the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, remember when everyone in Washington from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley to the Biden FTC accused Facebook of engaging in illegal monopolistic behavior. Congress and the Biden Administration regulators were even pushing to break up Facebook , but they are too late. The market is already doing that on its own.
The chart below shows that just this year the once $1 trillion social media empire that Mark Zuckerberg built has lost 40% of its valuation. It wasn’t government calls to break up Facebook but the companies but the inability to deal with “Free Speech” , changing tastes of consumers and equity markets that has sealed the doom for the social media giant .
The lesson of Facebook’s descent is highly relevant to big government’s assault against “big tech” – particularly the other members of the FAANG tech powers – Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.
What looks to be an unconquerable monopoly today can lose $350 billion in market cap tomorrow. That’s the wonder and dynamism of free market capitalism – which always disciplines “monopolies” much more swiftly and ruthlessly than government regulators.
The Democrats were NEVER going to breakup their Social Media propaganda and anti-Democrat speech suppressor arm. Their threats were just cover to allow Facebook et. Al. To increase the suppression of Republican speech under the guise of “fake news”.
When I was in undergrad many years ago, we still had professors who survived WWII in Europe and the aftermath as unwilling participants.
The one thing they told us was the the Allies big mistake was letting the Communists get control of the newspapers and radio.