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This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken *to reduce competition*, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.
Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:
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a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are "efficient" and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;
b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually *pro*-monopoly laws, and if you look at them *just right*, you'll find that what Congress *really* intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
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The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are *seeking* a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is *nothing*, because how can you know why a company *truly* wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person's heart?
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This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who's trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.
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This is the guy who put *in writing* the immortal words, "It is better to buy than to compete," and "what we’re really buying is time," and who described his plans to clone a competitor's features as intended to get there "before anyone can get close to their scale again":
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Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, "Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I've decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it's 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it."
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And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg's intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are *no* bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented.
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All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.
It wasn't always this way. In the trustbusting era, enforcers joined with organized labor and activists for all kinds of human rights, from universal sufferage to ending Jim Crow, to smash corporate power.
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Foundational to this fight was the understanding that concentrated corporate power presented a serious danger: first, because of the way that it could corrupt our political process, and second, because of the difficulty of dislodging corporate power once it had been established.
In other words, trustbusters sought to *prevent* monopolies, not merely to break up monopolies once they were formed.
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They understood that a company that was too big to fail would also be too big to jail, and that impunity rotted societies from within.
Then came the project to dismantle antitrust and revive the monopolies. Corporatists from the University of Chicago School of Economics and their ultra-wealthy backers launched a multipronged attack on economics, law, and precedent.
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It was a successful bid to bring back oligarchy and establish a new class of modern aristocracy, whose dynastic fortunes would ensure their rule and the rule of their descendants for generations to come.
A key part of this was an attack on the judiciary. Like other professionals, federal judges are expected to undergo regular "ongoing education" to ensure they're current on the best practices in their field.
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Wealthy pro-monopolists bankrolled a series of junkets for judges called the "Manne Seminars," all-expenses-paid family trips to luxury resorts, where judges could be indoctrinated with the theory of "efficient monopolies":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
40% of all federal judges attended a Manne Seminar, and empirical studies show that after graduating, these judges changed the way they ruled, to favor monopolies:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352?login=false
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The terrible beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to get *all* the judges into a Manne Seminar - you just need to get enough judges to attend that they will create a wall of precedent that every other judge will feel hemmed in by when they rule on antitrust cases. Those judgments further shore-up the pro-monopoly precedent, setting the stage for the *next* pro-monopoly judgment, and the next, and the next.
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So here we are, a couple generations into the project to brainwash judges, monopolize the economy and establish a new aristocracy, and a judge just ruled that Meta isn't an illegal monopoly, even though Mark Zuckerberg literally put his explicit criminal intent in writing.
What are we to do? Should we despair? Does this mean it's all over?
Not hardly. Reversing 40+ years of pro-monopoly policy was always going to be a slog, with many setbacks on the way.
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That's why antitrust has historically sought to prevent monopolies. Once monopolies have conquered your economy, getting rid of them is *far* harder, or, as the joke from eastern Canada goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."
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But you have to play the ball where it lies. The fact that Meta can deliberately set out to create a monopoly and still evade judgment is *more* reason to fight monopolies, not less - it's (more) evidence of how just corrupted and illegitimate our judicial system has become.
We've been here before. The first antitrust laws were passed to do the hard work of smashing existing monopolies, not the relatively easy task of preventing monopolization.
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Of course: before there is a law, there has to be a crime. Antitrust law was passed *because* of a monopoly problem, not as a pro-active measure to prevent the problem from arising.
Our forbears smashed monopolies that were, if anything, far more ferocious than Big Tech. They vanquished oligarchs whose perfidy and ruthlessness put today's ketamine-addled zuckermuskian mediocrities in the shade.
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How they did it is not a mystery: they just put in the hard yards of building coalitions and winning public sentiment.
They did it before and we can do it again. We know how it's done. We remember their names and what they did. Take Ida Tarbell, the slayer of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Tarbell was a brilliant, fierce writer and orator, fearless and brilliant.
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She was the first woman in America to get a science degree, and a key driver of the movement for universal suffrage. But in addition to all that, she was an anti-monopolist.
Tarbell's father was a Pennsylvania oil man who'd been ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil.
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come over, warm up. coffee?
