Harmeet Dhillon Appears on FBN’s ‘Making Money With Charles Payne’ To Discuss Facebook’s Future with Whatsapp and Instagram
According to Dhillon:
These are three separate companies, and there are three separate cases. I’m not sure I see the business case for breaking up Amazon at all. I mean I think, you know, it’s a popular service, big isn’t necessarily bad. The complaint against Facebook is different, it is that Facebook has systematically broken some privacy rules, including some agreements it’s had with the FTC in the past, and some alarming stories have come out about that, but breaking up the company doesn’t seem like necessarily the best way to go there, although the complaints include the fact that some of its subsidiaries like Instagram and others effectively block out other companies that are competitors. I think strongest case for breaking up is actually Google, and specifically Google has a long track record as documented both in European privacy decisions as well, and in the FTC, as well, of blocking competitors in the vertical search field, and also digital advertising between Facebook and Google, they dominate over almost 70% of the market. You know, one other fact about Google and Facebook, is that they actually have blocked out competitor social networks like Gab, and Apple has done that as well on its phones, as so there are aspects that I think both the FTC and DOJ need to look at. The fact that leftists are now asking for it is interesting, but they spread around so much money on both sides of political spectrum, I think that’s why you haven’t seen action taken before this.
I share the concerns that antitrust law can be a very blunt instrument. However, history has shown that in targeted instances of antitrust intervention, actually it has led to disruptive evolution of great technology. So, for example, we wouldn’t be talking about these companies right now if we hadn’t broken up AT&T, which eventually lead to the flourishing of the internet. Microsoft, as well, even though ultimately the United States government was not able to let antitrust enforcement really stick, it got really a slap on the wrist, as a result of having to look over their shoulder all the time because of antitrust regulators, and their you know, frankly, their practices were very anti-competitive, they actually began to sensor themselves, and ultimately that allowed competitors like Google and others to build better search engines. So now Google is the Microsoft, really, and Google is getting away with a lot, and I think if Google gets a little bit of a penalty box or some of its practices are cut back, you may see better and more interesting technologies that we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
Dhillon Discusses Facebook on ‘Making Money With Charles Payne’ from Harmeet Dhillon on Vimeo.
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