U.S. FTC calls Facebook an illegal ‘personal social networking’ monopoly
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday fired back at Facebook’s attempt to dismiss the regulator’s lawsuit seeking to break up the social media giant, as Big Tech continues to face scrutiny from the government. “The court should deny Facebook’s motion,” the commission said in a document filed late Wednesday, arguing that “Facebook holds monopoly power over personal social networking (‘PSN’) services in the U.S., and is violating the antitrust laws by maintaining its monopoly through means other than competition on the merits.”
Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergIn March, Facebook argued in its motion to dismiss that the FTC’s lawsuit was legally defective because it failed to identify a relevant market in which the company purportedly holds a monopoly. According to Facebook, because its services are free of charge, no PSN market exists for the purpose of substantiating an antitrust claim.
Facebook also said the agency neglected to credibly allege that it had acquired monopoly power over a market, and failed to make reasonable allegations that the company had engaged in unlawful exclusionary conduct. Facebook said the FTC also had no authority to sue over actions it had already approved: Facebook’s acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion, and its acquisition of photo-sharing site Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion.
The FTC’s lawsuit is seeking to force Facebook to break off WhatsApp and Instagram. The social media giant also faces a lawsuit from dozens of attorneys general claiming it’s violating antitrust law by buying up competitors and depriving consumers of alternatives that would better protect their privacy.
Free or not, the FTC argues in its filing that courts have condemned monopolists for resorting to anticompetitive practices similar to the actions of Facebook, and that a relevant market does in fact exist because PSN services in the U.S. are not “reasonably interchangeable” with other services.
MacDailyNews Take: Facebook is insidious and gross.
As I’ve said before, if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, we lose so much more than data, we lose the freedom to be human… If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, it does not deserve our praise, it deserves reform… Too many are still asking the question, “how much can we get away with?” when they should be asking “what are the consequences?” – Apple CEO Tim Cook, January 2021
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SSNs
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
Zuckerberg: They “trust me”
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
(Instant messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early days, reported by Business Insider in May 2010.)
If you trust Mark Zuckerberg to be the keeper of your photos, contacts, political views, religious beliefs, etc., you’re batshit insane. — MacDailyNews, May 23, 2018
All of these “social media” platforms – Twitter, Parler, Facebook – are cancers on society. They are clearly eating society from the inside out. There’s something unsavory within human nature that “digital distance” amplifies to the point of disgust.
If you quit these cancers you will quickly realize what they are and what they do. You will be happier and healthier to have excised them from your life.
We haven’t had personal Twitter or Facebook accounts for many years now. And very happily so. — MacDailyNews, January 9, 2021
We use FaceBook as an RSS feed. Our CMS automatically reposts our article headlines and links them back to our website. That is our only interaction with Facebook and has been our only interaction with Facebook for years. We deleted our personal accounts [which we opened only so we could understand the Facebook phenomenon] many years ago.
If you want to share photos and videos with friends, text them using Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iMessage service. You need to control your social networking, not cede it to a gatekeeper like Facebook. – MacDailyNews, March 19, 2018
