US Lawsuits Against Facebook May Trigger Force Sale Of WhatsApp, Instagram?

Lawsuits against the social media giant stated that the company uses a "buy or bury" strategy to snap up rivals and keep smaller competitors at bay.

(Representational Image: Getty)

In a latest development, Facebook Inc might be forced to sell its prized assets WhatsApp and Instagram after the US Federal Trade Commission and nearly every US state filed lawsuits against the social media company. As per the news agency Reuters, the twin lawsuits filed on Wednesday got the social media giant Facebook embroiled into a major legal challenge this year after the US  Justice Department sued Alphabet Inc’s Google in October, accusing the $1 trillion company of using its market power to keep the rivals at bay. What’s the accusation? The complaints on Wednesday accused Facebook of buying up rivals which hinted at its previous acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. Federal and state regulators said the acquisitions should be unwound, a move that might kick off a long legal battle as the deals were cleared years earlier by the FTC. The Federal Trade Commission and a major coalition of states are asking that Facebook be forced to sell WhatsApp and Instagram, saying it used a "buy or bury" strategy to snap up rivals and keep smaller competitors at bay. What’s Facebook’s stand? Facebook’s general counsel Jennifer Newstead called the lawsuits “revisionist history” and said antitrust laws do not exist to punish “successful companies.” Newstead said WhatsApp and Instagram managed to succeed after Facebook invested billions of dollars in growing the apps. “The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final,” she added. Newstead also raised doubts about alleged harms caused by Facebook, arguing that consumers benefited from its decision to make WhatsApp free, and rivals like YouTube, Twitter and WeChat did “just fine” without access to its developer platform. In a post on Facebook's internal discussion platform, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told employees he did not anticipate "any impact on individual teams or roles" as a result of the lawsuits, which he said were "one step in a process which could take years to play out in its entirety." What are its current acquisitions? Facebook had announced buying customer service start-up Kustomer, in an acquisition that the Wall Street Journal said valued Kustomer at $1 billion. Facebook also bought Giphy, a popular website for making and sharing animated images, or GIFs, in May. That acquisition has already drawn scrutiny from the United Kingdom’s competition watchdog.