The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reportedly weighing an injunction against Facebook to stop it from integrating WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger into its own services, according to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The news follows reports that the the FTC has been investigating Facebook as part of an antitrust investigation, on the grounds that it’s policies are anticompetitive.
The commission started its investigation after Facebook announced that it would unify the technical underpinnings of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. That would allow its 2.7 billion users to send private, encrypted messages from one app that could be received on another. “We’re building a foundation for social communication aligned with the direction people increasingly care about: messaging each other privately,” he said at the time.
The FTC’s primary concern is that Facebook’s acquisition of rival apps like Instagram has reduced social networking competition. The commission believes that if Facebook tightly integrated those apps into its own infrastructure, it would become much more difficult to break up.
As of last year, Facebook owned around 66 percent of the global social media market, compared to 11 percent each for Pinterest and Twitter. In 2018, the company earned a net profit of $22.1 billion.
Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are all facing the possibility of antitrust investigations by the Justice Department and House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
The FTC was also known to be investigating Facebook while groups of state attorneys general are looking at Facebook and Google.
General William Barr, US Attorney, said on Tuesday he hoped to have Justice Department investigations of the big tech platforms completed next year.
Barr said the Justice Department review was not limited to antitrust, but that looking for anti-competitive behaviour was ‘front and centre’
