Meta will face an antitrust lawsuit over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp
Facebook owner Meta Platforms should face trial in a U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit alleging the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to stifle emerging social media competition, a Washington judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge James Boasberg largely denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the case filed against Facebook in 2020, during the Trump administration, claiming the company acted illegally to maintain its monopoly on social networking.
Meta, then known as Facebook, overpaid for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate emerging threats rather than compete on its own in the mobile ecosystem, the FTC alleges.
Boasberg left that claim standing, but rejected the FTC’s contention that Facebook strengthened its dominance by restricting third-party app developers’ access to the platform unless they agreed not to compete with its core services.
“We are confident that the evidence at trial will demonstrate that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have been good for competition and consumers,” a Meta spokesperson said on Wednesday.
FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar said the case, filed during the Trump administration and refined under Biden, “represents a bipartisan effort to curb Meta’s monopoly power and restore competition to promote freedom and innovation in social media.” ecosystem.”
During the lawsuit, Meta will not be allowed to argue that the acquisition of WhatsApp has strengthened competition by strengthening its position compared to Apple and Google, Boasberg ruled.
The judge said he would release a detailed order later on Wednesday after the FTC and Meta had a chance to redact sensitive commercial information.
A trial date in the case has not yet been set.
Meta had urged the judge to dismiss the entire case, saying it depended on too narrow a view of social media markets and did not take into account competition from ByteDance’s TikTok, Google’s YouTube, X and Microsoft’s LinkedIn.
The case is one of five successful lawsuits in which antitrust regulators from the FTC and the US Department of Justice are going after Big Tech.
Amazon.com Inc and Apple are both being sued, and Alphabet’s Google is facing two lawsuits, including one in which a judge recently ruled that it unlawfully thwarted competition among online search engines.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
