Facebook owner Meta is set to face trial in a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit seeking its break-up over allegations it bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush media competition. social, a judge in Washington decided this Wednesday (13).
Judge James Boasberg denied Meta’s request to end the lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2020 alleging that the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on its social network.
Meta, then known as Facebook, overpaid for Instagram in 2012 and in 2014 to eliminate emerging threats rather than compete on its own in the mobile ecosystem, the FTC alleged.
Boasberg allowed that claim to stand, but rejected the FTC’s claim that Facebook restricted third-party app developers’ access to the platform unless they agreed not to compete with its core services.
The judge also did not allow the target to present as a defense the fact that the acquisition of WhatsApp benefited its strategic position in relation to Apple and Google.
The judge said he would release a detailed ruling later Wednesday, after the FTC and Meta have had a chance to redact any commercially sensitive information.
A trial date for the case has not yet been set.
Meta asked the judge to throw out the entire case, saying it was based on an overly narrow view of social media markets and did not take into account competition from TikTok, ByteDance, YouTube, Google, X and LinkedIn , from Microsoft.
The case is one of five high-profile cases in which antitrust bodies from the FTC and the US Department of Justice are pursuing so-called “Big Tech”.
Amazon and Apple are being sued, and Alphabet’s Google is facing two lawsuits, including one in which a judge recently found that the company illegally impeded competition among online search engines.
