A federal judge dismissed a pair of lawsuits by state and federal regulators who brought wide-ranging antitrust allegations brought against Facebook last year.
Throwing out a pair of lawsuits that were rolled out to great fanfare late last year, a federal judge found state and federal regulators offered little to support wide-ranging antitrust allegations brought against Facebook. The Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 48 attorneys general will have 30 days to refile their complaints. In a 53-page ruling against the commission’s case, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg offers a sweeping history of social media and antitrust law. “At the time of the last great antitrust battle in our courthouse — between the United States and Microsoft — Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school,” the first lines of the ruling begin. “Only after his arrival at Harvard did he launch ‘The Facebook’ from his dorm room. Nearly twenty years later, both federal and state regulators contend, in two separate actions before this Court, that Facebook is now the one violating the antitrust laws.” An even lengthier ruling dismissing the suit brought by the state attorneys general adopts a similarly sweeping scope. “As the pillars of our national economy have shifted from the concrete to the virtual, so too have the targets of government antitrust actions,” that ruling begins. “Where railroads and oil companies were alleged to be early violators, over the past decades, providers of telecommunications (AT&T) and computer operating systems (Microsoft) have been the defendants.
