Congress must bring antitrust laws into the digital age to hold Facebook accountable

That point was made clear last month when federal antitrust complaints filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 48 states including Massachusetts were thrown out by a federal judge in Washington. Now Congress, where antipathy toward the tech giant’s actions is a rare area of bipartisanship, must act with haste to bring antitrust laws into the social media age.“Courts really don’t know how to define antitrust markets in the digital context,” said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, a Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law.The ruling, by Judge James Boasberg, held that federal and state officials failed to assert a “properly defined antitrust product market,” a prerequisite to proving that Facebook violated the law.“It is almost as if the [FTC] expects the court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist,” Boasberg wrote.It was not a total legal victory for Facebook — state and federal officials were given 30 days to refile new complaints with more specifics about their claims. But even if those lawsuits move forward, they would potentially take years to reach a conclusion.The lawsuits also face a major complication: The antitrust law that the FTC and…
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