Democrats want social media sites to delete more content. Republicans want the opposite. That hasn’t stopped them from joining forces to crusade against Facebook under the guise of antitrust action.
So what if Facebook doesn’t actually fulfill the Justice Department’s definition of a monopoly? Mark Zuckerberg may have created the site from scratch in his dorm room only to create nearly 50,000 jobs and more than half a trillion dollars in the company’s market cap, but he lets Breitbart post too much or too little, depending on which side of the aisle you sit. Republicans and Democrats know that they’re diametrically opposed, but both are willing to bet that once they blast open a boundary to expand federal regulation that the odds will fall on their respective favor.
But there’s a problem bigger than the partisan battle over the control of new government overreach: It’s the simple fact that antitrust action won’t magically give Congress the power to police Facebook’s operations.
Antitrust action, in a practical sense, would likely focus on Facebook’s acquisitions, most notably Instagram and WhatsApp. There’s no question that losing either of these would hurt Facebook’s market value, and especially with Instagram, its long-term relevance among younger users who post less on the actual Facebook site. Facebook’s advertising services could also be tinkered with if Wednesday’s House antitrust hearing was any indication of Congress’s targets. But Facebook, as a singular social media website, wouldn’t be meaningfully changed, even if the company lost brand value and suffered a diminished market cap.
In other words, the things big government Democrats and Republicans actually care about wouldn’t be affected, namely because big government Democrats and Republicans don’t actually care about monopoly power.
Consider as a parallel the antitrust war on Microsoft from the turn of the century. In 1998, the cast was different, but the story was the same. Bill Gates, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy, and Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale were all called to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee over their market shares, and the Justice Department eventually charged Microsoft with violating the Sherman Antitrust Act for forcing hardware hosting Microsoft operating systems to use Internet Explorer. The Justice Department won its case, with the court ordering Microsoft to split into two companies: one for the Windows operating system and another for software such as Internet Explorer and the Microsoft Word suite.
Microsoft, of course, successfully appealed the ruling. But the initial ruling does show what actual antitrust action would look like in practice against Facebook: Instagram and WhatsApp would likely just become their own companies again. That would do absolutely nothing for Democrats wanting Facebook to censor President Trump and absolutely nothing for Republicans wanting to keep up coronavirus pseudoscience.
This isn’t about antitrust concerns, and it never was. Both halves of the crusade are simply led by career politicians who have never created a job or a dollar of GDP in their lives, and thus, they feel entitled to dictate how an entrepreneur runs his own company.
