Washington Joins 46 State Lawsuit Against Facebook's 'Monopoly'

OLYMPIA, WA — Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has joined a coalition of 48 attorneys general in filing a suit against Facebook, in an attempt to break up what they call an "unlawful monopoly" controlling social media.

If successful, the plaintiffs hope to force Facebook to sell their stock in Instagram and WhatsApp, and ban Facebook from future "anticompetitive" acquisitions and mergers.

In a statement announcing Washington's involvement in the lawsuit, the Ferguson characterized Facebook as an overwhelming force that consumed all competition.

“Facebook has become a mainstay in many people’s lives,” said Ferguson. “The company has done everything it can to keep it that way, from unlawfully swallowing up its potential competitors to walking back its privacy protection promises. Facebook has built a fortress around its power in the market that not even an international data privacy scandal could break. No single company should have that much power.”

In particular the suit focuses on three acquisitions that plaintiffs argue allowed Facebook to build its illegal monopoly:

• The purchase of photo app Instagram in 2012.
• The purchase of data analytics company Onovo in 2013, which they say Facebook put to work identifying potential threats to Facebook's monopoly for elimination.
• The purchase of messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.

The suit has drawn bipartisan support from across the country— the list of plaintiffs includes 46 states, plus the territory of Guam and District of Columbia. Only South Dakota, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina did not join in the lawsuit.

The plaintiff's argue that's Facebooks monopoly has given them unfair leverage over users. As the Office of the Attorney General Explains:

"An increasing amount of people rely on Facebook products daily to communicate with the people in their lives, consume news and run or support small businesses. Now that Facebook has bought up or pushed out nearly every viable competitor, many users cannot leave Facebook even if they wanted to. In fact, Facebook’s user base continues to increase, even after major data leaks and privacy violations — including the company’s biggest scandal, which involved data-collecting company Cambridge Analytica."

Ferguson's office notes that roughly 5 million Washingtonians use Facebook every day, as do 2.25 billion people across the world.

The Attorney Genera's Office also uses the failure of Google+ as an example of how Facebook's monopoly harms users. In 2011 when Google launched their competing social network, Facebook made efforts to fix efforts that had plagued users for years. But when Google+ flopped, Facebook quickly set about rolling back privacy protections, emboldened by the fact that users had nowhere else to go. Practices like that have proven lucrative for Facebook: they earned $70 billion dollars last year, up 27 percent from just the year before.

The suit is not the first time Washington has faced off against the social media giant: the state has twice sued Facebook for selling political ads without maintaining the legally-required documentation show which political groups supported the ads. Washington won the first suit, filed in 2018, which ended with Facebook paying $238,000 in fees. The second suit was just filed in April of this year, and remains in litigation.

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