Senator Al Franken: ‘privacy is a casualty’ of Google and Facebook's success
Senator Al Franken gave a rousing speech to the American Bar Association's Antitrust Section last night, calling for greater antitrust oversight of large media and tech companies as a way to ensure greater privacy protections for Americans.
Context & Ripple Effects
Franken's speech extends a line of regulatory criticism that began with an FTC member's public attack on Google's privacy efforts in March 2010 — the difference is venue and mechanism: where the FTC critique stayed inside consumer protection, Franken is arguing to the American Bar Association's Antitrust Section that market dominance itself is the privacy problem.
The timing sharpens the target. Facebook's implied valuation climbed 8.9% to $102.8 billion in the final SharesPost auction before its IPO, putting the company's data practices under maximum scrutiny weeks before going public, while a 'Girls Around Me'-style stalking app was already being cited as evidence of how much personal exposure Facebook's platform permits. The speech drew same-day pickups from CNET, Marketing Land, and Interactioned, so it landed as part of the pre-IPO news cycle rather than a standalone address.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook now face a second front beyond privacy regulators: Franken is asking antitrust enforcers to treat market concentration as a privacy harm, which puts Facebook's data model squarely in view days before its IPO pricing.
Second-order effects
- If antitrust becomes a privacy instrument, any future acquisition or dominance case involving these firms has to answer data-practice questions alongside market-share questions — raising the cost of the next big platform deal.
Third-order effects
- The speech sketches a structural argument that would reshape competition policy: that scale in advertising-funded media erodes users' bargaining power over their own data, making privacy a factor in defining relevant markets rather than a separate compliance matter.
The trend: US policymakers are beginning to fuse privacy and competition policy, treating platform dominance itself as a consumer-protection problem.