FTC files new antitrust complaint against Facebook

> FTC Alleges Facebook Resorted to Illegal Buy-or-Bury Scheme to Crush Competition After String of Failed Attempts to Innovate

Ouch.

It's important to analyze this in the context of the initial complaint, which was rejected because they didn't show enough evidence of a monopoly (and many commenters here questioned that assertion too, discussed many times, but here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27666439). This amended complaint seems to make their claims more explicit.

Note that if I'm following correctly, the main thrust of the complaint is not that they are a monopoly now, it's that they were in the early 2010s, and they abused that monopoly position at that time. Though they do also spend some time making the case that they currently have monopoly power, I'm not sure that they need to substantiate monopoly in 2020; they might just need to substantiate it in 2012 (Instagram) and/or 2014 (WhatsApp).

> By 2011, Facebook was touting to its advertising clients that “Facebook is now 95% of all social media in the US.”

I find that more specific argument much more convincing, although I'm convincable that they have a 2020 monopoly too.

> According to the amended complaint, a critical transition period in the history of the internet, and in Facebook’s history, was the emergence of smartphones and the mobile Internet in the 2010s. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recognized at the time that “we’re vulnerable in mobile” and a major shareholder worried that Facebook’s mobile weakness “ran the risk of the unthinkable happening - being eclipsed by another network[.]”

> After suffering significant failures during this critical transition period, Facebook found that it lacked the business talent and engineering acumen to quickly and successfully integrate its outdated desktop-based technology to the new era of mobile-first communication. Unable to maintain its monopoly or its advertising profits by fairly competing, Facebook’s executives addressed this existential threat by buying up the new mobile innovators, including its rival Instagram in 2012 and mobile messaging app WhatsApp in 2014

> The amended complaint bolsters the FTC’s monopoly power allegations by providing detailed statistics showing that Facebook had dominant market shares in the U.S. personal social networking market.

The detailed claims seem to be found around paragraph 180 in the filing (https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/ecf_75-1_ft...). This cites Comscore numbers, does anyone know if they are any good?

Also, another claim might be that TikTok is a viable competitor; they claim TikTok is in another market:

> TikTok is a prominent example of a content broadcasting and consumption service that is not an acceptable substitute for personal social networking services.

It seems that a lot of antitrust complaints come down to where you draw the dotted line of the "market" in which they compete. This seems quite technical and IANAL so I'll just note this as interesting, without opining.