A bipartisan group of lawmakers have asked that the FTC continue its antitrust lawsuit against Facebook after setbacks in court. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), together with House representatives David Cicilline (D-RI) and Ken Buck (R-CO), signed a letter addressed to FTC Chair Lina Khan detailing why the regulatory action is needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is essential that the Commission take action to deter anticompetitive conduct by digital monopolists by ensuring that they are held liable for antitrust violations to the full extent of the law,\u201d the lawmakers wrote.<\/p>\n
This letter comes just four days after Judge James E. Boasberg dismissed the federal government\u2019s key antitrust complaint against Facebook on Monday, as well as a complaint from 48 state attorneys general. <\/p>\n The FTC has until July 29th to refile its complaint, although it will have to offer more comprehensive evidence that Facebook does indeed wield monopoly power in social networking. In the Monday dismissal, Boasberg wrote he was unimpressed with the FTC\u2019s attempt to classify Facebook as a monopoly, as the initial complaint only provided \u201cthe naked allegation\u201d that the social media giant had a 60 percent market share.<\/p>\n The dismissal does offer some metrics that might be persuasive to the court, like how much users spend on Facebook apps, or an explanation of Facebook\u2019s competition in the sector. However, each of those suggestions are caveated with how examples of how difficult these metrics can be to prove.<\/p>\n In the dismissal, Boasberg also noted how difficult it was to fit Facebook\u2019s service into the existing antitrust regulations.<\/p>\n \u201cThis case involves no ordinary or intuitive market,\u201d he wrote. \u201cRather, PSN [Personal Social Networking] services are free to use, and the exact metes and bounds of what even constitutes a PSN service \u2014 i.e., which features of a company\u2019s mobile app or website are included in that definition and which are excluded \u2014 are hardly crystal clear.\u201d<\/p>\n This point hasn\u2019t been lost on lawmakers, who have rallied around changing antitrust law to better address modern tech giants. Buck, one of the letter\u2019s signatories, tweeted Monday that the dismissal showed antitrust reform is urgently needed. <\/p>\n \u201cCongress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anticompetitive conduct,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bipartisan group of lawmakers have asked that the FTC continue its antitrust lawsuit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[38,64,62,66,63,65,69,67,71,68,70],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1958,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions\/1958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itparadise.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cIt is essential that the Commission take action\u201d<\/q><\/aside>\n