The Facebook Lawsuits Explained

on techRegulators accuse Facebook of buying up rivals. Here’s what this means for us and Big Tech.VideoCreditCredit…By Roy TerhorstDec. 10, 2020, 1:16 p.m. ETThis article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.WELP, Wednesday was intense. The U.S. government and more than 40 states sued Facebook for illegally crushing competitors and demanded the company undo its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.This is going to be a noisy and long legal mess, as my colleagues Cecilia Kang and Mike Isaac wrote in their article. Let me try to help us understand what’s happening by posing five questions:1) What’s the argument from the government and from Facebook?There’s a legal reason Instagram and WhatsApp are at the heart of the state and federal lawsuits. Trying to reduce competition by purchasing rivals is an explicit violation of America’s antitrust laws. That’s exactly what government lawyers say Facebook did and will keep doing.The tricky thing, however, is that the government had given Facebook permission to buy Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. Facebook’s argument is that it’s unfair for government officials to try a do-over now,  » Read More