When Antitrust Met Facebook

Social networks are among the hottest phenomena on the Internet. Facebook eclipsed Google as the most visited website in both 2010 and 2011. Moreover, according to Nielsen estimates, as of the end of 2011 the average American spent nearly seven hours per month on Facebook, which is more time than they spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft, and Wikipedia combined. LinkedIn’s May 19, 2011 initial public offering (“IPO”) surpassed expectations, placing the value of the company at nearly $9 billion, and approximately a year later, its stock price had risen another 20 percent. Facebook followed suit a year later with an IPO that placed the value of the company at over $100 billion. Other social networking sites remain hot properties, and other Internet companies are struggling to catch up. In what may be considered a rite of passage previously faced by such high-tech giants as IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, and most recently Google, social networking companies are now facing increasing scrutiny under the antitr

Jul 1, 2012 ... Yoo, Christopher S., "When Antitrust Met Facebook" (2012). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 422. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/ ...

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