Trump’s Rearview Antitrust Battles

The cases against Meta and Google miss how fast markets are changing

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Judge Mehta admitted in his ruling that “Google has not achieved market dominance by happenstance. It has hired thousands of highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions. The result is the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users.”"

"Google’s partners chose it “because its search engine provides the best bet for monetizing queries,” as the judge wrote."

"The government wants to force Google to divest its Chrome browser to degrade its ability to target ads. This would hurt advertisers while helping other companies that serve up ads such as Amazon and Meta."

"Even Mozilla, a browser competitor to Google’s Chrome, said the government’s “misguided plans would be a direct hit to small and independent browsers"

"Google was late to publicly roll out AI models. ChatGPT has five times as many daily active users as Google’s Gemini."

" neither app [WhatsApp and Instagram] at the time of Meta’s purchase generated a profit, and it wasn’t clear if they ever would. Not all acquisitions succeed."

" Meta vigorously competes for users, so-called influencers and advertisers with X.com, TikTok and YouTube, among other platforms."

"Users spend more time on TikTok and YouTube than either Facebook or Instagram."

"Elon Musk’s purchase of X.com has already spurred a more open social-media marketplace for conservative ideas."