Tim Wu Thinks It's Time to Break Up Facebook

Tim Wu thinks it’s time to break up Facebook. Wu has a new book coming out in November 2018 called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. Breaking up Facebook (and other huge tech companies like Google and Amazon) could be simple under the current law, suggests Wu. But it could also lead to a major rethinking of how antitrust law should work in a world where the giant platform companies give their products away for free, and the ability for the government to restrict corporate power seems to be diminishing by the day. And it demands that we all think seriously about the conditions that create innovation.

The movement to break away from the consumer welfare standard is growing. Sometimes called the New Brandeis movement, the idea is that the law should prioritize competition. It’s the same sort of standard European Union regulators have been using to crack down on big tech companies; these standards were originally based on the American approach under Brandeis and Roosevelt. The 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act allows mergers to be studied for anticompetitive effects, and Wu thinks the case against Facebook is easy enough that it could be broken up without changing the consumer welfare standard.