Opinion: Break up Facebook

• Published in: Dayton Daily News (Online)
• Main Author: Reich, Robert
• Format: Web Resource
• Language: English
• Published: Dayton Cox Newspapers, Inc 21.11.2018
• Subjects: Antitrust laws; Innovations; Political advertising; Political parties; Political power; Roosevelt, Theodore (1858-1919); Steel production; New York; United States > US; Ohio

America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century began with a raft of innovations — railroads, steel production, oil extraction — but culminated in mammoth trusts owned by “robber barons” who used their wealth and power to drive out competitors and corrupt American politics. In 2012, the staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of competition submitted to the commissioners a 160-page analysis of Google’s dominance in the search and related advertising markets, and recommended suing Google for conduct that “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation.” “If we will not endure a king as a political power,” thundered Ohio Sen. John Sherman, the sponsor of the nation’s first antitrust law in 1890, “we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale” of what the nation produced.