Status: 08/19/2021 8:49 p.m.
Has Facebook secured a monopoly for itself through acquisitions from competitors? The US antitrust authorities accuse the group. After a first attempt was rejected, the authority has now filed a revised complaint.
In the dispute over Facebook’s market power, the US antitrust authority FTC has filed a revised monopoly lawsuit against the Internet giant. In the complaint, the FTC accuses the group, among other things, of having defended its dominant position with “anti-competitive takeovers”. Reference is made to the purchase of the online services Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.
“After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” said FTC representative Holly Vedova. “This behavior is no less anti-competitive than if Facebook bribed new app competitors to keep them out of the competition.”
First lawsuit dismissed
A federal judge had dismissed an initial FTC lawsuit against Facebook in June. Among other things, he criticized the fact that the competition watchdog had not been able to conclusively demonstrate that Facebook had created a monopoly on the market for online networks. The lawsuit contained “almost nothing concrete on the crucial question of how much power Facebook actually has,” said the judge. However, he allowed the FTC to submit a revised complaint, which the agency did now.
In an initial statement, Facebook said that the original statement that the company did not have a monopoly had not changed. Therefore, the new lawsuit has no chance of success. One still wants to examine the new lawsuit and then express itself in more detail. The dominant position of online giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon has drawn competition watchdogs in a number of countries.