Ben Sperry Cited in Law360 on FTC’s Meta Appeal
Law360 cited an ICLE amicus brief in its coverage of the FTC’s appeal in its monopolization case against Meta. Ben Sperry, ICLE Senior Scholar for Innovation Policy, serves as ICLE’s in-house counsel in the case. The article drew on ICLE’s argument that the district court properly considered current competitive conditions and that the FTC had not shown Meta could profitably reduce quality for users or raise prices for advertisers given competition from TikTok and YouTube.
Read the full article here.
Also defending those findings Thursday were separate amicus briefs from the International Center for Law & Economics, a think tank, and the libertarian-minded Washington Legal Foundation.
The International Center for Law & Economics in turn defended Judge Boasberg’s competitive benchmark based on current conditions, instead of letting the FTC shape a test around how the market might have looked without Meta’s influence. It also pushed back on the FTC’s assertions of monopolistic power based on Meta’s high profits, arguing the FTC hasn’t traced the profits to friends-and-family sharing and hasn’t separated “monopoly rents from returns to superior products, efficiency, or successful risk-taking.”
“A monopoly baseline might affect the amount of switching or the characteristics of the users observed, but it does not alter the ranking of alternative products on which the district court relied. The commission identified no mechanism or evidence that would alter the consistent ranking of TikTok and YouTube as Meta’s closest alternatives,” the International Center for Law & Economics said.
According to its brief, the FTC and its amicus backers never show how Meta “could worsen quality to users or raise prices to advertisers” without costing itself so much demand from either side that it would make those moves unprofitable.
“They instead assume that prevailing conditions reflect monopoly, use that assumption to justify discounting substitution evidence inconsistent with their proposed market, and then treat the resulting absence of evidence as support for that market,” it said. “That is not an empirical demonstration of monopoly power, much less of its unlawful exploitation.”
The International Center for Law & Economics is represented in-house by R. Benjamin Sperry.