Congress should deliver antitrust legal guidelines into the digital age to carry Fb accountable

That point became clear last month when federal antitrust complaints filed by the Federal Trade Commission and 48 states, including Massachusetts, were dismissed by a federal judge in Washington. Now, where antipathy towards the tech giant’s actions is a rare area of ​​bipartisanism, Congress must act quickly to bring antitrust laws into the social media age.

“Courts really don’t know how to define antitrust markets in a digital context,” said Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat who chairs the House of Representatives Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee.

Judge James Boasberg’s ruling found that federal and state officials failed to enforce a “properly defined antitrust product market,” a requirement for proving that Facebook has broken the law.

“It’s almost as if the [FTC] expects the court to simply nod at the popular belief that Facebook is a monopoly, ”wrote Boasberg.

It wasn’t a total legal victory for Facebook – state and federal officials had 30 days to file new complaints detailing their claims. But even if these lawsuits were pushed forward, they could potentially take years to close.

The lawsuits are also facing a major complication: the antitrust law that the FTC and the states want to enforce was drafted decades ago to regulate and, if necessary, break up companies with more specifically defined markets, as in the groundbreaking case of Standard Oil. Although the Sherman Antitrust Act was successfully used against AT&T in the 1980s to force the company to discontinue its local telephone services known as Baby Bells, the application of the Sherman Act 1890 to the rapidly changing Internet age has shifted state regulators to life proved to be more problematic. Since a ruling against Microsoft resulted in a landmark settlement two decades ago, there hasn’t been a major successful lawsuit against a technology company.

“Everyone on the Internet knows that Facebook has monopoly power,” tweeted Senator Elizabeth Warren after the verdict, calling for stricter antitrust laws. “They control 85 percent of the data traffic in social networks, destroy competition and undermine our democracy.”

Just days before the ruling, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee tabled several bills to update antitrust laws to curb anti-competitive practices by tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. The burden would be put on companies to prove they are competitive and not on the government to prove they are not. It would also give federal regulators more resources to monitor anti-competitive activity in the digital world.

The House bills follow a Congressional report, led by Cicilline and Representative Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, describing the move by corporations to crush or consume their competitors.

The companies “use the market dominance they have to expand their market position, to destroy competitors, to acquire them and to stifle innovation,” said Cicilline. “They were allowed to grow and grow, basically without supervision, without regulation, without robust cartel enforcement, and they now have enormous monopoly power.”

The danger of Facebook’s unbridled power and massive size is of particular concern to Biden, who on Monday described the misinformation about vaccinations that Facebook is spreading on its platform as fatal. But it won’t be enough to fill your administration with heavy-hitters like Kanter, who made careers to defend big tech’s competitors, if the law hasn’t been modernized to support those efforts. Only Congress can allow this motion.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter @GlobeOpinion.

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