The agency pushed back against Facebook's claims that it faces plenty of competition, saying specialized social networks such as LinkedIn, messaging services including Signal and Apple's iMessage, and other apps including TikTok, YouTube and Twitter are not in the same category of providing "personal social networking." Snapchat is the next closest, it argued, "but its user base pales in comparison," with tens of millions of fewer users a month than either Facebook or Instagram. "No other personal social networking provider in the United States remotely approaches Facebook's scale," the suit said. users of social networking apps has exceeded 80% and its share of monthly users has been over 65%. The exact figures were redacted from the filing, but the FTC quoted figures from Comscore showing that since 2012, Facebook's share of time spent by U.S. use Facebook and Instagram each month and how much time they spend on the apps. It cited data about how many people in the U.S. It makes similar arguments about Facebook's alleged anti-competitive strategy of buying up or blocking companies it perceived as potential threats, but it also gives more backing for its claim that the social network is a monopolist in an attempt to address the judge's concerns.įacebook "has been the dominant and largest personal social networking service in the United States since at least 2011," the complaint alleged. The FTC's new complaint is nearly 30 pages longer than the original. The states said they plan to appeal the ruling. The judge also dismissed the states' case against Facebook, saying they had waited too long to challenge the purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. But he also gave the FTC 30 days to refile the suit, a deadline that the court later agreed to extend to Aug. Boasberg said the agency failed to give enough evidence for its argument that the company holds a monopoly in social networking. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the FTC's complaint in June.
Technology Facebook Gets Reprieve As Court Throws Out Major Antitrust Complaintsīut Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. "We fight to win people's time and attention every day, and we will continue vigorously defending our company." "The FTC's claims are an effort to rewrite antitrust laws and upend settled expectations of merger review, declaring to the business community that no sale is ever final," Facebook said on Twitter. On Thursday, the company blasted the FTC's lawsuit as "meritless," noting that its purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp had been "reviewed and cleared" by regulators "many years ago." "After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat," Holly Vedova, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, said in a statement.įacebook has until Oct. It accused Facebook of buying up-and-coming rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to protect its dominance and of luring other would-be competitors with access to its platform and data and then cutting them off when they became threats. Technology 'The Wrath Of Mark': 4 Takeaways From The Government's Case Against Facebook