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Facebook Acquires WhatsApp For $16 Billion
The Department of Justice recently sued Facebook alleging the social media giant as anti-American by employing foreign workers rather than the residents in the country.
This time the Federal Trade Commission and 48 States filed a lawsuit against Facebook and making the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp as the core of complaints.
Facebook faces lawsuit
Facebook is the biggest social media platform with millions of users across the world. Despite the popularity of social media, the company is now facing a lawsuit. The Federal Trade Commission and 48 states in the U.S. filed the suits against the social media giant.
Facebook became a prime target for President Donald Trump in the last two months of his administration. Last week, he threatened to veto the annual U.S. defense authorization bill unless Congress adds a rider to abolish the law that protects technology companies, including Facebook, from liability over most content posted by users. The demand followed months of attacks by Trump and some other Republicans, who accused technology platforms of suppressing conservative views after they began flagging misleading and false posts about the pandemic and the election. Those claims aren’t part of the suits filed Wednesday.
Facebook and its tech peers are facing a groundswell of bipartisan antagonism over their control of digital commerce and their ability to influence what users watch and read.
+1.65% over its mega-acquisitions of Instagram ($1 billion in 2012) and WhatsApp ($19 billion in 2014), and demanding that Facebook “unwind” the transactions. Federal and state officials are attempting to undo years-old deals that they claim violated antitrust laws even though the FTC investigated and approved them, a process that presages a very long legal fight.
“The Facebook suit is difficult because it seeks to undo an acquisition approved by the Obama administration,” Shubha Ghosh, a law professor at Syracuse University. “The Facebook lawsuit will not be a simple one and will pose challenges for proving a violation and imposing a remedy.”
The FTC has authority to reconsider and unwind past transactions in court if it determines they were anticompetitive. However, it will be difficult for the government to explain how actions that Facebook took six to eight years ago are continuing to harm competition today, says Notre Dame Law School Professor Stephen Yel