Q&A with Dina Srinivasan, author of The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, on Meta and Google's ad duopoly, the US antitrust cases, concerns about Apple, and more
Patrick McGee / Financial Times : LinkedIn: Patrick McGee . Tweets: @rasmus_kleis , @dinasrinivasan , @paultang , @patrickmcgee_ , @anshublog , @simonjharris , and @spignal See also Mediagazer LinkedIn: Patrick McGee : Just published - a new Financial Times “Tech Exchange” interview with Dina H. Srinivasan, “exposing the monopoly power of Facebook and Google” … Tweets: Rasmus Kleis Nielsen / @rasmus_kleis : “You want to manage conflicts of interest between four nodes: the buyside; the sellside; the exchange in the middle; and then any entity that is buying and selling for its own account. And you have a similar situation in ad markets” https://www.ft.com/... Dina Srinivasan / @dinasrinivasan : What a treat to sit down with one of my favorite journalists @PatrickMcGee_ to chat about research and antitrust https://www.ft.com/... Paul Tang / @paultang : Freaking scary but real “ I could use public data sets to determine whether two people had been meeting in the same place at the same time. And somebody in the ad market literally walked me through how to do that. ” https://www.ft.com/... Patrick McGee / @patrickmcgee_ : I have several favourite bits of this interview. This is one: https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Anshu Sharma / @anshublog : One of the best interviews on privacy and the power it bestows and takes away. Must read: https://twitter.com/... Simon J Harris / @simonjharris : Fascinating interview of @DinaSrinivasan by @PatrickMcGee_, read it twice. I do remain a little skeptical though of the harms of personalisation around interest & intent, especially when it's linked by consent, pseudonymous, non persistent identifiers https://www.ft.com/... Stanley Pignal / @spignal : Ask a teenager about the monopoly power of Facebook. Expect to be laughed at. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Srinivasan has been building this argument for years: her treatises on Facebook and Google reframed how antitrust thinkers see platform power, and by late 2020 she was advising the Texas AG's antitrust investigation of Google. This Financial Times Q&A with Patrick McGee is the argument reaching a business audience mid-litigation, not in retrospect.
First-order effects
- The interview puts Srinivasan's structural critique of the Meta-Google ad duopoly in front of FT readers while the US antitrust cases are live, giving regulators' arguments a public articulation from one of their own advisors.
- Her four-node conflict-of-interest frame — buyside, sellside, exchange, and any entity trading for its own account — names the specific mechanism the cases target, sharpening what until now has been a sprawling set of claims against Google and Meta.
Second-order effects
- Raising Apple alongside Meta and Google widens the enforcement perimeter: if the duopoly framing extends to Apple, the defendants face scrutiny on multiple fronts rather than a single case they can outlast.
- Because litigation drags on, the concern that predatory conduct can continue for years while cases play out keeps pressure on enforcers to consider deterrents beyond civil remedies — which is exactly the debate this interview feeds.
Third-order effects
- If the conflicts-of-interest framing holds, ad markets get treated like regulated financial exchanges rather than self-correcting ecosystems — a reversal of the self-correction argument Foundem's case against Google already exposed as flawed.
- The throughline from the 2017 manifesto-era calls to check Facebook's power to a sitting state-AG advisor explaining monopoly mechanics in the FT suggests antitrust has moved from commentary to enforcement doctrine in tech.
The trend: Ad tech is being reframed from a competitive marketplace into a conflicted-exchange problem, with academic critics becoming litigation architects and the case list expanding from Google and Meta toward Apple.