One strategy that the press has deployed in its war on Amazon, Google, and Facebook is the profile. Because profiles legitimate, and what the press’s war on these companies lacks is legitimate intellectual support. Readers assume that if The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal chooses to write about you, then you must know something, and that causes bureaucrats, legislators, other journalists, and even some academics, all of whom read the papers, to start treating you like you do.
The Times’s profile two years ago of a recent law school graduate who had written a student note attacking Amazon appears to have had this effect.
The Wall Street Journal’s profile of Dina Srinivasan today seems to be trying to do the same thing.
The profile pitches Srinivasan as having made a surprisingly successful academic case for antitrust intervention against Facebook. But one strains to find anything in the profile that distinguishes Srinivasan other than the fact that she titled a law review article she wrote as “The Antitrust Case against Facebook.”
Is Srinivasan an antitrust expert? No. As the article beguilingly informs us, when she wrote her paper Srinivasan had “neither any institutional affiliation or a law license,” though she did have a law degree from Yale that she had “never put to use” (until now, apparently). Indeed, we learn that until recently she’s been unemployed, having “quit her job as a digital advertising executive two years ago.”
Was the article in question published in a top law review? No. It was published in a specialty law review, rather than the general interest law reviews that make up the first tier of outlets for legal academic work. The Journal tries, appallingly, to make this placement sound like a coup, by saying that the law review in question published her “unsolicited article.” But in law virtually all articles appearing in academic law reviews are unsolicited.
Is this pioneering work? No. Srinivasan’s argument that Facebook charges users a price denominated in data rather than dollars is nothing new. In 2017, when Srinivasan wrote her piece, the concept of the data price was literally everywhere one turned in antitrust circles. Two years earlier, in fact, John Newman, a genuine antitrust scholar, made that argument in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, a top-tier academic journal. Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, antitrust scholars at Oxford and the University of Tennessee, respectively, had just published a book saying the same thing. Germany’s antitrust enforcers had undertaken a major investigation of Facebook based on exactly that premise. And a graduate student, Elias Deutscher, was presenting a paper advancing exactly this argument with a great deal more sophistication. No doubt more examples can be found.
But only Srinivasan wrote the idea up as “The Antitrust Case against Facebook.”
Has Srinivasan’s paper in particular met with an unusual level of academic acclaim? No. We are told that she has presented her paper at the “American Antitrust Institute’s annual conference.” AAI is a politically moderate advocacy organization, not an academic forum, and presenting at one of its meetings, while nice, is hardly a high-prestige affair within antitrust circles, let alone a reason to stop the presses. But if you’re not impressed by that (which you shouldn’t be), news flash: the Journal informs readers that Srinivasan “is presenting her work at an international antitrust conference in Brussels this week.” I wish every time I attended an international conference, which I and dozens, if not hundreds, of antitrust scholars do every year, the Journal would write me up.
The paper does little to hide the fact that Srinivasan is no authority on antitrust because the point of this profile is not to report. But to create. And for that all you really need is publicity.
If you aren’t convinced yet that this profile is about advancing the press’s narrow competitive interest in the demise of Facebook, just read the article through to the end. Srinivasan, we learn, is employed again. She is “currently working with The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, News Corp.”