Facebook Challenges FTC’s Antitrust Case

Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies. They say the Antitrust Case fails along three main pillars.

1. First, the FTC does not “allege a plausible relevant market.” After all, to have a monopoly, one must have a market over which to exert that monopoly. And the FTC, Facebook argues, has not shown this, alleging only a nebulous “personal social networking” market, and “no court has ever held that such a free goods market exists for antitrust purposes.”
2. FTC “cannot establish that Facebook has increased prices or restricted output because the agency acknowledges that Facebook’s products are offered for free and in unlimited quantities.” The idea here is literally that if the product is free to the consumer, it is by definition not possible for the provider to have or abuse a monopoly.
3. The third argument is that the behaviors the FTC singles out — purchasing up-and-coming competitors for enormous sums and nipping others in the bud by restricting access to Facebook’s platform and data — are not only perfectly legal but that the agency has no standing to challenge them, having given its blessing before and having no specific illegal activity to point to at present.