"Break Up Big Tech? Some Say Not So Fast"

Louise Matsakis of Wired magazine quoted Maurice Stucke on there antitrust implications of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon:

"That doesn’t mean regulators shouldn’t take a hard look at the mergers they have allowed to proceed in the past, says Maurice Stucke, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law and a former trial attorney at the DOJ’s antitrust division. He believes the government hasn’t done enough to evaluate the effectiveness of its decisions after the fact. 'You’ve basically got a weather person who never goes outside to see whether their prediction is correct,' says Stucke. 'The agencies should be far more rigorous in going back and looking at the competitive risks of the mergers they allowed.'

Another issue is that antitrust laws are intended to address competition problems, not some of the other concerning practices of big tech companies, like how they handle consumer data. 'We can’t really load up antitrust with stuff it wasn’t designed to do,' says Moss. To deal with issues like privacy, the government will need to use other tools aside from antitrust. 'There’s no silver bullet,' says Stucke. 'You really need to have a coordination among privacy, consumer protection, and antitrust policies.'”

The June 7, 2019 article is available here.