US govt, 48 states sue Facebook for 'illegally' maintaining 'monopoly p

In a landmark antitrust action headlined by bipartisan support the US federal government and 48 states led by the New York Attorney General have sued Facebook in two separate lawsuits accusing it of abusing its market power to neutralize competition and going into destroy mode against smaller playersThe lawsuits are now seeking action that could include a spinoff of Facebookowned Instagram and WhatsApp services The case against Facebook was announced on Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James The led lawsuit runs into more than 100 pages the FTC lawsuit is 53 pages long and both the documents align on the big themes of predatory conductAntitrust legislation is something both Republicans and Democrats support In previous years it has been used to break up tobacco companies and ATampT Microsoft was almost split up after losing an antitrust case in the 1990s The latest backlash comes 16 years after Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from his Harvard dormFrom that time Facebook has grown to become the worlds biggest social network with 27 billion users and a market value of nearly 800 billion while Zuckerberg has become the worlds fifthrichest person Facebooks user base in America is among its lowest across geographiesBut its average revenue per user ARPU in the US Canada and Europe is relatively higher because of what Facebook calls the maturity of these online and mobile advertising markets According to Facebooks latest annual stock market filing ARPU in 2019 in the US and Canada region was more than 11 times higher than in the AsiaPacific regionThe same document lists India Indonesia and the Philippines as key sources of growth in daily active users India is Facebooks largest market with more than 328 million users WhatsApp accounts for more than 400 million users in India Wednesdays lawsuits against Facebook comprise the second big US governmentled offensive against Big Tech this yearThe first was when the Justice Department sued Google in October just before the November 3 presidential election accusing the search giant of capturing the entire online search and advertising market Within the first two pages the 48 states make the case that Facebook has had monopoly power in the personal social networking market in the US for more than a decade and illegally maintains that monopoly power by deploying a buyorbury strategy that thwarts competition and harms both users and advertisersFacebooks illegal course of conduct has been driven in part by fear that the company has fallen behind in important new segments and that emerging firms were building networks that were competitive with the social media giant and could be very disruptive to the companys dominance an excerpt from the statesled lawsuit saidAs Facebooks founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg observed onething about startups is you can often acquire them indicating at other times that such acquisitions would enable Facebook to build a competitive moat or neutralize a competitor it added Its really critically important that we block this predatory acquisition of companies and that we restore confidence to the market James said at a briefing on WednesdayPersonal social networking is central to the lives of millions of Americans said Ian Conner Director of the FTCs Bureau of Competition Facebooks actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition Our aim is to roll back Facebooks anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thriveWhen Facebook started in 2004 I was one of its earliest users Since then Facebook has broken the privacy promises that initially made it popular and has become infamous for a business model prone to abuse Facebook must understand that it is not above the law FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra tweeted The FTC fined Facebook 5 billion in 2019 for privacy violations the largest fine the agency had ever slapped on a tech company but it did little to dent Facebooks businessThe FTCs antitrust suit to break up Facebook will change the whole dimension of tech regulation But we need more An acknowledgement that these companies are not just monopolies but natural monopolies that require utility regulation Dipayan Ghosh a Facebook defector who now codirects the Digital Platforms and Democracy Project at Harvard University posted on TwitterKeep scrolling to read more newsCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates MidDay is now on Telegram Click here to join our channel middayinfomedialtd and stay updated with the latest newsThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in 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