Brian Albrecht on Market Definition and the FTC’s Meta Appeal
Brian Albrecht, ICLE Chief Economist, was quoted in a Reason article on the FTC’s decision to appeal of its antitrust loss against Meta, explaining why the agency is unlikely to succeed given the court’s market definition and lack of evidence of monopoly power. Read the full article here.
Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, tells Reason that the FTC faces “an uphill battle.” Albrecht says it’s unlikely that the FTC will challenge Boasberg’s findings of fact, but “whether [he] applied the correct framework for market definition, whether he demanded a form of proof that antitrust law doesn’t require, or whether he excluded or discounted evidence for legally improper reasons.” The success of this strategy is doubtful because Boasberg, “by most accounts, engaged seriously with the standard antitrust tools [and]…found the FTC’s market definition unconvincing after weighing the evidence, not on a technicality,” explains Albrecht.
Albrecht is joined in his evaluation of the FTC’s likelihood of appellate success by Joe Coniglio, director of antitrust and innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Coniglio says “there is virtually no chance that [Boasberg’s] robust factual findings will be found clearly erroneous on appeal” and tells Reason that “the FTC’s only conceivable hope is to prove that Judge Boasberg got the law wrong in holding that the FTC ‘had to show that Meta is violating the law now.'” But Coniglio says Boasberg got the law right and describes the FTC’s decision to appeal as “a very poor use of the FTC’s prosecutorial discretion to spend thousands, if not millions, more of American taxpayers’ money on a case that was always a loser.”