How Should Antitrust Deal With Facebook? A Stigler Center Panel Investigates – ProMarket

Panelists at the Stigler Center’s recent antitrust conference look at the antitrust case against Facebook and discuss potential theories of harm, as well as the remedies that enforcers around the world have proposed or implemented.  This year’s Stigler Center’s 2022 Antitrust and Competition Conference, which took place in late April this year, looked back over its previous five editions while also looking ahead to what’s next in enforcement. There was one particular corporate behemoth that couldn’t be left out of the conversation: Facebook–a company that has not only seen its strategic focus pivot to the “Metaverse” and name changed to Meta, but also its revenue balloon in size while weathering multiple storms over the last few years, ranging from user privacy concerns to anticompetive behavior, to allegations of fueling genocide and subverting democracy, both in the United States and abroad. The final panel at this year’s Stigler Center conference took stock of answering several questions regarding Facebook and antitrust: Presuming guilt on Facebook’s part, what is the theory of harm against its practices? What remedies are currently being implemented globally, what are they hoping to achieve, and how likely are they to succeed?  Moderating the panel was Adam Lashinsky, a…
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