Efforts to rein in Big Tech suffer setback as court throws out Facebook antitrust suits

A federal court has dismissed antitrust suits launched by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general, delivering a fresh blow to efforts to rein in Big Tech.

On Monday, US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC, threw out the FTC’s case, asserting that prosecutors failed to provide a good enough explanation for how they came to the conclusion that Facebook controls more than 60 per cent of the social networking market.

The judge wrote that social networking “services are free to use, and the exact metes and bounds of what even constitutes a [social networking] – i.e., which features of a company’s mobile app or website are included in that definition and which are excluded — are hardly crystal clear” in his decision, as Politico first reported.