The IT Nerd

Last week we got the first hint that Facebook was about to get sued. Now it’s happened. CNN is reporting that Facebook is being sued for anticompetitive behavior by dozens of states and the US Government:

The parallel lawsuits, months in the making, represent an unprecedented challenge to one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful corporations. The complaints zero in on Facebook’s acquisition and control over Instagram and WhatsApp, two key services in its social media empire. 

The suits come roughly 14 months after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that her office was leading a group of attorneys general in investigating Facebook for potential anticompetitive practices. More than 40 attorneys general ultimately signed onto Wednesday’s complaint. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, has been conducting its own antitrust investigation of Facebook since June 2019. 

Much of the scrutiny of Facebook concerns the companies it has purchased to build up a massive audience that now totals more than 3 billion users across its portfolio of apps, according to its financial statements. That dominance has raised questions by some legal experts, including US lawmakers, about whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set out to neutralize competitive threats by gobbling them up.

Facebook however is ready for a fight:

As the drumbeat in Washington against Facebook has grown louder, the company has had years to prepare for a showdown. It’s moved to tightly integrate its apps on a technical level, a decision some critics have suggested is a strategy to frustrate any potential breakup. It’s stepped up its hiring of lawyers with antitrust and litigation experience. And the company has fine-tuned its talking points, settling on a narrative that Facebook welcomes regulation but that cracking down too hard could risk giving other countries like China a competitive edge in the fast-moving technology sector. 

The company has also argued that regulators reviewed the WhatsApp and Instagram deals at the time and did not see a reason to block them then. Instagram was acquired particularly early on in its lifecycle, before many came to view it as the successful giant it is today.

We’ll see who’s right as you can bet that this will be an all out fight by everyone involved to take down Facebook. And I for one hope that they take down Facebook as this is one company that needs to be taken down because of their horrible handling of user data on many levels.

This entry was posted on December 9, 2020 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Facebook, Lawsuit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.