Facebook has held a monopoly over personal social networking for the past decade, according to a beefed-up antitrust suit by the Federal Trade Commission …
Facebook has held a monopoly over personal social networking for the past decade, according to a beefed-up antitrust suit by the Federal Trade Commission filed Thursday. The FTC’s amended suit, which comes two months after a federal judge dismissed an earlier version, seeks to force Facebook to restructure or sell off assets including Instagram and WhatsApp that it says help the company squash competition. “Facebook holds monopoly power in the provision of personal social networking in the United States and has held such power continuously since at least 2011,” the FTC wrote, accusing the company of illegally maintaining a “durable monopoly.” The new complaint is longer and more detailed than a Trump-era suit against the company that was dismissed this June. At the time, Washington DC federal judge James E. Boasberg said the complaint was “vague” and “too speculative” in its arguments. In Thursday’s complaint, the FTC retained its core argument that Facebook engaged in a “buy or bury” scheme to eliminate competition including Instagram and WhatsApp, helping the firm secure an illegal monopoly that hurts consumers. “Unable to maintain its monopoly or its advertising profits by fairly competing, Facebook’s executives addressed this existential threat by buying up the new mobile innovators, including its rival Instagram in 2012 and mobile messaging app WhatsApp in 2014, who had succeeded where Facebook had failed,” the FTC alleged.
