Recently filed antitrust lawsuits against social media giant Facebook claim that the company engaged in illegal tactics to stifle competition, including subjecting companies that refused to be bought out to the “wrath of Mark” Zuckerberg.
Salon reports that the recent antitrust lawsuits filed against Facebook filed by the federal government and 48 attorneys general make a number of claims about Facebook’s operating procedures and allege anticompetitive activities.
In the complaint, the 46 state officials and attorneys general from Guam and the District of Columbia write: “For almost a decade, Facebook has had monopoly power in the personal social networking market in the United States.” A similar claim was made in a filing by the FTC, which stated that Facebook “has maintained its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire.”
The lawsuits allege that Mark Zuckerberg at one point told a colleague that “[o]ne thing about startups . . . is you can often acquire them” which Facebook allegedly used to form a protective “moat” around their own firm by neutralizing any competition.
The filings further allege that Zuckerberg would often intentionally offer competing startups a figure so high “they’d have to consider it” and alleges that “if you stepped into Facebook’s turf or resisted pressure to sell, Zuckerberg would go into ‘destroy mode’ subjecting your business to the ‘wrath of Mark.'”
The FTC filing points to one instance in which Facebook celebrated its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014 by clearly describing the situation as neutralizing a potential competitor. One Facebook manager reportedly wrote that the purchase was “w]orth it” because “their numbers are through the roof, everyone uses them, especially abroad…. Prevents probably the only company which could have grown into the next FB purely on mobile[.] . . . [1]0% of our market cap is worth that[.]”
Facebook has denied being a monopoly, noting that it ranks behind Google in how much revenue it takes from the $160 billion global market for online advertising. Google and Facebook maintain a duopoly over the online advertising market. Facebook currently has 2.74 billion users worldwide and disclosed in July 2019 that the FTC was investigating it for alleged antitrust violations. New York States attorney general, Tish James, announced two months later that she was leading a multistate coalition probing antitrust concerns of Facebook.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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