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Facebook is under scrutiny again after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a new antitrust complaint against it. The move is said to be a fresh attempt for Mark Zuckerberg’s social media form to sell its other assets - Instagram and WhatsApp.
In the FTC’s new complaint against Facebook, it accused the company of monopoly. The filing of the latest antitrust case last week came just as FB made an announcement about its new virtual reality (VR) meeting application.
According to The Independent, the commission accused Facebook of operating a monopoly in the United States as it is also operating Instagram at the same time. In the filing, the antitrust regulator also stated that the social media giant continued to operate in a way where it uses the firms it acquired to create a protective channel around its personal social networking monopoly.
The FTC said that if this will not be stopped, Facebook will keep on buying companies. This is said to be the buy-or-bury scheme which is illegal and being utilized to maintain market dominance.
Based on the explanations in the complaint, Facebook failed to develop significant innovations on its app, so it just bought its competitors such as WhatsApp and Instagram. These companies were said to have succeeded in developing features that Facebook was not able to accomplish.
Zuckerberg’s company is now being urged to get rid of the said firms to break them up and avoid a monopoly on social networking. The FTC further said that as Facebook also owns other popular sites, it is hard for other similar firms to compete.
“Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, Holly Vedova, said in a press release. “This conduct is no less anti-competitive than if Facebook had bribed emerging app competitors not to compete and the antitrust laws were enacted to prevent precisely this type of illegal activity by monopolists.”
Finally, in response, Facebook said that the renewed lawsuit filed by FTC is meritless. It explained that its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram were cleared after a review and the company’s policies are lawful.
