Does Big Tech Need an Antitrust Exemption to Fight Russian Meddling?
If social-media companies want to share information with each other to help detect/prevent foreign meddling on their platforms, they could do that today, without any antitrust exemption, as long as they’re careful about how they do it and how much information they share, said Tom Struble, the technology policy manager at R Street Institute, a conservative tech-policy think tank. If collaboration were facilitated through a third party Struble floated the Internet Association, Silicon Valley s lobbying arm in Washington he believes it wouldn t violate existing antitrust law.
…If an exemption to combat foreign meddling does materialize, experts say it s important to prevent the harms it could cause to competition in the tech space. Granting them an antitrust exemption would allow them to share information directly, including pricing info, which could help them better detect and police foreign meddling, but it could also lead to a lot of behavior that harms competition and/or consumers, Struble said.
