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WThe US consumer protection agency, the FTC, and 48 states have sued online giant Facebook over allegations of competition violations. In the lawsuits presented this Wednesday, Facebook is accused of preventing free competition with its dominant position. Among other things, Facebook is required to separate itself from the online services Instagram and Whatsapp.
“Facebook’s approach to defending and maintaining its monopoly denies consumers the benefits of competition,” said FTC Representative Ian Conner. “Our goal is to reverse Facebook’s anti-competitive behavior and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can flourish.”
Facebook bought the Instagram photo platform in 2012 and the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014. For its protection, the company claimed that the two online services were equally successful because Facebook had invested heavily in them. In fact, in recent years the group had brought the technical infrastructure behind its online network platform closer, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. That would make a split technically more difficult.
The Facebook and WhatsApp logo
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Image: AFP
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is responsible for the lawsuits brought by US states, said that for nearly a decade Facebook had used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and stamp out competition. “All at the expense of everyday users.” Today, she and her colleagues in the other states are taking steps “to defend the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been hurt by Facebook’s illegal behavior.”
So far, Facebook has not responded to the lawsuits. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said that the internet market was still free competition and gave the example of Tiktok, a video platform that didn’t exist years ago. Privately, according to the Washington Post, he is said to have told employees that he would “go down on the canvas” to defend himself against an antitrust lawsuit, which he sees as an “existential” threat to the company.
The market power of large Internet companies has been drawing international criticism for some time. The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) announced earlier this year that it had been seeking acquisitions by internet and tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet since 2010. Last October , the US government sued Google on charges of forming an “illegal” monopoly on Internet search engines and online advertising. The government suggested a possible division of the tech giant.
