Last June, James Boasberg, a judge with U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, threw out an antitrust case that was filed by the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook (which has since changed its corporate name to Meta). The lawsuit alleged that the company has an illegal monopoly on social networking services, that it built this monopoly in part by acquiring competing services such as WhatsApp and Instagram, and that it uses its monopoly position in an anti-competitive way against other companies. In his dismissal of the case, Boasberg said that the federal regulator had failed to provide enough tangible evidence that Facebook had anything approaching a monopoly over a discrete market segment known as social networking (a similar antitrust lawsuit filed by 40 state attorneys-general was also dismissed by Boesberg last June, but the states have not yet filed an appeal).
The judge left the door open for the FTC, however, telling the agency it was welcome to try again, if and when it accumulated the evidence he sought. On Tuesday, Boasberg ruled that the majority of a new FTC lawsuit can proceed, based on evidence of a monopoly position provided by the agency in its revised submission. The judge said the FTC’s first attempt at a lawsuit “stumbled out of the starting blocks,” but that the facts provided by the agency this time were “far more robust and detailed than before, particularly in regard to the contours of defendant’s alleged monopoly.” Boasberg blocked another part of the case, which alleged that Facebook harmed competitors by illegally restricting access to its platform—he said Facebook “abandoned the policies in 2018, and its last alleged enforcement was even further in the past.
Although some critics of the FTC’s case, including technology analyst Ben Thompson, have questioned the accuracy of the agency’s attempts to define a specific market for “personal social networking” over which Facebook allegedly has a monopoly, Boasberg found no fault with this market definition. In his first ruling, he said that “while there are certainly bones one could pick with the FTC’s market-definition allegations, the Court does not find them fatally devoid of meat.” In terms of whether Facebook has anything approaching a monopoly, the judge seemed to be convinced in his latest decision by the addition of data from Comscore, a traffic measurement company, which said “Facebook’s share of DAUs [daily average users] of apps providing personal social networking services in the United States has exceeded 70 percent since 2016.”
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
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