> antitrust enforcement in the US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed and it doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to any of these corporations
One, the House Judiciary Committee is also investigating. That not only makes the investigations bipartisan (though the DoJ is technically nonpartisan). It also introduces the potential for new legislation.
Two, there has been consumer harm. It's just not dollar-denominated harm. From a recent New York Times article:
"In 2007, for example, Facebook introduced a program that recorded users’ activity on third-party sites and inserted it into the News Feed. Following public outrage and a class-action lawsuit, Facebook ended the program. 'We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them,' Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a public apology.
This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off.
But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network Orkut. Emboldened by the decline of market threats, Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit from the social media market) changed its privacy pact with users.
This is how Facebook usurped our privacy: with the help of its market dominance. The price of using Facebook has stayed the same over the years (it’s free to join and use), but the cost of using it, calculated in terms of the amount of data that users now must provide, is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition" [1].
One, the House Judiciary Committee is also investigating. That not only makes the investigations bipartisan (though the DoJ is technically nonpartisan). It also introduces the potential for new legislation.
Two, there has been consumer harm. It's just not dollar-denominated harm. From a recent New York Times article:
"In 2007, for example, Facebook introduced a program that recorded users’ activity on third-party sites and inserted it into the News Feed. Following public outrage and a class-action lawsuit, Facebook ended the program. 'We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them,' Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a public apology.
This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off.
But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network Orkut. Emboldened by the decline of market threats, Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit from the social media market) changed its privacy pact with users.
This is how Facebook usurped our privacy: with the help of its market dominance. The price of using Facebook has stayed the same over the years (it’s free to join and use), but the cost of using it, calculated in terms of the amount of data that users now must provide, is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition" [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust...