The lawsuit turned out to be a blessing in disguise after the United States court dismissed complaints against Facebook, and soon after the ruling was made, Facebook’s markets surged by more than 4%. This means that Facebook’s market value is now amounting to more than 1 trillion dollars. The Federal Trade Commission had teamed up with a state attorneys’ general to file a lawsuit against one of the biggest social media platforms.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Facebook on 9 December 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic outbreak. FTC was accusing the social media network of being a business mogul monopoly in its conduct. The allegations were based on the fact that Facebook illegally monopolized the social networking sectors by propagating anti-competitive tendencies. This means that Mark Zuckerberg and his counterparts were working towards dissolving any organizations that seem to threaten their products or services. FTC highlighted that Zuckerberg was anticompetitive and wanted to be the only standing entity for social networking. Therefore, FTC formed a coalition with attorney generals of 48 states, the District of Columbia and Guam, and they launched the lawsuit against Facebook [Source].
An investigation was carried out and revealed that the social media platform had devised a systematic way of eliminating its competitors. FTC and its coalition members alluded to the fact that back in 2012, Facebook acquires Instagram, which was growing into becoming a major competitor in the social network sector. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, a business move that the FTC regards as ‘buying off the competition .’ They argued that Facebook was scared of facing Instagram in a competitive environment.
Then in 2014, Facebook also acquired one of WhatsApp’s popular mobile messaging app for $19 billion. This, too, is seen as a ‘greedy’ business plan premeditated to stamp out any platform that can unseat Facebook from Facebook the throne. It was also accused of imposing unfavorable conditions against other software developers as they continue to drown any aspiring competitions in the social networking industry and software development. According to FTC investigators, Zuckerberg and his partners have been denying free access to application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows software developers an interface with Facebook and only allow them to access the APIs under conditions that they desist from creating anything that competes with them [Source].
In their defense, the complainants argued that Facebook’s conduct oppresses users as they are left with a few choices when it comes to personal social networking. At the same time, it deprives advertisers who want to market their products and services on social networking online platforms. During the lawsuit period, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Ian Conner, uttered that “Personal social networking is central to millions of Americans’ lives”; hence, Facebook denied the consumers their right to benefit from the competitions among diverse social platforms developers. He further explained that Facebook’s monopoly of the social network entity was an economic strategy for amass all the profits. In 2019, it was reported that it generated revenues amounting to $70 billion+ and about $81.5 billion in profits.
Thus, it was selfishly milking the ‘community cow’ alone while chasing away all the other competitors. This is the reason why the FTC coalition sought legal ways of putting a cap on the ‘selfish and greedy’ acts of the Facebook executives [Source]. FTC highlighted that the lawsuit was supposed to stop Facebook from acquiring competitive platforms and divestiture its assets such as Instagram and WhatsApp, prohibit Facebook from imposing anti-competitive regulations on software developers, and the executives must put out a notice and seek approval first before signing a merger or acquiring other entities in the near future.
However, with lady luck on its side, Facebook has managed to get a ruling in their favor. The US courts have dismissed the complaint citing that there is no evidence of monopoly and the lawsuits were “illegally insufficient” [Source]. This ruling triggered a heavy downpour of increased market value for the social media giant, which is now around £722 billion.
But the courts only dismissed the complaint, which means the case can still stand if the FTC wants to file another lawsuit, and given the determination by FTC’s coalition with 48 US states, another sue might be brewing, and o