ANALYSIS: FTC’s Meta Loss Shows Enforcers in a Bind Against Tech

The FTC and DOJ have been running a real-world experiment into whether antitrust law can reform the tech platform market. So far, several big problems have cropped up in that effort.

First, antitrust enforcement takes a lot of time, and is inherently backward-looking in a fast-paced, forward-looking market environment. Antitrust lawsuits are brought when a market is already evidence of competitive harm—and then lawsuits take years to complete. Even when enforcers win, the market that they propose remedies to fix is a decade removed from the one they started researching.

Which neatly points to the second problem: remedies in tech ...