Antitrust Investigation Against Facebook

As of Friday February 6^th, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that the attorneys general of eight states and the District of Columbia will be launching an antitrust investigation into Facebook. This is meant to focus on Facebook’s impact on advertising prices as well as consumer privacy. James states that she is “proud to be leading a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general” in this investigation into Facebook. The bipartisan coalition she is referring to includes Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee. Facebook’s vice president Will Castleberry commented, “We welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate”. He said this days before dozens of states are expected to launch another antitrust investigation but into Google. This has begun more antitrust investigations into Amazon and Apple as well. In the meantime, the Department of Justice is performing an antitrust review for all of the nation’s largest tech companies.

           

            In my opinion I think performing these investigations is something that has been needed for a long time now. I don’t like talking about buying something with my friends and then going online and seeing ads for those items when I never searched for them. Even if I did search for them it concerns me that these companies are going through my personal information that is private and nothing they should be able to look at. For me to lookup a product on google and then go on Instagram and see ads for that same product really concerns me for my privacy as well as others. These companies should not be able to monitor what I am doing on my devices since it is none of their business. It’s also not fair since I never agreed to receiving ads about items I have searched for or simply just talked about with a friend in person.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/tech/facebook-antitrust-investigation/index.html