NY Attorney General Files Lawsuit Against Facebook Over Anticompetitive Action

[engine]

New York Attorney General Letitia James today filed a lawsuit against Facebook Inc., alleging that the company has and continues today to illegally stifle competition to protect its monopoly power. The lawsuit alleges that, over the last decade, the social networking giant illegally acquired competitors in a predatory manner and cut services to smaller threats — depriving users from the benefits of competition and reducing privacy protections and services along the way — all in an effort to boost its bottom line through increased advertising revenue. Attorney General James leads a bipartisan coalition of 48 attorneys general from around the nation in filing today’s lawsuit to stop Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct.

[ag.ny.gov...]

[tangor]

However January 20 works out, State AGs are going after FB, G, T and whoever might be termed a "tech giant". Both sides have seen how much power these companies have not only in commerce, competition, but all aspects of human society.

Texas is bringing legal lumps to g in a week or so...

2020 showed what kind of genie is in the bottle ... and the AGs are not going to try to put the genie back, they are going to break the bottle(s).

[JorgeV]

Still bet that nothing will change.

[explorador]

depriving users from the benefits of competition

True, but many users are at fault, impossible to sue them for causing this.

It's amazing to witness how many people out of lazyiness express, describe and even let you see (explicity) their desire that everything was inside FB, just like when someone also out of lazyness enters a domain name (without the .com) on Google only to click on the first result. It's interesting to see until you have seen it too many times.

[tangor]

@explorador, you are correct that users seeking the path of least insistence (sic) for instant gratification is a large part of the current problems regarding privacy and invasive/anti-competition on the web.

Sad thing to see. (sigh)

[IanCP]

The lawsuit alleges that, over the last decade, the social networking giant illegally acquired competitors in a predatory manner and cut services to smaller threats

A leaf out of the - then growing - Microsoft book of the olden days. Who said the Robber Barons died off at the end of the 19th Century?

Every one of these ridiculous conglomerates were built upon the backs of other smaller innovative businesses.

[Nads123]

Interesting to read.

[mcneely]

This is 1974 and 1995 all over again. Back in those days both AT&T and Microsoft pretty much wrote their own rules for reconciliation with the federal government.
I'm seeing this whole affair with Facebook in pretty much the same light as that.

Facebook may spin off a couple of ruined (ruined by Facebook) subsidiaries, call it a day, and continue to do what it's always done, just like with Microsoft and AT&T (Facebook will absolutely retain it's core structure and business model).
These big companies are very rarely ever hurt by government intervention into their trade practices ... At&T for example lost nearly 70% of it's book value in the beginning, but rallied back in a sense when it was purchased by SBC in 2005 for 16 billion dollars. AT&T might have been broken into Baby Bells, but it still owned all of the hard lines across the United States and all of those Baby Bells had to pay AT&T for the use of those lines.

Same deal with Microsoft. The company was never really ever required to divest itself from using certain Apple GUI's back in the day (windows 2.01) ... and again, from bundling it's own writes into it's OS platform.

Facebook owns what it owns. Though a court may impose certain divestitures, Facebook is going to walk out of the court room having written it's own rules to satisfy the federal authorities.
Since roughly 30% of the value any big corporation doesn't really exist in real time, Facebook is going to divest itself from that 30% and walk away. Facebook will still own the data centers, and will charge fees accordingly for any of their use outside of the real time company ownership, just like how the Baby Bells back in the day had to pay AT&T for use of all of those millions of miles of hard lines across the United States.

My main point here is that nothing is going to happen to Facebook. It will be business as usual just as it's always been. There will be a bit of huff-n-fluff in the media and people that don't have millions of dollars will be aghast at the fine(s) imposed.

Usually by the time the federal government steps in, the damage has already been done and these companies walk away none the worse off for it.

[IanCP]

Long overdue for the revision, and reinvigoration of your United States antitrust laws. Alas Australian laws have little impact upon foreign registered corporations - primary exception being our consumer laws such as product warranties.

Foreign registered corporations are often bewildered they cannot in any way water down our consumer protection laws by writing their own limited warranties as was once done in the olden days when you mailed back your product warranty registration.

I would dearly love to see the Murdoch run News Limited corporation broken up across Australia and elsewhere around the world. Murdoch's stranglehold on News Limited is a far bigger evil than Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others ever will be.