with the basics. Although the word is thrown around quite a bit, a monopoly is actually a very specific thing under the law, namely, a company so powerful that it dominates an entire market sector and is effectively the only seller of a good or service. Importantly, to qualify as a monopoly, you don’t have to literally be the only seller in the market, you need to take actions “in restraint of trade” to give you a dominating position and control the market through your actions. The idea is that monopolies discourage…