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by arrosenberg 1613 days ago
My more charitable take is that they are trying to pick a fight they can win based on the political and legal landscape. Antitrust enforcement has been weakened, diminished, and atrophied since the Borkism infected both political parties in the late 70s and early 80s. As such, they have to pick their early battles careful in order to gain experience, figure out which strategies can prevail in court, in public opinion, etc.

We all want to see them take on the big fight with monopolists like the ISPs, but no one has more experience fighting antitrust action. The current set of DOJ lawyers and federal judges are not the ones who broke up ATT in the 50s and 80s, they're going to have to rebuild the foundation of antitrust enforcement.
1 comments
namelessoracle 1613 days ago
The current set of lawyers and judges and officials for this are political appointees one and all, and will only pick fights on behalf of the political faction. The current detente was only because "each side" had their pet companies.

Facebook has messed up in that managed to anger both sides of the political spectrum. They foolishly thought they could thread a needle here. Now one side is going to make an example of them. The best we can hope is that the other side will make an example on the opposite end when they take power.

But make no mistake that they will take anti trust action against parties that have successfully threaded the needle like the ISPs. Both sides are bought by them

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arrosenberg 1613 days ago
Eh, there are three sides - Democrats, Republicans and true believers like Lina Khan. The believers need to notch some wins before taking on a big bad like Charter or ATT, and as you note, Facebook made themselves an attractive target. You take those where you can get them and win big to build cachet for going after bigger cases in the future.
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namelessoracle 1613 days ago
True believers think this will open a door. But in reality they are just being used to do all the work to kill a target one side wants dead. They will then see the doors firmly shut again. The only way this doesnt happen is if the other side decides they should do the same trick to their opponents using the same true believers as weapons.

We may be at the point where this back and forth is preferable.....

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