The U.S. Federal Trade Commission accused Facebook of eliminating competitors and monopolizing the advertising market on social networks.
“Facebook’s dominance gives the company staggering revenues… Last year alone, its revenues exceeded $85 billion, with revenues exceeding $29 billion,” the suit, filed in Washington District Court, said.
The commission believes “the company mainly monetizes the social network’s monopoly through the sale of advertising based on (computer) tracking of users.” The authors of the lawsuit believe that for more than 10 years Facebook has been “buying up” companies that could potentially become its competitors, thereby creating a market in which it is the only player of this scale.
The commission is asking the court to find the social network guilty of violating antitrust laws and to force the company to abandon such actions in the future.
Earlier, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued orders requiring Amazon, ByteDance, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube to report on how they collect and process users’ personal data.
