Justice’s antitrust chief sketches how big tech will be assessed

The US Justice Department’s antitrust chief suggested Tuesday, June 11, 2019, that he’ll take a broad view of how competition is harmed when assessing whether big tech firms should be broken up.

Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said in a speech in Israel that he is aware that just two companies dominate digital advertising, though he did not name the two, Google and Facebook.

Without indicating whether he plans to move against any particular company, he said factors to be considered in assessing whether a monopoly exists—meriting anti-trust action—go well beyond whether a company’s dominance leads to higher prices.

Delrahim’s speech, published on the Justice Department’s website , follows reports that his agency has been given oversight of potential investigations into Google and Apple for anti-competitive behavior while the Federal Trade Commission oversees Facebook and Amazon.

“The current landscape suggests there are only one or two significant players in important digital spaces, including internet search, social networks, mobile and desktop operating systems, and electronic book sales,” he said. “This is true in certain input markets as well. For example, just two firms take in the lion’s share of online ad spending.”

Delrahim said factors that must be considered include “network effects” or when a business attains so much market share that barriers to entry for competitors are prohibitively high.

And he said acquisitions of nascent competitors can be anti-competitive in the digital realm, including when they protect a monopoly or “otherwise harm competition by reducing consumer choice, increasing prices, diminishing or slowing innovation or reducing quality.”

Delrahim said another factor that must be weighed in the digital economy is services that are, at least ostensibly, free. That would include Google’s search and email, and Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, which generate profits by gathering data from users’ behavior that is then provided to advertisers.

Delrahim also said that by protecting competition, his department “can have an impact on privacy and data protection.”/