‘Monopoly’ Facebook Is Losing Ground

Teens are shifting from Instagram to TikTok even as critics claim the company has few competitors

By Robert H. Bork Jr. Excerpts:

"Facebook is a social-media geriatric losing ground to its competitors." 

"The use of the Facebook app by young adults is expected to drop 4% in the next two years, and a 45% decline among teens. What about Facebook-owned Instagram? Doesn’t that app bring in the young users, while older people use Facebook? It turns out Instagram is showing its age as well, as teens migrate in large numbers to TikTok and Snapchat."

"The FTC has since attempted to define the personal social-networking market more clearly in this antitrust lawsuit refiled under the direction of the new chairman, Lina Khan. But the new definition excludes TikTok, Twitter and other popular services arguing that those platforms are about sharing content, though they also allow people to make and follow friends—Facebook’s basic innovation.

Antitrust enforcers are ignoring lessons of the past. The Justice Department sued IBM in 1969 for monopolizing the market for “general purpose digital computers.” By the time the case was dismissed for lack of merit in 1982, the market had dramatically shifted toward personal desktop machines, and IBM was a late entry. Tim Wu, the White House adviser on technology and competition policy, credits the lawsuit’s “policeman at the elbow” effect with restraining IBM and giving competitors including Apple space to emerge. But my father, Yale Law School professor Robert Bork, called the case “the antitrust division’s Vietnam.”

That division, if I may extend the metaphor, met its Iraq when the Trump administration directed it to file a lawsuit against AT&T for its merger with Time Warner. It made political sense for Mr. Trump, given his feud with CNN, then owned by Time Warner. Soon after a federal judge ruled the merger legal, AT&T gave its shareholders a jolt when it unloaded the company (rebranded WarnerMedia) for roughly half of what it had paid. The telecom company’s executives apparently realized they had no business trying to manage content companies."

"If AT&T can lose billions on a bad acquisition, how can government experts forecast the future impact of today’s business decisions? The consumer and the market eventually correct in ways beyond human prediction, and that‘s what they’re doing to Facebook."