When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and more than 40 states sued Facebook on Wednesday for illegally killing competition and demanded that the company be split apart, lawmakers and public interest groups applauded.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said, "Facebook’s reign of unaccountable, abusive practices against consumers, competitors and innovation must end.” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley called the lawsuits "a necessity” and said Facebook’s acquisitions of nascent rivals "were meant to be anti-competitive, and they should be broken up.”
But lawmakers and consumer advocates did not address a hard-to-deny factor: The cases against Facebook are far from a slam dunk.