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gain favor among lawmakers and judges. It takes a laissez faire approach to
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and claiming the market will sort everything else out. When the price of your
social media network, email system, or video hosting is free, it’s near impossible
to bring an antitrust suit under this theory. But we need to stop thinking about
the users as the customers, according to NYU’s Dhar. “Customers are the people
paying them, and users aren’t paying them,” he says. “The users are just
supplying them the data that they’re using for the advertising.”
“The tech industry confounds a lot of the antitrust orthodoxy that is applied in
the courts and the government enforcement agencies ... because competition
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another for access to data, for customer loyalty, and for venture capital.”
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general, led by Ken Paxton from Texas, have announced an investigation into
Google over its dominance in advertising and how it uses data to maintain that,
and others have begun pursuing Facebook over allegations of anti-competitive
advertising rates and product quality. The House Judiciary Committee and
Antitrust Subcommittee chair have been hearing arguments about the role of
Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple to decide whether the companies have
abused their market power. And politicians at the national level, particularly
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Instagram from Facebook.
To some degree, this is self-interest, says NYU’s Economides. Facebook’s News
Feed and Google News reach a large enough portion of Americans that those
platforms can have a big impact on what we see, intentionally or not. Most
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what bubbles to the top (and what doesn’t) is hugely important. “That gives a
tremendous amount of power to these companies to shape the political debate
... and it’s very hard to take it away,” says Economides.
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that Google had used anticompetitive practices and abused monopoly power,