FTC remounts legal effort to prove Facebook has tried to illegally squash competition

The Federal Trade Commission has remounted its legal effort to prove Facebook is illegally crushing competition, after a federal judge recently dismissed the agency’s original case against the social media giant.

The FTC case filed Thursday has the same overall arguments as the one dismissed two months ago – that Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were made to create a "moat" around its monopoly in social networking, according to The New York Times. The agency also restates its argument that the social network should be broken up.  

However, the update suit is nearly twice as long and includes more facts and analysis that the agency says better support the government’s allegations, The Times also reports.

"Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile," Holly Vedova, the acting director of the bureau of competition at the agency, said in a statement. "After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat."

Facebook said in response: "There was no valid claim that Facebook was a monopolist and that has not changed. Our acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were reviewed and cleared many years ago, and our platform policies were lawful."

The agency had to refile the case after James E. Boasberg, of the District Court of the District of Columbia, in June said the government had not provided enough evidence that Facebook was a monopoly in social networking. Boaberg made a similar decision in a case against the company brought by more than 40 states, also according to The Times.