In an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Google and Facebook Are Monopolizing Ideas,” Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip quotes from Maurice Stucke’s article in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year and also from Maurice Stucke and Allen Grunes’s older article on “Antitrust and the Marketplace of Ideas.”
The subject of Ip’s story is Google’s decision to ban bail-bond companies from advertising on its platforms and Facebook’s decision to do the same. Ip writes: “That Google can ban ads from an industry that offends its values is not, by itself, noteworthy. Media companies have long decided what content or ads to carry for the same reason. The difference is that even after decades of consolidation, no media company enjoys a U.S. market share as dominant as Google’s in Internet search (close to 90%) or Facebook Inc.’s in social networking. Like earlier bans on payday-loan ads, Google’s bail-bond ad ban, which Facebook copied the next day, effectively kicked an entire industry out of a major advertising channel.
The story is here (subscription required).