Meta Stands to Lose Tens of Billions of Ad Spend in Impending FTC Antitrust Trial
Brian Albrecht, chief economist at ICLE, was quoted in this AdWeek story about Meta’s trial with the FTC. Read the full story here.
But it’s a potentially tenuous position for the agency to take because it focuses on a different time—and ultimately, a different market than today’s, said Brian Albrecht, an antitrust expert and the chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit policy research organization.
“The government will want us to imagine—if even implicitly—that this is 2018 and Facebook and Instagram are the two big players,” Albrecht said. “But they aren’t anymore.”
And considering that both transactions were completed long ago, the burden of proof will be higher for the FTC than in some other antitrust cases, Albrecht said. Ultimately, he predicts that the FTC will be hard-pressed to convince a judge that the divestiture of Instagram and possibly of WhatsApp will meaningfully impact future competition in the market, because today “there are more competitors and options than ever.”