Feds expected to reveal new strategy in Facebook antitrust fight
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week is expected to lay out its new legal strategy in an ongoing antitrust battle with Facebook that will also reveal how FTC chief Lina Khan plans to take on the market power of U.S. tech giants.
The FTC has until Thursday to disclose whether it plans to proceed with the case after a major courtroom setback earlier this year. The agency is largely expected to move forward, and is likely to do so by filing an amended complaint.
The stakes are high not just for the FTC but also for its new chair, a critic of big tech who is facing calls from Silicon Valley to recuse herself from this case and others.
“One of the most important things for the commission is, and I suspect they understand this, is to realize even before you do more things this is the most important case you have. Succeeding in this case is, I think, vital to carving out a broader path of enforcement in the future,” said William Kovacic, who served as FTC chairman from 2008-2009.
The commission’s case against Facebook centers on the company’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, and the FTC seeks to restructure the company.
The FTC voted to file the lawsuit against Facebook during the Trump administration, with then-Chairman Joseph Simons, a Republican, joining Democrats in support of pursuing an antitrust case. GOP commissioners Noah Joshua Phillips and Christine S. Wilson, who remain at the agency, voted against proceeding.
A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment on the agency’s plans and said officials will make a public announcement about the case “at the appropriate time.”
It will be Khan’s first major action as President Biden’s FTC chair.
“If you fail here, that does not bode well for the rest of your programs. So in some sense, her program depends a lot on making this existing case a success,” said Kovacic, who’s now a professor at George Washington University Law School.
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE LIKES: Facebook will be sharing quarterly reports with data on the most “widely viewed” content on the platform’s News Feed feature as part of a push the tech giant said will increase transparency.
The reports, the first of which was released Wednesday along with the announcement, measure public content based on views as opposed to Facebook’s Crowdtangle tool that measures engagement on posts.
Reports based on Crowdtangle data have shown in the past that pages for right-leaning outlets and public figures have had the highest levels of engagement.
“There’s a few gaps in the data that’s used. The narrative that has emerged is simply wrong,” Facebook’s vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said on a call with reporters. “Crowdtangle is focused on interaction, Crowdtangle only has a limited set of certain pages and accounts.We are creating a report that provides a broad and represents … an accurate representation of what people’s experiences actually are on our platform.”
