The US Federal Trade Commission and nearly every US state just filed a lawsuit against Facebook, in what will be one of the biggest antitrust cases in a generation.link

Highlights:
The FTC would seek an injunction that "could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

In its complaint, the coalition of 46 states, Washington, DC and Guam also asked for Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to be judged to be illegal.

"For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users," said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

James said the company used vast amounts of money to acquire such rivals before they could threaten the company's dominance.

Facebook is the world’s biggest social network with 2.7 billion users and a company with a market value of nearly $US800 billion ($1 trillion) whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s fifth-richest individual and the most public face of Big Tech swagger.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, who was on the executive committee of attorneys general conducting the investigation, said the litigation has the potential to alter the communications landscape the way the breakup of AT&T’s local phone service monopoly in the early 1980s did.

“Our hope is to restructure the social networking marketplace in the United States, and right now there’s one player,” Stein said in a news release.


Some are arguing against the measure:
NetChoice, [a Washington trade association of businesses who "share the goal of promoting free speech and free enterprise on the net"] which includes Facebook as a member, quickly panned the lawsuits. The case for antitrust enforcement against Facebook “has never been weaker,” NetChoice vice president Carl Szabo said in a statement, pointing to newer social services such as TikTok and Snapchat as rivals that could “overtake” older platforms.

With that out of the way

HOLY FUCK GUYS I AM HYPPPED

Fuck 'em up, FTC

Yes please, lets start breaking up all of these big monopolies. Can we do Diseny next?

Amazon too <3

They are tracing us!!! Phuck 'em.

^

Let's do this!