Federal Trade Commission lawsuit seeks settlement with Facebook owner Metaplatforms over claims it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to crush new competition in social media The case must go to trial, a Washington judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge James Boasberg ruled against Meta's motion to end a lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2020 during the Trump administration, alleging that the company acted illegally to maintain its monopoly over the social network. Partially rejected.
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta (then known as Facebook) joined Instagram in 2012 and in 2014 to eliminate new threats rather than compete alone in the mobile ecosystem. The FTC alleges that it overpaid WhatsApp.
Boasberg acknowledged that claim, but the FTC's argument that Facebook strengthened its dominance by restricting third-party app developers' access to its platform unless they agreed not to compete with its core services. Rejected.
“We are confident that the evidence at trial will show that our acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were beneficial to competition and consumers,” a Meta spokesperson said Wednesday.
FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar said the lawsuit, filed during the Trump administration and elaborated under the Biden administration, would “curb Meta's monopoly power and ensure freedom and innovation in the social media ecosystem.” “It represents a bipartisan effort to restore competition for the United States.”
Mr. Boasberg ruled in court that WhatsApp could not claim that its acquisition promoted competition by strengthening its position against Apple and Google.
The judge said he would issue a detailed order later Wednesday after the FTC and Meta have had the opportunity to redact commercially sensitive information.
A trial date for this case has not been set.
Mehta told the judge that the lawsuit relies on an overly narrow view of the social media market, failing to take into account competition from ByteDance's TikTok, Google's YouTube, X and Microsoft's LinkedIn. It had asked that the entire lawsuit be dismissed.
The case is one of five large-scale lawsuits that the FTC and Justice Department's antitrust regulators are pursuing against Big Tech.
Amazon and Apple have both been sued, and Alphabet Inc.'s Google faces two lawsuits, including one in which a judge recently found it illegally impeded competition among online search engines.
