The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been trying to break up Meta for quite some time now, due to alleged anti-competitive practices the company did: pretty much, the act of buying rising possible competitors Instagram and WhatsApp has been considered as anticompetitive by the FTC. It had filed a lawsuit last year, and the “amended and more detailed” version of it was now allowed to proceed, reports AppleInsider.
The FTC is again trying to break up Meta
The documentation provided by CNN’s Brian Fung shows that the social media giant has again tried to dismiss the case; however, the judge didn’t agree with its argument and allowed the case to move forward.
This lawsuit was initially filed back in December of 2020, and it indeed accused the social media giant of anti-competitive practices. According to the complaint, Facebook violated antitrust regulations with the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp (which have been rising rivals to it) in an attempt to eliminate possible competition.
Back in June, the complaint was dismissed by a federal court, and the main reason for this decision was the lack of evidence that Facebook is indeed a monopoly in its market. Despite the dismissal though, the FTC went ahead with a 3-2 vote to refile the complaint.
Tech giants under scrutiny for anti-competitive behavior
As many of you may have probably heard so far, many regulators (not only in the United States but in Europe as well) have been scrutinizing tech giants for at least a couple of years not. The reason: supposed anti-competitive practices. And it’s not only Facebook but Google, as well as Apple, that have been under the radar of antitrust entities.
Many of these antitrust regulations, research, proposals, or lawsuits are continuing for years In some of the cases, tech giants have been found to behave in an anti-competitive manner, and of course, fined by commissions quite heavily.
Apple and Google are also under intense scrutiny for monopoly
Additionally, back in July, Google was ruled to stand trial for recording and disseminating private conversations of people who accidentally activated Google Assistant.
On the other hand, both Apple and Google are currently being investigated for their alleged monopoly by a UK watchdog. In this case, we are talking about the mobile operating systems Android and iOS; for which the two companies have been alleged to hold a monopolistic position on the global market.
Facebook is one of the big tech companies that US regulators are looking to split up, but it is not the only one. The effort to empower healthy competition (at least, according to the US regulators) could end up affecting all four big companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and any of these might have to go against similar complaints that we have reported on above. This means that technically, US regulators might try to split up Amazon, Google, and Apple.
Back in June last year, five bills were introduced aimed at these four tech giants, because of their domination in online shopping, search dominance, and entertainment. Basically, anti-trust practices. All of this comes to say that these tech companies have been having quite a hard time with regulators across the globe for their alleged monopolies over the mobile (or generally the tech) market.
In summary, the tech giants are facing scrutiny all over the world. Australia and India have also aimed laws at reducing their monopolistic power.
