Friday, March 29

The lawsuit that wants to force Zuckerberg to sell WhatsApp and Instagram continues


Madrid

Updated:

Keep

The demand that could crack Meta – the emporium of social networks owned by Mark Zuckerberg– runs its course. A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission (FTCyou can continue with the antitrust case that opened against technology last 2020 and that, to date, has progressed in fits and starts. So much so that last summer the FTC was forced to review the lawsuit after Judge James Boasberg, of the District Court of Columbia who handled the case, pointed out that he had not presented enough evidence to support his accusations.

“In stark contrast to its predecessor, this complaint provides specific reinforcing allegations that all point to the same conclusion: Facebook has maintained a dominant market share for the relevant time period,” Boasberg said in a
memo
of 48 pages in which it emphasizes that the affirmations, now, are “much more solid and detailed than before”.

In amending the lawsuit, the FTC collects data from analytics firm Comscore to demonstrate Meta’s supremacy within the social media arena. In this way, he points out that since 2016 technology concentrates more than 70% of the market for these types of applications in the United States. However, the judge emphasizes that “it is possible that the agency will face a large company in the future to prove its allegations.”

Since the filing of the first version of the lawsuit, the Federal Trade Commission maintains that the company formerly known as Facebook had engaged in anti-competitive conduct acquiring a good handful of platforms that threatened to overshadow their services. Something that, ultimately, would also have affected consumers; specifically due to the losses it would have caused in innovation and privacy. “The agency will have to corroborate these allegations in later stages of the litigation, probably with expert testimony or statistical analysis,” says Boasberg.

Also Read  Prince Andrew's Lawyers Fight to Dismiss Virginia Guiffre's Lawsuit in Court | Prince Andrew

The first ‘app’ to become part of the Zuckerberg conglomerate was Instagram in 2012 in exchange for about $ 1 billion. Later, in 2014, it was the turn of WhatsApp; in this case in exchange for 19,000 million.

“One of the three great fears”

The judge now says that the Federal Trade Commission can go ahead with its main accusation, in which it maintains that the company cemented its emporium through acquisitions and that, in this way, it ended the competition from the rest. However, the judge sided with Meta in concluding that Facebook did not violate antitrust laws by denying interoperability permissions with competitor apps as a way to maintain your dominance.

When the time comes, the lawsuit filed by the FTC could tear the technology to pieces, forcing Meta to get rid of the rest of the platforms it has acquired over the years. Something that the journalists of ‘The New York Times’, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, highlighted in their book ‘Manipulated’ (Debate) as one of “one of the three great fears” of Mark Zuckerberg. Be that as it may, everything indicates that the outcome of the case is far off. It could be years before a final resolution is reached.

ABC has contacted Meta to find out its position regarding the judge’s decision not to dismiss the antitrust suit. At the moment there has been no response.

See them
comments


www.abc.es

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *