It turns out that
Facebook is more powerful and resilient – and
American antitrust law less helpful – than critics of big tech had hoped
Within 12 hours of a federal judge tossing out a state and federal antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, the market value of the adolescent company exceeded $1tn. Facebook became the fifth company worth more than a trillion, joining
Apple,
Amazon,
Microsoft and Alphabet (the parent company of Google).
What are we to make of this sudden turn of events? We have been conditioned by more than five years of criticism and concern about the growing power of Facebook to influence our politics, social lives and economic activities to assume that the company was increasingly vulnerable to aggressive regulators around the world.