By Jody Godoy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – facebook owner Meta Platforms (NASDAQ ) is set to face trial in a U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit seeking to break it up over allegations it bought instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. emerging on social media, a judge in Washington ruled Wednesday.
Judge James Boasberg largely denied Meta's motion to end the case filed against facebook in 2020, during the Trump administration, alleging that the company acted illegally to maintain its monopoly on the social network.
Meta, then known as facebook, overpaid for instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate nascent threats rather than compete on its own in the mobile ecosystem, the FTC said.
Boasberg stood by that claim, but dismissed the FTC's charge that facebook restricted third-party app developers' access to the platform unless they agreed not to compete with its core services.
The judge also rejected Meta's defense that the acquisition of WhatsApp benefited its strategic position against Apple (NASDAQ:) and Google. The judge said he would release a detailed ruling later Wednesday, after the FTC and Meta have had a chance to redact any confidential business information.
A trial date has not been set in the case.
Meta had urged the judge to dismiss the entire case, saying it relied on too narrow a view of social media markets and did not take into account competition from ByteDance's TikTok, Google's YouTube, Microsoft's (NASDAQ:) x and LinkedIn. .
The case is one of five blockbuster lawsuits in which antitrust regulators from the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice are going after Big tech companies.
amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:) and Apple are being sued, and Alphabet's (NASDAQ:) Google faces two lawsuits, including one that a judge recently found illegally thwarted competition among online search engines.
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