When a regulatory burden is a competitive boon

The incipient surveillance economy is dominated by a duopoly: Google and Facebook. (Shall I call it GooF? Yes, I shall.) According to estimates, the two companies control somewhere between half and three-quarters of spending on digital-advertising throughout the world, and that already extraordinary share seems fated to rise even higher. Thanks to Google’s failure to develop a strong social-media platform, the two companies compete only glancingly. Their services are largely complementary, so...