FTC Refiles Historic Antitrust Lawsuit as Facebook Tries to Bury the News With Shiny Things

Amid a Facebook advertising and marketing blitz, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday refiled its antitrust lawsuit towards the corporate, claiming that it “holds monopoly power” within the social media market, and maintains that monopoly by “systematically” buying rivals and creating different limitations to competitors.

“Facebook is the world’s dominant online social network, with a purported three billion-plus regular users. Facebook has maintained its monopoly position in significant part by pursuing Chief Executive Officer (‘CEO’ ) Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy, expressed in 2008: ‘it is better to buy than compete,’” the FTC criticism says. “True to that maxim, Facebook has systematically tracked potential rivals and acquired companies that it viewed as serious competitive threats. Facebook supplemented this anticompetitive acquisition strategy with anticompetitive conditional dealing policies, designed to erect or maintain entry barriers and to neutralize perceived competitive threats.”

News of the refiled lawsuit, which many onlookers anticipated, got here amid a advertising and marketing blitz by the corporate, which included the announcement of a brand new “transparency report” about common content material on its platform and the launch of a digital actuality area through which customers of its Oculus VR headsets can remotely attend conferences in digital type.

“No other personal social networking provider in the United States remotely approaches Facebook’s scale,” the criticism provides.

Facebook didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

In addition to Facebook, the corporate additionally owns Instagram and WhatsApp, two of essentially the most broadly used platforms worldwide, and are prime examples of the corporate utilizing its huge sources to dominate the social media market.

The FTC was pressured to refile its historic lawsuit towards Facebook after a federal choose tossed its authentic criticism in June after agreeing with Facebook’s movement to dismiss on the grounds that the federal government’s go well with didn’t adequately assist its claims that Facebook is, in truth, a monopoly.

Read the complete FTC v. Facebook antitrust lawsuit under

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