Facebook filed a petition Wednesday asking for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan to recuse herself from the FTC’s antitrust case against the company.
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Facebook filed a petition Wednesday asking for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan to recuse herself from the FTC’s antitrust case against the company. The tech giant argued in the petition that Khan’s public statements, in which she suggested Facebook’s conduct constituted an antitrust offense, violated the company’s due process rights. “When a new Commissioner has already drawn factual and legal conclusions and deemed the target a lawbreaker, due process requires that individual to recuse herself from related matters when acting in the capacity of an FTC Commissioner,” Facebook argued in the petition. The petition pointed to Khan’s October 2020 interview with The New York Times, in which she characterized Facebook’s acquisition strategy as a “land grab” to “lock up the market,” as well as a December 2020 tweet in which Khan described the company’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as “part of broader monopoly maintenance strategy.
