antitrust

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

BUSINESS

The Facebook Antitrust Case Relies So Heavily On Mark Zuckerberg’s Emails

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own words play a starring role in the government’s case to break up his social network. “It is better to buy than compete,” he allegedly wrote in an email in 2008, according to the lawsuit. Four years later, after Facebook purchased what he had called a “very disruptive” photo-sharing app, he celebrated by explaining to a colleague in another email: “Instagram was our threat. … One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.” As an antitrust professor preparing a new spring course called “Antitrust for Big Tech,” I read the FTC’s Dec. 9 complaint with great interest. I have taught my students for years that internal documents can come back to haunt antitrust defendants. But I have never seen a plaintiff’s case rely so heavily on a CEO’s own w...

Should Apple Be In The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Crosshairs Along With Google

Google’s payments to Apple to promote its search engine in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers are at the center of the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant. The suit alleges this creates a “continuous and self-reinforcing cycle of monopolization” by limiting which search engines consumers can use. But as someone who studies platform markets, competition and industry structure, I believe the agreement seems more like a damning indictment of Apple’s own potentially illegal business practices. Why Google needs Apple The Department of Justice alleges that Google pays Apple and other device-makers to set its search engine as the default “on billions of mobile devices and computers worldwide,” thus controlling how users access the internet. It’s true, Google is domin...

US probes Amazon’s cloud business in antitrust investigation

The scope of the investigation has been expanded to determine whether products by Amazon Web Services harm competition. U.S. antitrust enforcers have broadened their scrutiny of Amazon.com Inc. beyond its retail operations to include its massive cloud-computing business, according to people familiar with the matter. Investigators at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission have been asking software companies recently about practices around Amazon’s cloud unit, known as Amazon Web Services, said the people, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The outreach by the FTC signals that the agency, which is already looking at Amazon’s conduct in its vast online retail business, is taking a broader look at the company to de...