The FTC’s case is further complicated by the fact that a substantial amount of its claim rests on the idea that the acquisitions of both Instagram and WhatsApp were anti-competitive in nature, designed to maintain and expand Facebook’s monopoly on social networking. ” So far, however, it has not been tested in federal court. That argument was advanced in 2019 by Dina Srinivasan, a legal scholar at Yale, in a paper called “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook. That leaves the FTC to argue that price-raising takes place on the advertising side, or that Facebook causes consumers harm in equivalently bad ways-by, say, invading their privacy and sharing their data with advertisers. The second of these is difficult to prove on a consumer level because, as Facebook has taken pains to point out, its services are free. Such success would be impossible according to the FTC’s definition, if Facebook really has managed to squeeze out competitors.įacebook’s defense also goes after another problematic aspect of the FTC’s claim: the fact that antitrust activity (as it has been defined by the courts for the past several decades) consists of causing harm by restricting choice and-or raising prices. As some technology journalists have pointed out-including Casey Newton, the author of a Substack called Platformer-FTC’s definition seems shaky, though : for one thing, the FTC’s claim ignores the existence of popular apps like TikTok, which has managed to build a massive amount of market share-eight hundred million users or so by the end of last year. The FTC, for its part, has no trouble defining the market that Facebook dominates: it’s “personal social networking,” or the sharing of photos and other personal information with family and friends. The government’s complaint fails, per Facebook, “because the FTC has not pleaded facts sufficient to satisfy any of the three required elements of a claim.”

The FTC “has not alleged facts amounting to a plausible antitrust case” and “ignores its own prior decisions, controlling precedent, and the limits of its statutory authority.” In order to make a plausible case for antitrust action, Facebook argues, the FTC would have to prove a) that Facebook dominates a defined market, b) that it has the power in that market to raise prices or restrict output, and c) that it has maintained that monopoly power in ways that harm competition and-or injure consumers.

“No government lawsuit similar to this one has been brought in the 130-year history of the Sherman Act, and for good reason,” Facebook’s statement begins. When the case was filed, last December, Facebook responded with a blog post calling the lawsuit “revisionist history” and arguing that it “ignores reality.” On Wednesday, Facebook released a much more comprehensive response: a legal defense and request to dismiss. One of those was a lawsuit against Facebook brought by the Federal Trade Commission, backed by an investigation conducted alongside forty-nine states the suit alleged a wide range of monopolistic behavior. The report, which called for a number of “structural remedies”-including that the companies be broken up-also gave momentum to an almost unprecedented number of state and federal antitrust actions. Last fall, after more than a year-and-a-half of Congressional committee hearings and investigations into the power of technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the government released a comprehensive report alleging anti-competitive conduct.

Subverse lawsuit