The Northern District Rejects Settlement Attempt on Unlawful Monopolization Claims … – JD Supra

No. 22-cv-00237-HSG, 2025 WL 3654114 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 17, 2025) In this litigation, Plaintiffs allege LinkedIn unlawfully monopolized the professional social networking market in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. No. 22-cv-00237-HSG, 2025 WL 3654114, at *1. Plaintiffs allege that LinkedIn protects its monopoly through “data centralization, machine learning models, and resulting trove of inferred data,” without which “a new entrant could not viably compete with LinkedIn.”  Id.  Defendant allegedly maintains its monopoly by engaging in two forms of anticompetitive conduct: 1) Defendant offers potential rivals access to its private user data through application programming interfaces (“APIs”), on the condition that those rivals do not compete with Defendant; and 2) Defendant integrated its user data with parent company Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system, “tying up and driving up prices for scarce hardware resources.”  Id. I. Settlement Background On December 17, 2025, the Northern District of California denied Plaintiffs’ unopposed motion for preliminary approval of class action settlement of their case against LinkedIn (“Defendant”). No. 22-cv-00237-HSG, 2025 WL 3654114, at *1. The parties entered into a settlement agreement after participating in mediation in December 2024.  Id.  The settlement agreement included a term prohibiting Defendant from including Non-Use of LinkedIn’s
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